The Galerie des Glaces is the most celebrated room in France. Running the full length of the palace's west facade, it stretches 73 metres from end to end, lined on one side by 357 mirrors that face 17 arched windows looking out over the gardens. When lit with 20,000 candles for a royal reception the effect was — and still is — staggering.
Built by Jules Hardouin-Mansart between 1678 and 1684, the ceiling paintings by Charles Le Brun chronicle Louis XIV's military campaigns of the 1670s in the language of classical allegory. Every detail in this room — the painted ceiling, the mirrors (then an enormously expensive luxury), the gilded bronze fittings — was calculated to impress foreign visitors with the power and wealth of France.
The room has a more recent history too. It was here, in January 1871, that the newly unified German Empire was proclaimed after the French defeat in the Franco-Prussian War — one of the most deliberate humiliations in European diplomatic history. And it was here, in June 1919, that Germany signed the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War, in the same room where the Empire had been born.