The full-length mirror, the guidebook, and even the folding umbrella all owe a debt of gratitude to Louis XIV's Versailles, whose myriad innovations have influenced everything from the U.S. capital to the suburban front yard. Susan Hack revels in the Sun King's bevy of bright ideas—and Robert Polidori captures an icon in the midst of a historic makeover

Originally the modest hunting lodge of Louis XIII, Versailles became the obsession and personal reflection of Louis XIV as he matured from playboy to absolute monarch and lifted France out of the Middle Ages and into the modern era. In criticizing Louis XIV for relocating the court to a swamp with no view or natural amenities, the memoirist and pathological court gossip the Duc de St-Simon completely missed the point. Royal gardener André Le Nôtre's rare trees imported from every corner of the globe; topiaries clipped into balls, obelisks, and pyramids; and indeed the whole man-made perspective stretching to the horizon created a miniature realm that encapsulated the glory of the king and his power over nature, art, and man.

Versailles was more than a symbol. When they were not trying to expand France's boundaries through war, the brilliant king and his gifted staff—chief among them Le Nôtre, military engineer the Marquis de Vauban, finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and war minister the Marquis de Louvois—consciously used architecture to control, define, and unify the nation (a strategy pursued less artistically by dictators including Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin). Along with an ambitious program of road, fort, and port building, Louis XIV executed the biggest construction project since the Appian Way: the Canal du Midi, which linked the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, fulfilling a dream of Augustus Caesar's and providing a floating highway, in the days before cars and trains, for the luxury goods of France's new manufacturing base. The canal's tree-flanked towpaths were practical—shading the mules that pulled the barges—but they also repeated the imagery of Versailles's allées and underscored the Sun King's stamp on the planet.

To further emphasize Versailles's political dominance, its signature contributions to urban planning—radiating road junctions, major axes, broad tree-lined boulevards—were imposed on the Paris grid by Le Nôtre beginning in 1667. In 1648, at the age of nine, the king had been forced to flee the Louvre during the Fronde rebellion, an uprising of nobles that ended in 1653. He thereafter detested the largest city in Europe and refused to live there, although he didn't neglect its 400,000 residents. First floors overhanging the street—a medieval fire hazard—were outlawed, and Paris gained cobbled streets, sewers, street lamps, and a centralized police force, as well as such famous landmarks as the Place Vendôme and the gilt dome of Les Invalides.

The town of Versailles, meanwhile, emerged as the world's first modern real estate development. In 1682, Louis ordered the entire court to relocate to Versailles to remove nobles from family land and traditional sources of income. Some three thousand courtiers moved into the château and began a fawning lifestyle of mind-game etiquette: Denied real power, they vied to attend the king's Mass, and all bowed to his meat as it passed by on a covered platter. To prevent the rest of the royal entourage from settling in Paris—just thirteen miles and a potentially conniving carriage ride away—the king gave away free land for the construction of residences in the court's immediate vicinity. He insisted that new owners pay property tax and adhere to the royal architect's designs, which included a height restriction that preserved the view of the town from his château bedroom.