French Taking Over Versailles Restoration : Art: American patrons, feeling the economic pinch, have reduced their contributions to maintaining the palace.

Louis XIV, France’s famous “Sun King,” built the Versailles Palace here more than 300 years ago.

But for most of this century it has been American money--donated by wealthy patrons of the arts in the United States--that has helped keep the sprawling hilltop monument to the French monarchy from falling apart.

After World War I, American millionaire John D. Rockefeller paid for a new roof and other expensive renovations.

Between 1962 and 1980, donations to the Versailles Foundation, raised in the United States by the chief conservator, Gerald Van der Kamp, and his American wife, Florence, funded the restoration of the Hall of Mirrors, the royal bedrooms and other magnificent gilded chambers that last year attracted more than 5 million visitors to the palace.

The 80-year-old Van der Kamp, now ailing in a Houston hospital, also raised money for the Versailles Palace by appealing to French schoolchildren, teachers and police officers for small donations. “Simple people gave five or 10 francs,” Van der Kamp recalled in a telephone interview.

Strikingly absent during all this period, however, were the names of wealthy French families and major French companies. While corporate sponsorship for the arts is a way of life in the United States, it is still a relatively new frontier in France.

With the American economy struggling and museums in the United States strapped for funds, French museum directors have been forced recently to ask French corporations for help. That was the significance of a press conference Monday at the Versailles Palace, which was accompanied by an unveiling of some of the palace’s restored rooms.

A French luxury goods company, Groupe LVMH Moet-Hennessy-Louis Vuitton and its subsidiary, champagne producer Moet & Chandon, announced their intention to spend an undisclosed amount of money (one official estimated it at “several million dollars”) to restore the Africa and Crimea campaign rooms in the neglected north wing of the palace.

During the French Revolutionary period of 1793-94, most of the furnishings and paintings at Versailles were either removed or destroyed. To help fill the rooms after the restoration of the monarchy, the “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe, decided to devote some of the palace rooms to French history.

The seven rooms in the Africa and Crimea suite were dedicated to French imperial battles in Africa, Belgium, the Crimea and Mexico.

Already restored and unveiled for the press on Monday was the Constantine Room of the palace, named after one of the bloodiest sieges in the French imperial war in North Africa. The room contains six giant “panorama” battle scenes--reaching 15-by-20 feet in dimension--painted between 1837 and 1840 by Horace Vernet.

One of the immense battle scenes, “The Taking of Smalah d’Abd-el-Kader,” is featured in many French history textbooks. But the blood-dripping scenes of flag-draped French soldiers slaughtering Arab and African natives have not been politically correct here for some time. The paintings have been inaccessible to the public for at least a century.

“For a long time,” explained Versailles Palace director Jean-Paul Babelon, “the historical galleries ordered by Louis-Philippe were shrouded in the discredit attached to the ‘official’ painting of the 19th Century. Happily, today they are recognized for their great value, not only for the light they cast on the sense of history in the time of the Citizen King but also for the quality of the paintings themselves.”

Groupe LVMH President Bernard Arnault said the work on the Africa and Crimea rooms will be finished next year, when museum officials hope to use the seven rooms for temporary exhibitions.

LVMH executives and French museum officials heaped praise on the American donors who have kept the Versailles Palace alive over the years with their generous contributions.

“This exceptional patronage of the arts,” announced a company press release, “will inscribe Moet & Chandon and LVMH in the great tradition of generous donors that includes the names of John D. Rockefeller, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Barbara Hutton. . . .”

But in speeches in the Constantine Room and at a lunch that followed at the Trianon Palace Hotel, the officials made it clear that the American age for the restoration of Versailles is fading.

“What this is really all about,” said Seth Goldschlager, a publicist for LVMH in Paris, “is that the Americans aren’t coming anymore.”