François de Mazières, Versailles’s mayor since 2008, is a giant fan of bicycles and structure. He was re-elected for a 3rd time period in 2020, as an impartial on a ‘divers droite’ (miscellaneous rightwing) ticket. He’s main a campaign towards ugliness within the metropolis’s constructed atmosphere and towards its rightwing repute. However on this 12 months’s presidential election, far-right candidate Éric Zemmour received 18% of the vote right here, greater than ten factors above his nationwide rating, taking votes from the conservative Les Républicains in prosperous elements of town. Nonetheless, Zemmour got here a distant second in Versailles to Emmanuel Macron (on 33%), whom town’s dominant center class judged greatest positioned to defend its pursuits. A few of them, primarily Versailles’s newer arrivals, are much less connected to reactionary traditions.

‘The town has an aura a lot larger than its dimension. It defines the picture of the entire space from the jap fringe of the Yvelines division to Saint-Germain-en-Laye [to the west],’ mentioned Bruno Valentin, till just lately Versailles’s auxiliary bishop. ‘The identical distinctive id [bourgeois and Catholic],’ he recommended. The city owes its fame to Louis XIV’s magnificent Seventeenth-century palace, visited yearly by some eight million, largely overseas, vacationers.

The Solar King left a deep mark on town’s city atmosphere. Versailles was the seat of presidency from 1682 to 1789, and a key location within the early section of the French Revolution. And the monarchist Nationwide Meeting elected in 1871 retreated right here in the course of the Franco-Prussian battle, reached an settlement with the Prussian occupiers and gave President Adolphe Thiers a mandate to bloodily suppress the Paris Commune.

Whereas I waited to fulfill the mayor, his workers advised me that larger-than-life personalities have all the time been related to Versailles, however this shouldn’t overshadow town’s current dynamism, particularly with a brand new, extra prosperous and fewer conservative, inhabitants altering its (…)

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