Louis XIV was ten years old during the Fronde, the aristocratic revolt of 1648 to 1653, and was twice forced to flee Paris. On one night the rebels entered his bedchamber to confirm he had not been smuggled away, and he pretended to be asleep.
He never forgot it, and Versailles is what he did about it.
The court moved permanently to Versailles in 1682. The nobility of France — the class that had raised armies against the crown within living memory — was expected to be in attendance, and attendance was expensive: a residence, appropriate dress, gambling, gifts, and the abandonment of the provincial estates from which independent power derived.
What they competed for there was access to the king's body.
The lever was the ritual of the king's rising, divided into stages with defined entry rights. To be admitted to the first entry was an enormous distinction. Within it, specific acts were assigned: one nobleman had the right to hold the candlestick, another to hand the king his shirt, and the shirt itself passed through a hierarchy of hands determined by rank. The coucher mirrored it in the evening. Every meal, chapel visit, hunt and walk had a similar structure.
None of this had any function. That is the design.
Access was rationed and awarded unpredictably by the king, which is the intermittent reinforcement schedule of chapter 19 applied to status rather than to affection, and it produces the same compulsive attention. A courtier could not know what would earn the next distinction, so the correct strategy was constant presence and constant vigilance.
Two consequences followed, and both were intended.
The nobility's competitive energy was redirected downward, into precedence disputes with each other, and away from the crown. A man consumed by whether he outranks his cousin at the coucher is not organizing a revolt, and Saint-Simon's memoirs — written from inside, by a duke obsessed with precedence and bitterly aware of what had been done to his class — are four thousand pages of evidence for this.
And the visibility produced self-censorship. Everyone at Versailles was watched continuously by everyone else, and the king was known to notice absences. A courtier managed his own behavior because he assumed observation, which is surveillance internalized as obedience, and it costs the state nothing to run.
Louis had understood something his predecessors had not. You do not need to defeat a rival class if you can supply it with a game.
Aftermath & Cross-Reference: Status Games and Manufactured Scarcity