Even though I didn’t have the opportunity to visit Versailles, I still made sure to learn as much about it as I could through documentaries and photos. The opulence of the palace was astounding, and all I could think about was the beauty it held. The luxury of the gardens and golden rooms speak to the amount of wealth the French royalty held. After seeing Versailles, I was left with one main thought sitting at the forefront of my mind. My first impressions of the palace were luxury, wealth, and beauty, yet at its core was a darker representation of inequality. Today, we see the palace as a museum, a monument to what humanity can create, and a symbol of French influence.
To the French during the time of Les Miserables and a Tale of Two Cities, the luxury of Versailles was a slap in the face to the poor in France. The first look at Versailles left me in complete awe. Even the mender of roads in a Tale of Two Cities who was angered by the aristocracy gazed upon the palace and saw the palace's undeniable magnificence. He even cried out to praise the king, even though all of his misfortune was a result of the king. I can definitely empathize with feeling a godly presence upon viewing the chateau, but for him, the palace wasn’t just a museum, it was a symbol of all the wealth the French monarchy held while people were starving on the streets. In Les Miserables, Versailles stood as a message to the commoners everywhere. It spelled out in bright gold letters: ‘We are better than you.’ It stood as a monument to all that was wrong in France at the time. You had people struggling to find food, dying on the streets, while French nobles dined luxuriously in Versailles with the problems of their country far out of sight. This is what eventually led to the revolution as the people revolted against this unfair treatment and inequality.
Even today, our wealthy may not live in golden palaces, but they still build massive estates as monuments to their wealth. The walls they built still stand today in the form of gated communities and fences with the same intent of keeping the poor and society’s problems out of their sight. People still die every day from wealth inequality and lack of access to food, problems that we could solve but still choose to ignore and keep out of our minds. Even in Los Angeles, we have communities and roads filled with tents housing the homeless that are suffering from inequality, just as the French did in Les Miserables. It shows a lot how we as a society choose to revere the palaces built by the wealthy and treat them as monuments to culture instead of seeing how they represent the issues deeply ingrained into our lives.