A Controversial Place: Versailles in the Primary Education Textbooks of the Third Republic

A jewel of France's cultural heritage, Versailles was for a long time a controversial place. Following the defeat of 1870, republicans worked on developing a national narrative that could be circulated in official primary education textbooks, whose use was compulsory. One of the difficulties was how to exalt the nation's achievements while downplaying or even denigrating the actions of its rulers. How was it possible to praise a king in a Republic? And how could you sing the praises of the Grand Siecle while disparaging the Grand Roi? Versailles was central to this contradictory attitude. It was both the brilliant side of France and the dark side of Louis XIV, the arena for the expression of France's many different talents, the megalomaniac tool of a tyrant and the ruination of the French. This caricature image of Versailles was toned down in the textbooks at a time when the political climate was changing. The amount of space assigned to texts was reduced in favour of an iconography that was more concerned with accuracy. Recognition of Versailles took place in the 1930s and, above all, after the war, as part of the cultural heritage strategy of a nation seeking to exert its soft power.