François de Mazières, Versailles’s mayor since 2008, is a big fan of bicycles and architecture. He was re-elected for a third term in 2020, as an independent on a ‘divers droite’ (miscellaneous rightwing) ticket. He’s leading a crusade against ugliness in the city’s built environment and against its rightwing reputation
But in this year’s presidential election, far-right candidate Éric Zemmour won 18% of the vote here, more than ten points above his national score, taking votes from the conservative Les Républicains in affluent parts of the city.
Nonetheless, Zemmour came a distant second in Versailles to Emmanuel Macron (on 33%), whom the city’s dominant middle class judged best placed to defend its interests. Some of them, mainly Versailles’s more recent arrivals, are less attached to reactionary traditions.
‘The city has an aura much bigger than its size. It defines the image of the whole area from the eastern fringe of the Yvelines department to Saint-Germain-en-Laye [to the west],’ said Bruno Valentin, until recently Versailles’s auxiliary bishop.
‘The same distinctive identity [bourgeois and Catholic],’ he suggested. The town owes its fame to Louis XIV’s magnificent 17th-century palace, visited every year by some eight million, mostly foreign, tourists.
The Sun King left a deep mark on the city’s urban environment. Versailles was the seat of government from 1682 to 1789, and a key location in the early phase of the French Revolution. And the monarchist National Assembly elected in 1871 retreated here during the Franco-Prussian war, reached an agreement with the Prussian occupiers and gave President Adolphe Thiers a mandate to bloodily suppress the Paris Commune.
While I waited to meet the mayor, his staff told me that larger-than-life personalities have always been associated with Versailles, but this shouldn’t overshadow the city’s present dynamism, especially with a new, more affluent and less conservative, population changing its character.
Versailles is apparently the fifth most sought-after residential location in the Île-de-France region, ‘price considerations aside’, according to the Fédération Nationale de l’Immobilier.
Property prices are high, with people choosing to live there for reasons of safety, education, employment, healthcare and tax. In the past five years, apartment and house prices have risen by 5-10%, a trend affecting many of Paris’s satellite towns.
For flats with a balcony and houses with a garden, ‘the increase is 10-15%. More than ever, outdoor spaces are in high demand,’ according to the National Real Estate Federation. Since Covid, working from home has become common, encouraging many executives to move out of Paris.
But with an average price of €9,000 per square metre, only the wealthiest can afford an attractive flat or house in a smart neighbourhood. Versailles, which has a population of 85,000, has one of the highest numbers of households liable for France’s property wealth tax (IFI). In 2019 there were 1,096 such taxpayers here, with assets worth an average of €2.23m.
‘We left the noise and stress behind’
Television presenter and mother of two Julie Andrieu, who is married to celebrity neurosurgeon Stéphane Delajoux, is glad they moved out of Paris: ‘We left the noise and stress behind four years ago,’ she said. They considered moving to the country but then compromised, settling on open spaces and tranquillity just 20km from the capital.
They bought a house with a garden near the palace grounds, where she cycles regularly. ‘Versailles combines the convenience of Paris with the quality of life of a provincial town,’ said Philippe Godenèche, manager of the Mansart estate agency.
I met the mayor in front of the town hall on the Avenue de Paris, one of the broadest streets in the world (93m). At the end of the avenue, an equestrian statue of Louis XIV stands on the Place d’Armes in front of the main palace gates. ‘These great tree-lined avenues all converge on the palace. Just look how beautiful they are!’ Mazières said. So began my guided tour of the mayor’s architectural achievements, on municipal e-bikes.
First stop, a bronze statue of Molière in a leafy spot near the town hall. This recently unveiled work is part of celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright’s birth.
‘It’s a nod to our history,’ Mazières said. Elsewhere the mayor has compared Molière’s importance to his city to that of Mozart to Salzburg. And since 1996, Molière Month each June has staged dozens of performances of his work citywide.
Mazières, who’s a graduate of ENA (the prestigious École Nationale d’Administration) and an inspector of public finances, denies aesthetics is his sole motivation. He emphasises the ‘risk of seeing our cities becoming increasingly ugly’ through a lack of ‘thought and coherence’ in planning. The city’s press pack states, ‘If our city is ugly, it’s less welcoming and generates more tension. By paying attention to the aesthetics, by encouraging creativity, we’re actually performing a social action.’
The mayor is actively working to make Versailles even more attractive. Trompe-l’oeil paintings illustrating La Fontaine’s fables cover unsightly telecoms and electrical cabinets.
On the Place du Marché, characters from a royal spectacle of 1662 decorate entrances to the underground car park and rubbish bins. Around the Royal Tennis Court, a key site in the history of French democracy, the artist Le CyKlop has painted dozens of anti-parking bollards to resemble Lego figurines using spray-paint and stencils. The city’s oldest neighbourhoods have had this attention because they’re near the palace.
Leftwing support in the suburbs
Affluent newcomers to Versailles are unlikely to be familiar with Bernard de Jussieu, a northeastern suburb that is home to 7,000 people, the majority of whom live in local authority housing. In the first round of the presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon achieved his best score in the city here, enabling him to finish ahead of local candidate Valérie Pécresse of Les Républicains, even though she had Mazières’s support. At one working-class polling station, Mélenchon, with 46%, even beat Macron by almost 30 points.
Bernard de Jussieu’s 22 poorly insulated apartment blocks from the 1950s and 60s have just been refurbished, but they contrast sharply with the smart buildings in the historic centre. Mazières stopped by one block and pointed to a new mural depicting hands grasping at doves. ‘Artists have decorated nine other walls,’ he told me.
What do local residents think? ‘Beautiful! It’s made a difference,’ a passer-by said. Local councillor Corinne Forbice was more measured: ‘The murals are great, but there’s more to it than that.’ She was critical of local residents for being too inward-looking; 70% of them live in local authority housing.
‘In Bernard de Jussieu, there are beneficiaries of the DALO law [which in 2007 established an enforceable right to housing for people otherwise unable to find decent accommodation] and Versailles would probably not have been their first choice.
The residents identify with the immediate area first, sometimes exclusively, without any real feeling of belonging to Versailles.’ This attitude isn’t only found here: owners of smart homes in the city’s expensive neighbourhoods form a homogeneous social class, too.
In Versailles, the poverty rate is half the national average and the median income well above national average. Manual workers make up 3.7% of the population and salaried staff 14.9%, compared to 33.1% for executives and highly skilled professions. Around 22% of the city’s housing is local authority, though the law stipulates a minimum of 25% for municipalities of this size.
Étienne Pinte, Versailles’s mayor from 1995 to 2008, belongs to a rare political breed, the social right. As mayor, he made housing a priority commitment. Since then, according to Philippe Domergue, head of a local food aid organisation, ‘the [current] administration has favoured student housing and accessible housing for households with higher incomes (social rental loans), at the expense of the poorest (assisted integration rental loans).’
Near the end of his second term, Pinte oversaw the approval of a shopping centre and multiplex cinema project. Mazières cancelled it in favour of something more ‘artistic’. ‘The multiplex was supposed to compensate for the planned closure of the Cyrano cinema in the city centre,’ Pinte said. ‘But some people feared it would attract people from nearby working-class towns, such as Trappes.’
The new Versailles Chantiers district was opened in 2019 on a former brownfield site belonging to the state railway (SNCF), which has been transformed into housing and offices. There’s also a new bus station, bicycle parking and a cycle path through a public park.
On the station forecourt a ‘cycling lifestyle shop’ caters to a trendy clientele. Around the corner, a Biocoop sells fairtrade products. There’s no sign of people from Trappes rushing to sign up for natural therapy workshops. A permaculture urban farm is one of Mazières’s proudest achievements.
‘The mayor’s surfing the greenwashing wave,’ said independent Green councillor Renaud Anzieu, though he concedes he’s ‘ahead of the curve’ with his cycle paths. Beyond municipal projects and PR puffs, eco-citizen initiatives are flourishing in and around Versailles.
There are 12 associations for the maintenance of peasant agriculture (AMAP), 12 recycling centres and even a non-profit co-op supermarket. Environmental awareness is not limited to new residents; it’s also being promoted by Versailles’s progressive Catholics, inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’, which is subtitled ‘On care for our common home’.
The Maison de l’Ermitage, on the edge of the palace park, describes itself as ‘a third space committed to people and the earth’. This former hunting lodge given by Louis XV to his favourite, the Marquise de Pompadour, is now a luxurious estate belonging to the religious order, the Sisters of Marie-Auxiliatrice.
The Ermitage offers personal development courses, business seminars, accommodation and aid for immigrants, and spiritual guidance. Recently, the Eurosport television group held an event on corporate social responsibility here.
‘We want to make this place an engine for social and environmental justice,’ said Benoît Vignon, regional co-director of the international ecumenical Christian organisation Fondacio, which runs the Ermitage.
How are Eurosport, Leroy Merlin, Danone and Mont-Blanc, all guests or clients of the Ermitage, working for ‘social and environmental justice’? ‘Fondacio isn’t anti-capitalist, though I am myself. My idea is nevertheless to make the Ermitage a place where struggles can converge,’ Vignon said.
He still needs to convince his colleagues, who believe the world can become green through the accumulation of individual actions. That’s a philosophy most people in Versailles seem to agree with: radicalism, whether environmental or social, holds little appeal.
‘Right to welcome a brother in need’
For ten years, Fondacio has acted as a mailbox for asylum seekers. The mail is collected on Mondays and Wednesdays. ‘Initially,’ said Vignon, ‘the sight of a thousand Africans, Indians, Tibetans and people from other countries in the Rue de l’Ermitage didn’t meet with universal approval.
Residents complained.’ Statistically, however, someone from Versailles’s middle class is unlikely to encounter a Libyan refugee. In 2016 the announcement of two new reception centres in Louveciennes and Rocquencourt, affluent residential areas near Versailles, provoked ‘particularly violent rejection’, Domergue from the food charity told me. The far-right municipal campaign group ‘Versailles, Family, Future’ called for demonstrations against the camps and the protest grew.
Versailles, Family, Future posted its view on the Observatoire de la Christianophobie (Christianophobia Observatory) website: ‘By opening the door like this, it will soon cease to be about housing a few thousand migrants around Paris and in the provinces, but hundreds of thousands, even millions ... We’re aware of the major dangers that Islam, the religion of the vast majority of migrants, poses to our country and to the whole of Western civilisation’ (4).
Under pressure, the prefect cancelled the Louveciennes camp. Galvanised, Versailles, Family, Future called for a further demonstration in front of the palace. ‘Here we drink wine, we eat pork, and our women don’t have to choose between being veiled or raped,’ said group leader Fabien Bouglé, who was re-elected as a city councillor in 2020.
When Christians and Muslims from Syria and Iraq fleeing ISIS massacres and their countries’ destruction sought refuge in Europe, Pope Francis asked every parish in Europe to take in a refugee family.
The good Catholics of Versailles mobilised to accommodate persecuted Arabs — as long as they were Christians. (Solidarity with the Ukrainian refugees, mostly Orthodox Christians, has proved less problematic.) At Saint-Symphorien church, the genial parish vicar Pierre Amar told me that ‘it’s right to welcome a brother in need first.’
When it comes to Muslims, ‘discretion’ is required. Versailles’s mosque, established in 1998, is a modest house close to a railway bridge. But for a plaque, it would be impossible to identify. It was permitted on condition that it had no minaret.
Fewer go to church
Versailles’s rich religious resources result from its citizens’ affluence. Their Christian fervour has few equals in France: ‘Two per cent of French people say they are Catholics and go to mass every Sunday.
In Versailles, it’s 10%, and in some districts 25%,’ Amar said with satisfaction. In Jeanne d’Arc parish, by the Rive-Droite railway station, one in four residents attends mass every Sunday. There are seven parishes in the town, compared with two in Sartrouville to the north (population 55,000) and one in Mantes-la-Jolie to the northwest (43,000).
Younger priests are attracted to Versailles, where their average age is 53; the national average is close to 75. With 15,000 members, Yvelines is also the French department with the largest number of scouts. And there are plenty of quality Catholic schools, both partly state-funded and fully private.
Nevertheless, Versailles is not immune to the general decline in religious observance (as measured by the number of baptisms and children attending catechism)
. ‘The Church in France is based in a rather narrow social layer, the upper middle class, who are being driven out of Versailles by rising property prices,’ auxiliary bishop Valentin said.
‘Large families who’ve been priced out are moving to the new town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines,’ according to Camille Pascal, a councillor of state who lives in the city. But many still send their children to school in Versailles and come back for Sunday mass. Even the archetypal Versailles bourgeoisie are suffering as a result of gentrification, being replaced by an affluent class who don’t care about religious values.
Mother of six Laurence Trochu, president of the Conservative Movement (formerly Common Sense, which campaigned vigorously against same-sex marriage), had to leave Versailles’s Saint-Louis district and move to the more affordable Guyancourt on the edge of town. ‘It was becoming impossible to live there with young children.
This is the daily challenge for families regarded as middle class according to INSEE [National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies] criteria,’ she said.
‘The people who’re forcing out large families, the rightwing “bohemian bourgeois” [many so-called bobos took a turn to the right with Macron] are looking for Versailles’s quality of life, and the cultural and educational offering.’
Their aspirations are mainly secular. When they enrol their offspring in excellent Catholic schools, they ‘always ask for more trips abroad to increase their children’s chances of getting into a grande école [top-tier university],’ Valentin said. ‘Weekends in abbeys are of less interest to these people.’
Versailles’s ten private Catholic schools and colleges educate around 9,500 students, from nursery school to tertiary level; 31% of junior high school pupils and 45% of high school pupils in Versailles are educated in diocesan schools.
Prefiguring Macron?
Sociologically and politically, did Mazières’s electoral success prefigure Macron’s? State Councillor Camille Pascal thinks so: staunch conservatism in the former case, bourgeois progressivism in the latter.
An event that occurred in Versailles in February 2013 may have offered an absurd foretaste of Macron’s future predilection for ‘both/and’ positions: 10-15,000 people demonstrated in front of the palace against the same-sex marriage bill. It was the largest event in France organised by Manif pour Tous (the group which led the campaign against the law). Simultaneously, the majority of MPs were preparing to vote for the first article of the law.
But Mazières, who then also had a seat in parliament and had demonstrated against the bill with his constituents, voted in favour ‘by mistake’... In retrospect Bouglé, an intransigent defender of the traditional family, said, ‘Seeing Manif pour Tous’s success in Versailles, Mazières backed the movement, then voted for the law all the same. So he wins on both counts, conservative and progressive. Quite the coup!’
In 2008 Mazières chose the rising star of Versailles conservatism, François-Xavier Bellamy, as his deputy. They parted ways in 2020, after the failure of Les Républicains’s list, which Bellamy headed in the European elections.
Even in conservative Versailles, the list was beaten by Macron’s. In 2022 the mayor backed the conservative candidate Valérie Pécresse in the presidential election; she came fourth behind Macron, Zemmour and Mélenchon.
His support for his young deputy, Charles Rodwell, for a local parliamentary seat, this time under the banner of the ‘presidential majority’, eventually paid off: Rodwell beat La France Insoumise’s candidate. Social issues may divide Versailles’s right, but it closes ranks whenever its financial interests are at stake.
The bioethics law that extended assisted reproductive technology to lesbian couples and single women in part explains support for Zemmour here. But ‘in addition to this bill,’ former mayor Pinte said, ‘the two-week extension of the legal time limit for an abortion was the last straw that pushed the most conservative fringe of the electorate towards Zemmour
.’ Zemmour’s anti-Muslim tirades were less of an issue for these middle-class Catholic voters. He achieved his highest scores in the affluent Notre-Dame and Saint-Louis districts. In the city, the thinktank Les Éveilleurs (Awakeners) is fighting the ‘societal revolutions led by the children of May 68’. Over the past six years, it has invited Zemmour three times. And in Versailles, the rightwing publications Le Figaro and Valeurs actuelles sell strongly.
‘Wokism against civilisation’
Notre-Dame des Armées is a traditionalist church where the priest celebrates mass in Latin. On Sundays at 10.30am, kneeling communicants overflow into the street and the service is broadcast live on YouTube.
The Catholic Renaissance organisation has put a pile of leaflets in the church advertising its 30th summer university; its chosen themes include the ‘Myths and realities of the great replacement’, and ‘Wokism against civilisation’. Invited speakers include Zemmour’s advisor Jean-Yves Le Gallou and former National Front (FN) vice-president Bruno Gollnisch.
However, the Rassemblement National (RN), heir to the FN, has never been big in Versailles; it may be too ‘common’ for the local bourgeoisie. In 2022 a Versailles woman allegedly told an RN activist, ‘I’m not voting the same way as my cleaner!’
In 2017, in the first round of the presidential election, François Fillon, the traditional conservative right candidate, took 43% of the vote in Versailles, putting him more than 15 points ahead of Macron. Since then, Macron’s popularity has grown. But Satory, south of the city and home of the largest gendarmerie barracks in France, does not share the Versailles bourgeoisie’s qualms. In the first round of the presidential election, Le Pen beat Zemmour here and came first. Their combined vote was 55%.
Back in May 1981 Versailles was shocked when (leftist) François Mitterrand won the presidency. The city demonstrated its anger in March 1984, when between 600,000 and 800,000 people marched through the streets in support of private, mainly Catholic, schools.
This national demonstration against a government bill brought down the government led by prime minister Pierre Mauroy. However, as later the case with the Manif pour Tous, the movement backing ‘free schools’ didn’t have the impact supporters expected.
‘Traditional Catholics have never succeeded, either in France or elsewhere, in becoming a political force, despite some attempts,’ according to historian Yves Chiron (5). Today, said Quentin Hude, president of the Versailles Union of Commerce, Industry and Handicrafts, ‘the traditionalist side is less significant than it used to be, even in the aristocratic circles I come from.’
Young Versailles artists, meanwhile, revolutionised electro-pop in the 1990s and became recognised internationally as ‘French touch ... from Versailles’. Artists such as Air, Phoenix, Alex Gopher and Étienne de Crécy all began their careers at the Jules-Ferry vocational school. Producer Marc Collin, who’s from the same generation, recently made a documentary about them, Why Versailles?
Coming from a privileged social background, this movement was built as a ‘counter-trend to rap and its offensive social and political discourse. Because we couldn’t say “We’re from Versailles”, we couldn’t be involved,’ Collin explained.
‘I used to be mocked for coming from Versailles,’ said Antoine Hébrard, president of the Bottin mondain (a Who’s Who of France’s social elite), who grew up in the city. ‘I was seen as uncool ... But that started to change about 30 years ago.’
Nicolas Godin, half of the duo Air, had a similar experience: ‘When we went Los Angeles, people regarded Versailles as a fairy-tale town, all Louis XIV and carriages.’ He goes back every Sunday: ‘The park’s one of the most beautiful places in the world, the most magical, and the most inspiring for my music.’ Macron might agree. He too spends his Sundays in the park, at his presidential residence, the Lanterne. He once explained that Versailles was ‘where the republic retreated when it was threatened’. A feeling he may understand.
