In earlier posts from Vincennes, we told you about the Keep, which you see rising to the right above. We also promised to tell you more about the later buildings which you could see in a few shots taken from inside the Keep. Herewith those last explanations and indeed pretty much last photos from Vincennes. Louis XIV, often referred to as the Sun King, built The King’s Pavilion above in the 1650s. (Along with the Queen’s Pavilion, behind me when I took this photo but visible behind construction scaffolding in a few other shots below. Sheesh: royal spouses apparently aren’t satisfied with different bedrooms, they want whole different buildings, in this case on French tax budgets. No wonder those French peasants started their revolution – and no doubt the Bourbon descendants rue the fact that they hadn’t yet drawn enough attention to immigrants as the cause of all problems, in order to direct the guillotines away from royalty and towards far more defenseless individuals. Of course, for our North American first nations, we immigrants sure as heck were the root of some pretty major new problems.)
But back to old Sunny, the King: his was the last royal court to live at Vincennes. Unsatisfied with Vincennes’ proximity to the actual city of Paris, he built and moved to Versailles, deeper into the suburbs, about thirty years later.
Ah, even when the stories they tell aren’t always the kindest, the stained glass windows in the cathedral at Vincennes were lovely, colorful, and lit the place up nicely even on a fairly overcast day. Last of these particular windows on the blog, unless there’s another future visit :-).
In this entry, royal dungeons from the oldest portion of the keep at the Chateau de Vincennes — since, as the tour notes below indicate, when one has a hereditary absolute ruler who is thus also the final arbiter of justice, that hereditary absolute ruler must have a dungeon in which to lock up those whom he deems out of line with the laws that he created. This particular dungeon saw some famous prisoners such as the Marquis de Sade during that highly unstable first French revolution, when France went in the course of about 15 years from absolute monarchy to various phases of pretty vindictive and murderous republic, back to empire once Napoleon decided he like the absolute-monarchy idea after all, then finally after Waterloo (nope, not just an Abba song) back to the house of Bourbon with the “Bourbon Restoration,” for its own last hereditary-royalty hurrah prior to the various other revolutions, empires and republics that tried to govern France over the course of the 1800’s. France is a repository of so many lessons on how to do or not do governance, should once choose to study it or even, crazy notion, learn from it and apply lessons :-).
The first time we’ve shown you the outside of Chateau de Vincenne’s lovely cathedral, though in this series we’ve shown you its inside a few times already. 🙂
And we’ll wrap up this week of bridges with two posts from Paris, where we began it all. This one’s all from Chateau de Vincennes. Its 700-year-old keep (above, with protective drawbridge) was built here well outside the city limits, at a time when France’s kings were feeling a bit vulnerable after a capture by the English and some demonstrations by angry peasants – most likely about the tendency of France’s wealthy dictatorial hereditary rulers’ tendency to underestimate the difficulty average people faced in feeding their families – near their city palaces.
First of several posts we’ll share from the Chateau de Vincennes, abutting Bois de Vincennes to the east of Paris. What you see here is the keep in the foreground – completed in the 1300s under Charles V, when French kings were feeling vulnerable after one of them had been captured by the English, and others made uncomfortable by public demonstrations and protests too close for comfort to their palace in the heart of the city. In the background you see parts of the Sainte-Chapelle de Vincennes, completed in the 1500s under Henri II but begun under Charles V in the 1300s. Lots of interruptions due to wars, money troubles and even a brief occupation by the English Henry V after his troops won the battle of Agincourt – and in fact it seems he died here at Vincennes, another “who knew” moment. Below you see some of the classical palaces built later: more on that later :-).
(so much world, so little time....) 