Costs of restoration programmes
What was the amount spent on Versailles during the Ancien regime?
Palace of Versailles
The restoration initiatives launched by the Fifth Republic have proven to be perhaps more costly than the expenditures of the palace in the Ancien Régime. Starting in the 1950s, when the museum of Versailles was under the directorship of Gérald van der Kemp, the objective was to restore the palace to its state – or as close to it as possible – in 1789 when the royal family left the palace. Among the early projects was the repair of the roof over the Hall of Mirrors; the publicity campaign brought international attention to the plight of post-war Versailles and garnered much foreign money including a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Concurrently, in Russia, the restoration of the Pavlovsk Palace located outside of Leningrad – today's Saint Petersburg – brought the attention of French museum authorities, including the curators of Versailles (Massie, 1990). Pavlovsk Palace was built by Catherine the Great's son Paul. The czarevitch and his wife, Marie Feodorovna, were avid francophiles, who, on a visit to France and Versailles in the 1780s, purchased great quantities of silk, which they later used to upholster furniture in Pavlosk. The palace survived the Russian Revolution intact – descendants of Paul I were living in the palace at the time the communists evicted them – however, during the Second World War, the furniture and artifacts housed in the palace, which had been transformed into a museum, were removed. In the process of evacuation the museum collections, remnants of the silks purchased by Paul I of Russia and Marie Feodorovna were found and conserved. After the war when Soviet authorities were restoring the palace, which had been gutted by the retreating Nazi forces, they recreated the silk fabrics by using the conserved 18th century remnants (Massie, 1990). When the French authorities saw the results of Russian efforts and the high quality they were able to achieve, the French revived 18th-century weaving techniques so as to reproduce the silks used in the decoration of Versailles (Massie, 1990). The two greatest achievements of this initiative are seen today in wall hangings used in the restoration of the "chambre de la reine" in the "grand appartement de reine" and the "chambre du roi" in the "appartement du roi". While the design used for the "chambre du roi" was, in fact, from a design that had been used during the "Ancien Régime" to decorate the "chambre de la reine", it nevertheless represents a great achievement in the on-going restoration at Versailles. Additionally, this project, which took over seven years to achieve, required several hundred kilograms of silver and gold to complete (Meyer, 1989). One of the more costly endeavors for the museum and the government of France's Fifth Republic has been to repurchase as much of the original furnishings as possible. However, because furniture with a royal provenance – and especially furniture that was made for Versailles – is a highly sought after commodity on the international market, the museum has spent considerable funds on retrieving much of the palace's original furnishings (Kemp, 1976). In 2003, a new restoration initiative – the "Grand Versailles" project – was started, which necessitated unexpected repair and replantation of the gardens. The project will be on-going for the next seventeen years, funded with a state endowment of €135 million allocated for the first seven years. The project will address such concerns as security for the palace, and continued restoration of the "bosquet des trois fontaines". VINCI underwrote the €12 million restoration project for the Hall of Mirrors, which was completed in 2006 (Leloup, 2006). We may never know the true amount spent on the creation of Versailles, and most current estimates are speculative. A recent estimate has placed the amount spent on Versailles during the "Ancien régime" as US$2 billion (Littell, 2000). This figure in all probability is an under-evaluation of the money spent on Versailles. France's Fifth Republic expenditures alone that have been directed to restoration and maintenance at Versailles undoubtedly surpass those of the Sun King.