page_title: History of the Palace of Versailles
section_title: Louis XV
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Palace of Versailles / Ancien Régime / Louis XV
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Extrait du "Plan de Versailles, du petit parc, et de ses dependances où sont marqués les emplacemens de chaque maison de cette ville, les plans du Château, et des hôtels, et les distributions des jardins et bosquets" par Mr l'abbé Delagrive (1689-1757) - M D CC XLVI (1746)
context_page_description: The Palace of Versailles is a royal château in Versailles, in the Île-de-France region of France. When the château was built, Versailles was a country village; today, however, it is a suburb of Paris, some 20 kilometres southwest of the French capital. The court of Versailles was the centre of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in October 1789 after the beginning of the French Revolution. Versailles is therefore famous not only as a building, but as well as a symbol of the system of absolute monarchy of the Ancien Régime.
context_section_description: After the death of the Louis XIV in 1715, the five-year-old king Louis XV, the court, and the Régence government of Philippe d’Orléans returned to Paris. In May 1717, during his visit to France, the Russian czar Peter the Great stayed at the Grand Trianon. His time at Versailles was used to observe and study the palace and gardens, which he later used as a source of inspiration when he built Peterhof on the Bay of Finland, west of Saint Petersburg.
  During the reign of Louis XV, Versailles underwent transformation but not on the scale that had been seen during his predecessor's reign. When Louis XV and the court returned to Versailles in 1722, the first project was the completion of the Salon d'Hercule, which had been begun during the last years of Louis XIV's reign but was never finished due to the king's death.
  Significant among Louis XV's contributions to Versailles were the petit appartement du roi; the appartements des Mesdames, the appartement du dauphin, the appartement de la dauphine on the ground floor; and the two private apartments of Louis XV – petit appartement du roi au deuxième étage (later transformed into the appartement de Madame du Barry) and the petit appartement du roi au troisième étage – on the second and third floors of the palace. The crowning achievements of Louis XV's reign were the construction of the Opéra and the Petit Trianon.
  Equally significant was the destruction of the Escalier des Ambassadeurs (Ambassadors' Stair), the only fitting approach to the State Apartments, which Louis XV undertook to make way for apartments for his daughters. The case for removing the Escalier was strengthened by the poor condition of the cast bronze support for the massive skylight over the staircase, which under Louis XIV had been an experimental wonder which allowed for an unprecedented span of the glass. By the 1750s this structure had seriously weakened, necessitating the removal of the skylight and the destruction of the staircase.
  The gardens remained largely unchanged from the time of Louis XIV; the completion of the Bassin de Neptune between 1738 and 1741 was the most important legacy Louis XV made to the gardens. 
  Towards the end of his reign, Louis XV, under the advice of Ange-Jacques Gabriel, began to remodel the courtyard façades of the palace. With the objective revetting the entrance of the palace with classical façades, Louis XV began a project that was continued during the reign of Louis XVI, but which did not see completion until the 20th century.
caption: Gardens and palace of Versailles in 1746, by the abbot Delagrive
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