How Versailles was built: the hunting lodge, Louis XIV's four campaigns, 36,000 workers, the water that never sufficed, the Hall of Mirrors, and how long it really took

Architecture · 4 September 2026

The Palace of Versailles was built around a brick and stone hunting lodge that Louis XIII put up in 1623 and rebuilt in 1631 in a marsh 20 km west of Paris, which his son Louis XIV, from 1661, enlarged in four campaigns over fifty years into the largest palace in Europe: Louis Le Vau wrapped the lodge in a stone "Envelope" in 1668–70, Jules Hardouin-Mansart added the Hall of Mirrors in 1678–84 and the north and south wings that made the facade 670 m long, André Le Nôtre laid out the gardens and the 1.7 km Grand Canal, Charles Le Brun painted the ceilings, and the Royal Chapel of 1710 finished it; the court and government moved in on 6 May 1682. It took about 36,000 workers and 6,000 horses at the peak, cost by the king's accounts about 100 million livres, about the cost of a war, killed workers by the hundred in the marshes, and never had enough water for its 1,400 fountains, which were turned on as the king walked toward them. Below: the lodge, the decision, the four campaigns, the Hall of Mirrors, the gardens and the water, the workers and the money, the court, the end and the museum, the numbers and the myths, with the style in Baroque architecture.

The hunting lodge and the decision, 1623–1661

Louis XIII hunted in the woods of Versailles, a village on a road to Normandy, and built a small lodge there in 1623 and a larger one in 1631–34 by Philibert Le Roy, of red brick with stone dressings and slate roofs, around a courtyard open to the east, the Marble Court of today, which stands at the heart of the palace with its facade of 1634 still visible; the king slept there a few nights a year and died in 1643. His son, Louis XIV, five at his accession and 22 at his personal rule in 1661, went in August that year to the housewarming of his finance minister Nicolas Fouquet's château of Vaux-le-Vicomte, built by Le Vau, Le Nôtre and Le Brun with money the king suspected was his, and three weeks later had Fouquet arrested and took his three artists, his orange trees and his statues for Versailles; the palace is the answer to Vaux, and the king's purpose, formed after the Fronde revolt of his childhood, was a seat outside Paris where the nobility would live under his eye. Palace of Versailles.

The four campaigns, 1664–1710

• First, 1664–68. The lodge was kept, at the king's insistence against Colbert, who wanted it demolished, and given new outbuildings, a menagerie and the first gardens by Le Nôtre, with the fête of 1664, "The Pleasures of the Enchanted Island", for 600 guests over a week in a palace that could sleep few of them.
• Second, 1668–74. Le Vau's Envelope: a new building of white stone wrapped around the old lodge on three sides, north, west and south, in the Italian manner with a flat roof and a balustrade, giving the garden front its centre and the king and queen their apartments, the Grand Appartement of seven planetary salons painted by Le Brun on the north and the queen's on the south, with a terrace between them on the west; Le Vau died in 1670 and François d'Orbay finished it. The Grotto of Thetis, the first Trianon of porcelain, and Le Nôtre's Grand Canal, dug 1668–71.
• Third, 1678–89. Hardouin-Mansart's: the terrace on the west filled in to make the Hall of Mirrors, 73 m long, between the Salon of War and the Salon of Peace, 1678–84; the south wing for the princes, 1678–81, and the north wing for the courtiers, 1685–89, each 150 m, so that the garden front is 670 m; the Orangery of 1684–86, 155 m long, under the south parterre; the Grand Trianon of 1687 in pink marble; the stables, 1679–82, for 2,000 horses; and the king's move with the court and the government on 6 May 1682, into a building site.
• Fourth, 1699–1710. The Royal Chapel, begun by Hardouin-Mansart in 1699 and finished by Robert de Cotte in 1710, two storeys of white stone and gilded columns, the last great work; then the wars of the Spanish Succession and the king's death in 1715, and building stopped, except for Louis XV's opera of 1770 by Gabriel and the Petit Trianon of 1768, and Louis XVI's library and Marie Antoinette's hamlet.

The Hall of Mirrors

The Galerie des Glaces, 73 m long, 10.5 wide and 12.3 high, has 17 arched windows on the garden and 17 arches of mirrors facing them, 357 mirrors in all, in an age when a large mirror was worth more than a painting and Venice held the secret of making them; Colbert had bribed Venetian glassmakers to France in 1665 to found the Royal Mirror Manufactory, the Venetian ambassador had them poisoned, it is said, and the French made the mirrors in Paris, in panes of 1 m, since larger could not be cast until 1688; Le Brun painted the 30 compartments of the vault with Louis XIV's victories against the Dutch in 1672–78, in the king's own person, and the gallery was hung with silver furniture, tables, tubs and chandeliers that the king melted in 1689 to pay for war. It was the passage between the king's and queen's apartments, where the court waited and the king passed daily to Mass, and the room where the German Empire was proclaimed in 1871 and the Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919; it was restored in 2004–07 for 12 million euros paid by the Vinci company.

The gardens, the canal and the water

• Le Nôtre. The gardens of 800 hectares on the great axis west of the palace, with the parterres, the Latona and Apollo fountains, the bosquets, the groves with their hidden fountains and theatres, and the Grand Canal, 1,670 by 62 m in a cross, dug by hand 1668–71 and sailed by a fleet of gondolas from Venice and a warship; the earth moved for the terraces and the canal was the largest engineering of the project, and the trees, tens of thousands, were brought whole from Normandy and Flanders and died in thousands in the marsh.
• Water. Versailles had none, on a plateau with a marsh; the fountains, 1,400 in the king's time with 600 jets in the Apollo basin alone, needed more water than Paris used, and the king spent a third of the palace's cost on getting it: ponds and windmills on the plateau, the Machine de Marly of 1681–84, 14 wheels 12 m across in the Seine at Bougival driving 250 pumps that lifted water 160 m to an aqueduct, the largest machine in Europe, which delivered a fifth of what was promised and broke constantly; and the Eure canal of 1685–89, to bring a river 80 km, on which 30,000 soldiers worked and died of fever until the war of 1688 stopped it, with the aqueduct of Maintenon unfinished. The fountains could never all run: the fountaineers, warned by whistles, turned each on as the king approached and off as he left, and the "Grandes Eaux" of today, on weekends, run for two hours.

The workers, the deaths and the money

At the peak in the 1680s the accounts list 36,000 men and 6,000 horses at Versailles, masons, carpenters, gardeners and, for the canal and the ponds, whole regiments of soldiers; the marsh gave fevers, and the deaths were so many that the bodies were carried away at night, Madame de Sévigné wrote, "so as not to alarm the workmen", and the cemetery of the village of Versailles was enlarged; the Eure canal alone is said to have killed thousands of soldiers. The cost, in the king's Comptes des Bâtiments kept from 1664 to 1715, is about 82 million livres, and with the water works and the furniture perhaps 100 million, at a time when the crown's annual revenue was about 100 million and a livre was a day's wage, so about the price of a year of the state or of a war, and much less than the legend, which has it bankrupting France; the debt that ruined the monarchy came from the wars of Louis XIV and the American War of Louis XVI. The palace's upkeep and the court's expenses were the drain, about 6 per cent of revenue in the 18th century.

The court and the end

From 1682 the palace held the king, the royal family, the government and the court, up to 10,000 people in the buildings and the town, in a ritual the king designed, the lever and the coucher, the public dinner, the hunt, the promenade, and the promotion or ruin of a noble by a glance; the courtiers lived in small rooms in the wings and the attics and fought for them, the nobility was kept from its provinces and its power, and France was governed from the king's apartment for a century. Louis XV and Louis XVI lived there, Marie Antoinette built her village, and on 5–6 October 1789 the women of Paris marched on the palace, broke into the queen's apartment, and took the family to Paris; the palace was emptied, its furniture sold in 17,000 lots in 1793, its art sent to the Louvre, and Louis-Philippe saved it in 1833–37 by making it a museum "to all the glories of France", with the Gallery of Battles in the south wing; the restoration since 1952, under Gérald van der Kemp and his successors, with American money, has put the furniture back, and 8 million people a year visit, the 10 million euros of the Hall of Mirrors and the 400 million of the 2003–23 plan paid by patrons and the state.

The numbers

• Size. 63,154 m² of floor, 2,300 rooms, 67 staircases, 2,143 windows, 1,252 fireplaces; the garden front 670 m; the Hall of Mirrors 73 m, 357 mirrors; the chapel 40 m high.
• Gardens. 800 hectares today, 8,000 in the king's; the Grand Canal 1,670 m; 55 fountains and 600 jets today, 1,400 fountains then; 200,000 trees; 210,000 flowers planted a year.
• Time. Lodge 1623 and 1631; Louis XIV's campaigns 1664–1710, 46 years; the court moved 1682; the chapel 1710; the opera 1770.
• Workers. Up to 36,000 men and 6,000 horses; deaths in the hundreds at the palace and thousands on the Eure canal.
• Cost. About 82 million livres in the accounts, perhaps 100 million in all, about 2 billion euros by the usual conversion; the Marly machine 3.5 million; the mirrors 654,000.
• Visitors. About 8 million a year, the most visited palace in the world; the town of Versailles 85,000 people.

Versions and theories

• Versailles bankrupted France. It cost about a year of the crown's revenue over fifty years, and the wars cost ten times as much; the Revolution's debt was the wars' and the American one, not the palace's, though the palace was the symbol.
• Versailles has no toilets. The king had a commode and a "chaise percée", the court had chamber pots and the corridors stank; there were about 300 commodes and a few flush toilets by 1750, for the royal family, and the smell is documented.
• The mirrors were stolen from Venice. The glassmakers were, by Colbert's agents, and Venice tried to get them back and to kill them; the mirrors were made in Paris by them.
• Louis XIV designed it. He directed it, chose between his architects' drawings, walked the gardens daily and wrote a guide to them; Le Vau, Hardouin-Mansart, Le Nôtre and Le Brun designed it.
• It took a hundred years to build. Fifty for the palace as it stands, 1661–1710, with additions to 1770; a hundred if the lodge of 1623 to the opera of 1770 is counted.
• The Hall of Mirrors was built to impress the ambassadors. To impress everyone; the ambassadors of Siam in 1686 and of Persia in 1715 were received there, and the room's purpose was the king's glory, painted on its ceiling.

The palaces that copied it, from Schönbrunn to Peterhof and Caserta, are in Baroque architecture; the house of the men who built it, the Mansarts, gave the roof its name in what is a mansard roof.

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