The Palace of Versailles Is a Real Shithole (Drenched in Gold)

Of all the places I’ve visited on vacation, I hated the Palace of Versailles the most. As someone who’s never been impressed by grandeur, I wasn’t expecting to be dazzled. I’ve always preferred ruined castles to gilded ones. Still, I wasn’t prepared for the visceral reaction I had when my husband and I decided to check it out 8 years ago while in France.

As I wandered through its gilded halls, I was struck by a lingering malaise — a feeling that gnawed at me and became impossible to ignore. Beneath the opulence and shimmering gold, I sensed a festering wound: a monument not just to royal excess, but to centuries of moral decay.

I’ve always been intuitive and attuned to suffering. It’s why I can walk into a place and immediately know if someone has died there. Eerie, I know. But in Versailles, it felt like I was carrying the weight of a thousand souls on my back. The palace’s luxury was merely a mask for greed and cruelty — a facade hiding a brutal legacy of class exploitation and alienated labour. It was built as a citadel of grotesque luxury and intimidation, on the backs of peasants who would never experience its pleasures.

I was born with a critical eye, so I have a hard time going anywhere and not looking at it through the lens of conflict theory. Nonetheless, what should have been awe — and still is for many tourists –– curdled into unease as the weight of history pressed down and revealed the rot at the very heart of power. I tried to focus on the art, to enjoy the sordid history lesson, but all I could think about was how many people had to suffer and starve so that a royal few could live in shameless profligacy. I couldn't help but think I would've loathed the assholes that ran the place.

The way I saw it, Versailles wasn’t beautiful at all. It was a gaudy spectacle of consumption, filled with bloated vanity and designed to normalize elitism and uphold the hierarchy that fed it. It was built into the bones of the place. Nothing about it felt warm or impressive, and yet here I was, with thousands of other tourists still feeding into the myth of it being larger than life. In truth, I hated all of it. I hated how vast it was. So wasteful and unnecessary. I despised the architecture and ornate design. I loathed the perfectly maintained gardens, rejecting their lack of wildness, forced pleasantry, and fountain shows. I even found the Grand Canal and its snobby swans lackluster and annoying.

By the time we reached the Grand Trianon, I felt sick. It was a scorcher of a day to be sure, but I grew increasingly hot, my hands clammy, my heart racing, until finally I had a full-blown anxiety attack in the courtyard. Fun times. Clearly, I'm just not built for places like these.

When it finally passed, I looked at my husband and said, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I had seen all I needed to see. Was it cool to visit in hindsight? I guess — maybe, if you want a brutal reminder of your values and the absolute cruelty of the ruling class while on vacation. But mostly, it felt like a colossal waste of time.

In any case, it solidified this for me: had lived during the French Revolution, I’d have been storming the gates.

Mostly, it taught me that I hate doing tourist runs through shitholes. Especially gilded ones.