Versailles is amazing-not just the scale of the buildings, but the grounds and gardens. The landscaping work must have involved a work force of thousands-can youimagine all the plantings done by hand? And, the f giant water works at marly-just to feed the fountains!
I don’t think the skilled labor you would need (to do an exact copy0 is available today.
According to Leonardo Benevolo,
As far as I can tell, all of the architects, gardeners, and artisans (including workers in glass, mirrors, tapestries, silverwork, etc.) were indeed paid hard currency, through the Minister of Finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (who had to deal with the guilds of each respective trade, much like how a modern administrator would have to deal with trade unions). How much of their salary was compensated by the accompanying prestige of working for the king, I don’t know.
I’ve spent the last half hour trying to figure out what the relative value of the livre was in the 17th century, but it seems to have fluctuated so much that I can’t nail it down with any certainty. The livre was originally worth 1 pound of silver, as instituted by Charlemagne (way back in the 9th century), but there was a LOT of inflation in 17th-century France.
Had the livre remained a constant “1 pound in silver” value, then 100,000,000 livres would be worth $21,904,000,000 today (based on the current market, which has 1 ounce of silver = $13.69 USD). But, again, that figure does NOT take into account what the exact value of the livre was in the 17th century, which I’m sure must have been worth less than a pound of silver.
I invite anyone who has a better knowledge of economic history to take a crack at it!
This may not remain a theoretical question forever: I read about an initiative to rebuild the Palais Royal in Paris (between the Louvre and Place de la Concorde) according to detailed plans recorded before the Revolution, and use it as an adjunct to the Louvre.
$21 billion? Not that big a chunk of the stimulus package now being debated on Capitol Hill. Call the new Presidential Palace a jobs-creation program and just watch the votes roll in!
personally, I can think of worse ways to spend 21 B$
The Spelling Manor, which is probably a close modern equivalent of Versailles, was built in 1991 for $47,000,000.
Nitpick: I think the building in question is the Tuileries Palace, which was burned down during the Paris Commune of 1871.
The Tuileries was indeed a royal palace, but the name “Palais Royal” usually refers to this Palais-Royal, which is still standing.
Which, despite its name wasn’t a palace, nor royal. The fancy name (actually originally “Palais Cardinal”) was given to attract buyers for the apartments in this newly built (17th century) project.
No better knowledge, but I googled, and found that at the end of the reign of Louis XIV, the value of the “livre” was fixed at 0.38 g of gold. So, 100,000,000 “livres” would have been worth 38 metric tons of gold. At today rate, that would be € 885 millions, or $ 1.1 billion or so.
However, the relative value of gold probably was vastly different at the time.
Expressed in wages, 100 000 000 “livres” would be about 400,000 years of wages for a stonemason in 1695, let say about € 600 millions.
Expressed in bread, 650,000 metric tons of bread, or at the current price of bread in France : € 2.5 billions.
Expressed in oxes : 7,4 millions of oxes. An extremely vague estimate based on a typical cow’s weight and its price in a slaughterhouse in 2004 results in an equivalent of € 7.5 billions.
Basically, depending on what reference I pick, those 100,000,000 “livres” might be worth anything between € 500 millions and € 10 billions.
As a previous poster mentioned it’s the palace of the “Tuileries”, the king’s residence before Versailles was build and after the revolution. However, I’m intrigued by this post, because it’s the first time I hear about rebuilding this palace. Also, it smaller and less luxurious than Versailles.
Which makes me think that a royal palace is being rebuilt in Berlin. Looking at the German wikipedia article about it, I guess (I can’t read German) that the estimated cost would be estimated at € 552 billions. Maybe someone could find out the actual price tag, figure out whether it include or not the inside ornamentation, the size of the palace compared to Versailles, and guesstimate a rebuilt cost for Versailles on this basis.
You’re quite right. Sorry, I misremembered. This is what Wikipedia has to say about the project:
Hereis a blog post about it, which emphasizes that the proponents plan to raise the money from private donors rather than use government funds, and here is a link to the Comité national pour la reconstruction des Tuileries.
The budgeted :rolleyes: cost of € 552 million for the new Stadtschloss is about € 480 million for a modern library/museum building (i.e. without the historic interior), plus about €72 million for three of the four facades built as recreations of the historical (baroque) ones (the fourth facade is going to be modern, as a sop to what seems to be the architectural convention that it is not done to identically rebuild historic buildings). So, not really useful as a comparison to building a real palace.
For those who can’t read German, here’s the English-language Wiki article on the project: Berlin Palace - Wikipedia
I have to admit I’m a bit sceptical about this. They don’t exactly number in the millions, but every developed country in the world has a decent number of people who either scrape by on minimum wage (or less) as stonemasons, woodcarvers , blacksmiths or whatever, or who do it as a hobby for free. These types of skills haven’t died out completely, they’ve just moved from the category of ‘everyday job people do to earn a living’ into ‘things people do because they love it’. Heck, even just the people who work in those ‘living museum’ places demonstrating how people made stuff in the old days must add up to a significant number on a global basis.
Not to mention that in the case of many things, its not necessary to have someone do it by hand. There are machines capable of doing rock and wood carving with greater speed and precision than any human could do.
I too am sceptical. The British experience has been that all the major rebuilding projects in recent decades - Hampton Court, Windsor, Uppark - began with fears that there won’t be enough craftsmen and every time this has been proved wrong. The demand always encourages craftsmen to develop the required skills.
Also, one must remember that plenty of European palaces have been rebuilt since 1945. The current trend towards rebuilding just the facades, of which the Berlin Stadtschloss is the obvious example, but one could also mention the plans for the Stadtschloss in Potsdam and Herrenhausen in Hanover, are actually rather unusual. There is no shortage of cases where (to varying degrees) interiors have been reconstructed as well. The Charlottenburg in Berlin, the Royal Castle in Warsaw, the Catherine Palace at Tsarskoye Selo and the major landmarks in Dresden all spring to mind.
As for Versailles, one might assume that the most expensive, most specialised, least practical and most unfashionable aspect of the decor in the twenty-first century would be the tapestries. But the Gobelins factory is still in business, still part of the Mobilier National and still producing tapestries for the French government.
Not quite. Although part of the complex was indeed a commercial development, I’m sure that several of the ducs d’Orléans would have been appalled by the suggestion that they were not royal and that their residence there was anything less than a palace.
It would cost us 800 production, but we can cut the time in half with marble and an additional 50% with an industrious leader.
Okay, seriously, where are we putting this thing? That’s a lot of land to find in the DC area. Wouldn’t it all have to be taken via eminent domain?