2024-07-18 11:30:29
The luxurious beauty of the French castles of Versailles and Fontainebleau has been enchanting people for hundreds of years. Exceptional color historical pictures from the years 1890 to 1900 capture it in the times when, for example, Claude Monet’s famous impressionist paintings were created. Thanks to ancient photos, we can see what Marie Antoinette’s bedroom in the Little Trianon or the chamber of the Sun King Louis XIV looked like at that time. in Versailles.
(10th episode of the series) In the series Ancient Photo Guide, we gradually presented the appearance of well-known tourist destinations in the days when the Czech lands still belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. This part takes us to France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
We no longer know the name of the photographer or photographers who recorded the beauty of the castle in Versailles and Fontainebleau. We only know that the images belong to a collection gathered by the American company Detroit Publishing Co., which was once engaged in publishing postcards.
The stately châteaux near Paris attracted postcard photographers, of course, because they were an important part of French history and, moreover, gained such fame that they became the model for many other magnificent château complexes throughout Europe.
The authors of the pictures paid quite a lot of attention to the chambers of the kings and their wives. That’s why today we can see what Marie Antoinette’s bedroom or Napoleon Bonaparte’s and his wife Josephine’s bedrooms looked like between 1890 and 1900.
The images also include shots of the artificial village of Hameau, which Marie Antoinette had built near the Little Trianon, where she enjoyed an idyllic village life with her children and courtiers, which, however, had nothing to do with the real one.
Hameau was one of the activities that greatly worsened the image of the queen in the eyes of the population. Subjects were enraged when they heard that the Queen’s “peasant” life also included the use of silver rakes, small porcelain buckets, or the installation of marble troughs in the cattle stables. To make the image of the village perfect, Marie Antoinette let a family from Touraine stay there in 1785, who kept the farm running for her.
The queen was then executed during the French Revolution and the architect Richard Mique, who designed the village, met the same fate. The village was confiscated together with the castle and fell into disrepair in the following years. It was restored only in 1810 at the request of Napoleon Bonaparte. Photographs captured the village eighty or ninety years later.
In the series, we successively visited:
1. Greece, 2. Egypt, 3. Turkey, 4. Around Lake Garda in Italy, 5. Spain, 6. Rome, 7. Venice, 8. Austria, 9. Germany, 10. France.