Versailles Mirrored: The Power of Luxury, Louis XIV to Donald Trump
By Robert Wellington (Bloomsbury Publishing)
Recommended by HÉLÈNE B. DUCROS
In June 2026, President Emmanuel Macron of France organized a formal dinner for US President Donald Trump and a few others in an effort to encourage the American president to remain at the G7 Summit and address geopolitical issues such as negotiations with Iran. Aside from the direct link between the US and Versailles, as the site where treaties were signed in the context of the formal end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783, this successful wooing and soft diplomacy exercise rested in great part on Trump’s fascination with Louis XIV and appetence for imitating the “Versailles style,” which often gets summarized in lavish Trump-land into gold, marble, crystals, mirrors, and more gold. How could he refuse the invitation?
Robert Wellington’s noteworthy book, Versailles Mirrored: The Power of Luxury, Louis XIV to Donald Trump, expresses how being associated with Versailles, through anachronistic architectural emulation, extravagant stylistic duplication, over-the-top copying, obsessive acculturation, or even accurate reproduction, has, since the Sun King’s time, been a symbol of not only power through wealth but also superior social and sometimes cultural status for those who have appropriated the panache, prestige, and limitless opulence of the hunting lodge Louis transformed between 1661 to 1710 into the château we know today. Art historian Wellington reviews eight cases spanning several centuries to explain not only the drivers and purpose of this craving for extreme sumptuousness but also how the transcontinental circulation of luxury goods related to Versailles or the Versailles style has operated as a building block for political and social influence globally. Through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital, in particular his connected subcategories of objectified and institutionalized capitals, which may arise separately—and problematically so—the author questions the rationale behind the attraction of the ultra-rich of the world for the material culture of the French Court. The characters in Wellington’s chronological retrospective are colorful: Ralph Montagu and the Duke of Marlborough in late-seventeenth/early-eighteenth century England, who sought to enhance their cultural standing through a display of their closeness to Versailles-style objects, although to convey radically opposed messages (familiarity for one and conquest for the other); Ludwig II of Bavaria, who built fantasy palaces as “private meditations on the aesthetic power of monarchy” in the nineteenth century; and Alva Vanderbilt who asserted her role in high society through a Gilded Age mansion at the Marble House in Rhode Island and later her daughter Consuelo, who used her dowry to restore the Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Finally, the book examines US presidents’ draw to French artistic and material culture, in particular Trump’s, as well as other twentieth and twenty-first century “Generation Wealth” personalities such as Emad Khashoggi and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman. The book shows that what these “super-rich” have in common is that their recurrent (yet possibly superficial and misguided) reference to Louis XIV’s style rests on their determination to foster cultural ascendency and social dominance, even when objectified cultural capital is present but the institutionalized cultural capital necessary for appreciation and rightful consumption (bon goût) is absent. The book, finely and academically researched but accessible to a general audience, constitutes a remarkable journey through the successive waves of architects, designers, artists, and patrons who revisited and reinterpreted Versailles’ visual and material culture from the Arabic Peninsular to Mar-o-Lago and today continue to transmit an imagination of exacerbated luxury out-of-touch with contemporary realities in translation of their life of privilege and power. The volume too feels rich, with pleasing thick glossy, smooth pages and handsome colorful illustrations. But of course.
Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century
By Dale J. Stahl (Stanford University Press)
Recommended by NICHOLAS OSTRUM
In a sense, the history of Near Eastern civilization is a history of water management. This is especially true in its core region of what the Greeks called Mesopotamia ( “the land between two rivers”) and the Arabs, al Jazira (“the island”) whose imperial history, at least, dates back to the irrigator Sargon of Akkad. After the Akkadians, various societies, kingdoms, and empires constructed large-scale irrigation channels, canals, and dams to harness the power of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in the process transforming once natural waterways into human technologies. In Two Rivers Entangled: An Ecological History of the Tigris and Euphrates in the Twentieth Century, historian Dale J. Stahl explores this sometimes-violent collision of environmental and sociopolitical forces to examine how it shaped and continues to shape twentieth and twenty-first century Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.
To do so, Stahl draws on “new materialist” methodologies, centering the non-human energies and natural agency (in the Latourist sense) in human plans to literally construct the future by taming, then deploying the power of the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. Rather than following a standard chronological political narrative, the author divides the story into four agentic elements—water, salt, rocks, and reservoir. The knottiest parts of the entangled riparian systems the author identifies are various dam projects, which, by the second half of the book, are embodied in the politically and fluvially interconnected dams at Keban (Turkey), Tabqa (Syria) and Mosul (Iraq). With a keen eye toward international politics, as well, Stahl skillfully traces the Ottoman, then European colonial origins of these projects and follows their realizations through American, Western European, and Soviet Bloc financing, technologies, and expertise, in addition to the activities of Indigenous visionaries and reactions of local populations. Indeed, Two Rivers Entangled is at its most engaging when it goes beyond the techno-ecological environments themselves to examine past imaginaries of the future, especially in Stahl’s reading of engineering reports and geological studies as subjective poetic projections alongside more traditionally accepted artistic productions of poems, films, paintings, and architecture. In this, he shows that just as the projects themselves, their environments, and the various riverine human and non-human actants entangled, so too did more strictly human methods of interaction and meaning-making.
Violence and Occupation: The Red Army in the Balkans and Central Europe, 1944–1945
By Vojin Majstorović (Cambridge University Press)
Recommended by OKSANA ERMOLAEVA
In 1839 Astolphe de Custine, French aristocrat and writer, described two major perils facing Europe: the raging armies of despotic Russia and the contagious, violent revolution taking place in the agonizing Russian empire. In his recent book, Violence and Occupation: The Red Army in the Balkans and Central Europe, 1944–1945, Vojin Majstorović provides a detailed description of the consequences of the first peril, as the Russian army occupied parts of Europe after WWII. Building on scholarship on violence and warfare in twentieth-century Europe and on the Soviet Army, Majstorović contributes a nuanced analysis of the way the modern authoritarian model of Russian governance rapidly expanded throughout Europe in the twentieth century through force, in particular during the Red Army’s advance into the Balkans, Hungary, and Romania in 1944–45, when an “Eastern border control” system was established there. Majstorović emphasizes not only the opportunistic and often chaotic character of this occupation but also its transformative dynamics. Contrary to Soviet plans, which had envisaged an ideologically driven, centrally coordinated, and coherent process, the occupation was shaped by wartime exigencies, local circumstances, and often conflicting Soviet objectives, producing a fragmented system of control marked by uneven discipline and highly variable, often tense and conflict-ridden, interactions between the Russian military and local populations.
The author further shows that the Soviet propaganda that was disseminated by the army’s political section, along with disciplinary practices, shaped soldiers’ conduct toward civilians and that complex hierarchies within Soviet military command enabled, tolerated, ignored, but at times also castigated soldiers’ unlawful behaviors. Drawing upon analytical reports summarizing the activities of Soviet military tribunals, Majstorović, for instance, addresses issues such as sexual violence within the Red Army and widespread looting perpetrated by Russian soldiers in occupied territories. The book actively endorses a comparative approach, highlighting how Moscow’s internationalist ambitions for controlling the Balkans differed from earlier tsarist projects aimed at the ethnic “nationalization” of borderlands and from the genocidal objectives pursued by Axis powers in the Soviet Union during WWII. Additionally, Majstorović compares the Stalinist state’s longstanding pattern of harshness toward its own elites and administrators to the way the Wehrmacht, and to a lesser extent the American army, often appeared to shield officers from judicial prosecution. Thus, this book situates Soviet exceptionalism on a spectrum of institutionalized violence and at the intersection of several factors: the historical circumstances of extreme brutality on the Eastern Front, Marxist-Leninist ideology, and the powerful drive for revenge shaped by the lived experiences of those who had suffered and sacrificed under Soviet rule and then were ravaged by the German army. This study thus contributes to our understanding of how hostile collective mentalities and polarizing mass sentiments in Eastern, Central, and Western Europe were historically constructed and how these constructions further produced and sustained geographically extended, geopolitically antagonistic political systems in the region. The book reveals historical roots for collective antagonistic narratives that continue to inform and reinforce patterns of geopolitical confrontation, for example currently in Ukraine.
