Château de Versailles, Versailles, France Part 01

I've already posted quite a few of my Japan-related photos here on Steemit, but it occurred to me that I haven't posted any from my time in France (I worked in Paris for the best part of ten years before moving to Japan in late 2016), so I thought I'd start to share some of them in this new series.

Because I also (i.e. as well as as a spirits consultant) worked as a photographer for a specialist spirits magazine, most of those photos are work-related. However, I do have a few of non-work-related subjects such as architecture and nature and that's the kind that I’m publishing today.

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In this post I want to show you some photos I took on a trip to visit the Château de Versailles, some 20km outside of Paris - if I’m not mistaken it took about half an hour by train to get there from where I used to live in the northern suburbs of Paris.

Different parts of the facade of the north wing. Like all the photos in this series, I took these photos with my Nikon D700 and then corrected the perspective in Photoshop: that's why some elements may seem stretched out...

Home to the French royal court from the end of the 17th century up until the French Revolution in 1789, Versailles started off as little more than a hunting lodge and ended up as the stone behemoth known all around the world today. A monument to centralised governmental power and the frivolent expenditure of obligatory taxation extracted forcibly from the populace (at the time far less extreme than today if you can believe it), Versailles is in many ways an unpleasant experience for anyone of a voluntaryist/anarchist/libertarian frame of mind, but remains a must-see because of the beauty of it’s art and architecture.

These photos show some of the more intimidating and overbearing character of the palace: just like any other "public" building it was in part intended to convey a clear message of dominance

The main attraction at Versailles is the interior of the main building: some 70 000 m² of heavily decorated floor space, ranging from private bathrooms to the very public Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors in French), this is what most tourists focus on and is the part of the palace complex that is most used in state events (from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to Putin’s recent visit in May 2017). However, as a former student of architecture (I have an Masters degree in Japanese art and architecture) and a lover of nature (I am a market gardener), I tend to spend most of time at Versailles outside, either walking around the gardens or looking at the stone exterior.

Three shots from the gardens immediately surrounding the main building, dotted with stone and bronze scupltures, and with row upon row of ornate topiaries

Whilst I used to prefer visiting in winter when there are always less tourists and the mist tends to linger over the extensive ponds and lakes, coming to Versailles in summer gives you a better idea of how the château would have been seen by the people who lived there in the 17th and 18th centuries: hundreds of nobles either permanently attached to the court or else visiting from their estates in the provinces, coming to pay hommage to the king, to see and to be seen, and to generally spend other people's money in time-honoured "public-servant" fashion. In any event, all the gardens immediately surrounding the palace were designed to be admired primarily in summer, and so too in a sense was the building itself: the stone shines in the summer light, seemingly rising directly out of the glaringly bright gravel covering the ground all around the west side.

Two more shots from the gardens: on the top from part of the fruit orchard; on the bottom from the walking area of the upper garden: some light erotic entertainment intended to ease the stifled boredom of male courtiers?

Although I don't have many photos of this part of the palace, a large section of the château gardens were used for something much more meaningful than just showing off and fighting boredom: the famous Potager du Roi (the King's Vegetable Garden) was designed and used to feed to the court and all who visited the king and his entourage. Created and managed by Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, these gardens employed the very latest technology to produce vegetables and fruit out of season or else far from their homelands: grafting, protected culture, training, compost etc. Much of what La Quintinie practiced at Versailles was adopted elsewhere in France and contributed heavily to the emergence of French maraîchage (market gardening).

I also have some photos of inside the Château de Versailles which you can see here...

Hope you like the photos: let me know what you think!

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Nick Sikorski is an organic market gardener and permaculture designer originally from Scotland, trained in France and now farming in Nagano, Japan. When he's not obsessing over heritage varieties of vegetables & herbs, chasing off wild deer or otherwise running around the fields of his mountain farm, he's trying to beat the system, taking photos or trying to better understand cryptocurrencies. You can find his Steemit introduction here.