Part Two: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles

Robert tells Ed about the Sun King's very sad death from butt rot and how his great grandson grew up raised by the insane party house of death that now controlled all of French politics.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Ah, we're back, and you know we're talking about Versailles,
me and my friend ed Edward Zitron. I've never called Edward.
It feels wrong. It's mostly what my mother calls me.

Speaker 3 (00:18):
When I've done something like Edward Edward Benjamin Zitron. That's
when I know I'm in real trouble.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Edward Benjamin Zitron.

Speaker 3 (00:28):
That's when the that's that's yeah, that's that's when I'm about.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
To really do that. Yeah, I feel like I need
to punish you for something. Just hearing that.

Speaker 3 (00:36):
Yeah, that's exactly it.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
It's the punishment phrase. So ed a better offline. We're
talking about Versailles and the weird culture of oligarchy. Well
it wasn't. I mean, it's an aristocracy, but whatever. Like,
we're talking about this weird subculture that Louis the fourteenth creator.

Speaker 4 (00:53):
During that during that break between recording episodes, neither of
you peede right because I'm not okay with that.

Speaker 2 (00:59):
I I pissed, behead you, behead you. It's done. Fortress.
Honestly though, it'd be pretty cool if I just got
to live in a fortress forever. I would not mind
a nice fortress stead. But don't pee as long as
it's all the time.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
I drink so many diet cokes I would be beheaded.

Speaker 2 (01:20):
Yeah, you would not have lasted a minute in verse
I me, I'm great at holding my pe. I'd have
been the fucking king's best friend. We'd have gotten wasted together.
We'd have been gambling. It is funny to me that
like all of these royal well every night gambling, constantly
losing and making fortunes, like while the country. A big

(01:41):
part of like why people get increasingly angry in the
period from here up to seventeen eighty nine when the
revolution happens, is like every day in these like newspapers
that are getting smuggled into France and you know these
other different like kind of news delivering methods. We'll talk
about that whole news ecosystem in Paris in a little bit.
But every day people are reading stories about like who

(02:02):
lost how much money? And Versailles. So they're like, oh,
the price of bread just tripled, my family's going to
starve and die. And the Duke de Orleone gambled away
seven hundred thousand livres like just burnt it for nothing.
Kind of pissed about that.

Speaker 3 (02:19):
Yeah, well, no, it's the case, may.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Be, yeah right, I would dare not be pissed about
it in front of the King. You know, the fact
that gambling is absolutely central to the culture of this
leadership caste, who all live at Versailles with the King.
I can't not think about crypto and how central that

(02:42):
is to the people who are trying to make themselves
the new the American nobility, right, who want to be
our hereditary aristocracy that rules things, and how they spend
most of their time and money gambling on crypto. Yeah, anyway,
I don't know, interesting interesting history, yes, yes, and they
even have their own you know, they've got mar A Lago,

(03:04):
which Trump clearly wants to be a sort of Versailles.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
Yeah, he lacks the atrocity gene, true, like I'm sure
he would love to do one, but like he lacks
the killer instinct of these perverts.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Well, yeah, he did not have to literally fight a
series of wars in over to get where order to
get where he is, which again, that's consistently the best
thing we have going for us.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
You know.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
It's the same as like, well, at least this generation
of fascists didn't all spend four years fighting in close
quarters in trenches. You know that said neither did we.
So the social constitution of Versailles took a lot from
its founder, which meant that the whole place was a
huge adultery club all the time. There's a great story

(03:46):
in Nancy Mitford's book that might be apocryphal, but it
tells of a high ranking noble returning home early from
a trip abroad to find his wife in bed with
her lover, and he apologized to both of them. He
was like, oh my god, I didn't warn you I'd
come home early. Of course you're fucking some dude. Oh
my god, I am so embarrassed. This is on me.

(04:09):
You know, it's not Poland, yeah, it's like Portland completely
my bad.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
You should apologize.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Oh rude. The normalization of this behavior among the ruling
class contributed to a growing break with the bourgeoisie in
the working class of France, because while these nobles who
are living together, they don't really most of them. There
are conflicts that emerge, but most of them aren't super
judgmental about adultery, right, It is just kind of considered

(04:40):
something you do. The working class and most of the
bourgeoisie are extremely Catholic and they are not okay with this.
And again, as more of this stuff leaks and gets
leaked out, right, if you want to, if you are
politically opposed to Madame de montespan right or whichever of
the King's lovers, you leak out stories of her doing

(05:03):
fucked up shit, you know, gambling irresponsibly, being drunk, sleeping
around on the king right, or whatever, and that both
makes the king look bad and it makes the King
more likely to send her away right right.

Speaker 3 (05:15):
And because the peasantry would get morally offended, well, I mean,
that's kind of a by product, right.

Speaker 2 (05:23):
The reason why you, as a noble at Versailles, are
leaking out stories about her is you want to hurt
her position, right, And the stories will get out into
the press, and then the police will find out that
peasants are talking about this and bourgeoisiser talking about this.
They'll bring that story back to the King and then
he'll know that he's been embarrassed. And so your goal
is a noble leaking that is to influence that situation.

(05:46):
But the byproduct of this is that the peasantry and
the like the regular people of France are constantly hearing
about how the king is sleeping around and not being
a good Catholic, and that makes them increasingly angry and
disaffected from the monarchy. This is a process that occurs

(06:07):
over like a century, but this, the sheer weight of
all these stories, changes completely how regular people think about
their rulers, right, in a way that is very negative
and that contributes to the growth of revolutionary sentiment. Right,
it's a part of it, you know. So this whole
process gets really escalated when Madame DeMont Span succeeds in

(06:29):
using magic to win the king over as her lover. Now,
Madame de Montespand had a husband, and in most cases,
when the king fucks your wife, you're cool with it.
For one thing. As a noble you are rarely married
for love. Right. You got married with this lady because
of a money thing, because of a political alliance. So like,
you don't really care who she fucks as long as

(06:50):
you're able to fuck who you like. Right. This is
not the case with Madame de Montespan's wife and the king.
Normally his thing is like to the husband, Hey, here
have a couple of privileges. You you get all the
tax money from this specific and it's something king, yes,
oh yes, you get very well rewarded. Right. And it's

(07:10):
also there's no shame in being cucked by the king, right,
he's the king, you know, like it's kind of a
bragging point of like, yeah, my wife is shtup in
the king. Now I get all of the taxes paid
on you know, fine leather work in Normandy or whatever,
you know. But this guy felt differently. And his uncle
was the Archbishop of Sins, right, so his uncle is

(07:32):
a high ranking member of the Catholic clergy. This guy's
pissed that the king is fucking his wife, and so
the archbishop his uncle, in order to punish the king,
finds a different married woman in his bishopric who's cheating
on her husband, and he makes her do public penance. Right,
He like puts her in public and punishes her, and

(07:52):
he posts public warnings about the sin of adultery. Now, again,
there's no free press in France, but numerous French papers
and pamphlets are printed in Amsterdam or the Hague and
sent across and the population is generally aware of what's
going on. As a result, the scandal peters out. Eventually
largely because the son king refuses to give a shit

(08:13):
about it or stop traveling around with his wife, his
pregnant former mistress, and his new mistress all in this
shit same carriage. There's a very funny moment where they're
all like traveling to the front together one day after
they work out their differences and get along, and some
of the soldiers they pass are like, I just saw
the king and the three queens of France.

Speaker 3 (08:34):
Damn Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (08:38):
Yeah, the fact they're alive. Will we're allowed to live? Yeah?
I don't know the rest of that thirty one year
old life. Yeah, right now. Speaking of which, travel in
the king's carriage was one of the great honors the
Versailles set competed over whenever he went on a trip.
If he picked you to travel with him, that's a

(09:00):
big deal, right, You've like won a major win. But
it's also miserable. As Mitford writes, these journeys, except for
the prestige they gave, were a real torment to his
companions and the coldest weather, all the windows had to
be kept open, as he could not bear stuffiness. The
ladies were expected to be merry eat a great deal.
He hated people to refuse food and to have no

(09:21):
physical needs that would force them to leave the coach,
and they hit, no, they can't do it any just
if by any chance they were taken ill, fainted, or
felt sick, they could expect no sympathy. On the contrary,

(09:41):
Disfavor said it, he's such a freak. Louis the fourteenth
had no sympathy for his pregnant mistresses either. He's going
to get you pregnant, and he's going to take care
of his bastard kids. He pays for them, He pays
for them well, they live very well, and he's like
the treats the kids reasonably nice. He hates pregnancy, so

(10:02):
his mistresses, when he gets them pregnant, are ordered to
hide their condition from him and the like. It's understood,
if you get pregnant, you need to not tell me.
You need to do everything you can to hide it,
and you need to have the kid quietly and then
smuggle it out of the palace into the hands of
some common maid or a poor noble or someone who
I will pay them to raise this kid. Right, So

(10:24):
does this guy like every nine months or so, just
find out he has a you child yes, Oh, okay,
you basically Louis the fourteenth Life. Yeah, I'm kids crazy,
another kid, Okay, some money, pay some random lady to
take care of it. I don't want to hear about
it though. Yeah, there's just one weird story. There's this
lady who he like. He like, pays her to take

(10:46):
care of one of his bastards because he hates her
and he wants her away from Versailles. And then the
kid dies immediately, and she's so sad about it that
he starts to like her, and he's like, oh, you
know what, then she got sad when my kid died.
Now I think she's cool. He is, He's a weird
he's nothing like then nothing would. Yeah. In general, one

(11:09):
thing you are struck by reading about Versailles under the
Sun King is that everyone lives in constant terror of
pissing this one dude off. One of his courtiers who
never quite made it to the inner circle later said falseness, servility,
admiring glances, combined with a dependent and cringing attitude above
all in appearance of being nothing without him, were the

(11:30):
only means of pleasing him. Cool dad to hang out with.

Speaker 3 (11:36):
Hey, I'm joining my my economy ruining house.

Speaker 2 (11:41):
It would be miserable. It's built up bones and costs
half of France to run.

Speaker 3 (11:47):
The Twilight Zone episode about this with like a child.

Speaker 2 (11:52):
Sounds horrifying. This sounds great for him. Yeah, yeah, now
the end. Oh, I don't know that we have a
full idea, but a bunch a bunch of bastards and
some legit kids, okay, Now, a displeased king could be
a terrifying thing. A representative story came when a group

(12:14):
of the King's friends got lost hunting one day. They
stumbled upon a cabin twenty miles or so from Versailles,
and the old man who lived there took them in
and fed them right. During a conversation while they're having
dinner that night, they found out that he had been
a frondeur, that is, a member of the rebellion in
Louis the fourteenth childhood, right that we started the episode
talking about. So the King's friends returned to Versailles and

(12:36):
they're like, hey, man, you'll never believe this. You know,
we met this old dude. He was part of the
rebellion years ago. He just lives right next to Versailles.
Very nice guy. You know, and they thought the King
would find it amusing. The King was livid and he
had the man trapped down and executed immediately. So real,
not a forgiving fellow. What of For another example of

(12:58):
like how Mercury old this guy could be one of
his closest friends in confidants was a guy named la Zune,
and la Zune got the idea in his mind one
day that he wanted to marry the King's cousin. Now
the same like at the same time as he's like
being like, hey, man, you should let me do this,
he starts making jokes which annoy the king, and the
King gets increasingly pissed off over the course of the night.

(13:21):
At like the fact that this guy is joking around
and talking about marrying his cousin, the King has his
very good friend arrested and locked away in a fortress
for ten years.

Speaker 3 (13:31):
So the guy, well, the guys, the guy, the guy,
the guy, Okay, cool. Why does anyone joke with Louis?

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Yeah it is. Is there a reward for being funny?
I suppose yes, because a big, big part of why
he likes the mistresses he likes is they can make
him laugh. If you can make him laugh, you can
get close to him, and there's you can get a
lot of benefits from that. But obviously comedy is a
very two edged sort, you know, kolemedy is both legal

(14:00):
illegal again, yes, yeah, it really depends on how the
sun King feels in any given moment. So very a
dangerous place to take make jokes. This is this is
truly insane.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
This is just like but it's like, there's a completely
there's a set of laws social and financial, and you
could just die because you were slightly.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Rude, yes, yes, in a way that you would never
have been able to guess, like you'll never find out
because your dad Yeah yeah, yeah, your dad are or
and usually just locked away. But if you're noble, usually
you just get locked away. So by the sixteen seventies,
the late sixteen seventies, Louis has created a captive society
of increasingly deranged, terrified, out of touch nobles whose entire

(14:42):
life revolves around trying to get him to like them.
The stakes are life and death. A bad joke can
get you locked in a fortress, and so again, people
increasingly turn to black magic. And one of the things
that's happening, as I said, A lot of this is nonsense,
like these black masses and stuff I don't think are
doing anything real, but there is a lot of real

(15:03):
stuff being sold by these witches.

Speaker 3 (15:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
Witchcraft has always been heavily tied to early medicine, and
particularly the use of botanical drugs. This often meant a
border of fasciants, right, like if you got pregnant and
didn't want to be, if it was bad for you
to be pregnant, especially all of the fucking that goes
on in you know, between these nobles, it's not always
a good idea to get pregnant with the person you're fucking.

(15:28):
You can get an abortion from these from these witches,
right the witch but they also offer they offer what
are called inheritance powders, which is literally poisoned to kill
the guy you will inherit his like the money of right,
like offer your husband. And over the middle of the
sun King's reign, it becomes very common to poison rivals
for his affections. In other words, you are trying to

(15:51):
kill people if they are closer to the king, and
you want to be close to the king. For the
most popular poisons are arsenic and antimony. In Versailles, these
were often snuck. How would you guess? What would you
guess is the most common way to poison people to
death in versai Well, poison them death. We're talking about
tron spoiling.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
I'm gonna guess. No, no, no, I'm gonna guess that.
It is like they sneak it into the food.

Speaker 2 (16:19):
M Okay, you're gonna guess food and you get a
guess for the most common way to poison someone at
versa something.

Speaker 3 (16:25):
To do with clothing, some sort of like some sort
of accessory perhaps that can have a poison on it.

Speaker 2 (16:31):
That is actually one of them. But that's not the
most common method. So I'm gonna give you a partial Sophie,
you're wrong. The most common way to poison people at
Versailles is to put poison in their enemas. So social

(16:52):
life at the palace, there's huge feasts all the time, right,
Like you're still be having these big feasts, and the
king is obsessed. He hates it when people don't eat.
If he is offering you food, you have to eat.
You have to eat a lot.

Speaker 5 (17:08):
Don't ship in any.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Presenting less you use the shitting the anima thing.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Yeah, and that's fine then, is now didn't want to
get fat? Right, Like there's a degree of stigma around that,
especially for like women at the court. And more to
the point, well.

Speaker 3 (17:26):
Yeah, body shaving.

Speaker 2 (17:30):
Do better sunking. The kind of food, the kind of
foods people are eating, these very rich foods, a lot
of cheese. People don't poop very well after eating feasts.
So inimas, everyone is taking enemas regularly because it's the
only way to relieve yourself after the king forces you

(17:50):
to eat six thousand calories of final and meat. Here
was this as well, This is like the sixteen seventy sixteen.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
How many people died from these fucking things? Like, we
must have been a lot of infections.

Speaker 2 (18:03):
We'll never know because like number one, arsenic looks like
a couple of other things, and somebody has a feast
and then has a heart attack or gets it. People
get sick and die for all sorts of reasons, and
we're bad at diagnosing, right. We do know there are
a number of proven poisonings, but we don't know how
many of the deaths at Versailles because Versaia is also

(18:24):
it's very easy to get sick there because you live
in a big house with three thousand people.

Speaker 3 (18:31):
Well, like pissing and pooping disease in weird places.

Speaker 2 (18:34):
That's probably that's not much of the problem. It's more
just that you know, flu season comes around and everyone
is in the same big room together, right, you know,
it's just easy to get sick. Again.

Speaker 4 (18:47):
The thought that you had in part one, the smell
of this place.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
The smell of this place because people are also yeah,
I mean they're using they're doing their enemas in their
private apartments, in the chamber pots. But enemas are a
daily thing for a number of people. And yeah, that's
an easy way to kill them. As you just put
arsenic in their enema, they'll shoot it out their ass
and get sick. Now ed, you got this right, a

(19:11):
very common method of poisoning. You would also impregnate someone's
clothes with arsenic, right, So you would put it unlike
the arms of their clothing or whatever, and that wouldn't
do anything unless they like touch their mouth or their eyes.
But people do that all the time, right, So the
idea is that you put it in the garment, they'll
get it on their hands. Eventually they'll touch themselves somewhere

(19:31):
that the poison can get in, right, and the symptoms
of arsenic are being are kind of similar to syphilis,
So it has this benefit of if they don't know
they've been poisoned, everyone thinks they've caught syphilis, and there's
a huge social stigma to getting syphilis. So again, if
you're trying to damage your rival, you don't necessarily have
to kill them. If you can make people think they

(19:52):
have syphilis, you can do some damage to their reputation.
They won't be able to fuck people anymore, you know. Yeah,
it's an issue now. Doctors had developed methods for testing
poison by this point, and they are awful. The main
one was if you think someone was poisoned, right, if
some guy gets sick suddenly and he's like, I think
I was poisoned, you feed whatever liquid or powder they

(20:16):
think that they were poisoned with to a dog, and
if the dog survives, it's not poison. If the dog dies,
it's poison. Right. Pretty brutal, but like it makes sense now.
Because the stakes were high and royalty is at risk,
doctors are constantly pushed to innovate and create antidotes, and
they don't really know what they're doing very rarely do

(20:37):
these work, and in order to try and figure out
if they do work. There's enough of science is becoming
a thing in this period. Right, we're not quite at
the Enlightenment, but people are starting to do science. And
one of the ways in which they try to scientifically
create antidotes is when a doctor thinks he's figured out
an antidote to a poison, they'll find a death row

(21:00):
prisoner who volunteers, and they'll poison them and then given
the antidote, and if they survive, their sentence is commuted,
they get off of the row.

Speaker 3 (21:10):
Right, I honestly would believe that they were just send
back to prison.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
Like now they're they're not there's a reward. People usually
don't survive. Right.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
Was all of this testing created specifically because of the sign?

Speaker 2 (21:25):
Yeah? I mean not, that's not the I guess there
are people others accelerates are getting poisoned. This is not
only a thing in France, right, Elements of this exists elsewhere,
but this poisoning economy is created and largely develops because
it's the shit like this existed under the Roman Empire
and further back. People always provided poisons and stuff, but

(21:48):
this specific industry, like version of the industry crops up
as a result of Versailles.

Speaker 3 (21:54):
Right, you've got the which economy, You've got the poison economy,
and of course the devil economy.

Speaker 2 (21:59):
Yeah. Yeah, Basically the extant poisoning and devil economy that
had existed in France that was probably similar to the
way it works in its neighbors, becomes this specific thing
because of Versailles. Right, that's fair to say. I think
I don't want to be like no one else poisons people, right,
everyone's poisoning people. You know, we poison people today. We've

(22:21):
gotten very good at it thanks to the Russians, you know,
That's what it was going to be an ad speaking
of which, Yeah, it is time for our ads, and
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(22:44):
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it really seems like a natural move for you.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
You know, I'm just saving my first like ad read
for like Hanwa I think like or Loki, you know,
the greats, the really I want to associate, Yeah, brand.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
I mean we're working on a Raitheon sponsorship for you,
and this is cools on media. Yeah yeah, yeah, largely
sponsored by Wraitheon. Get or a fucking who is it?
The Sikorski like it doing black Hawk.

Speaker 3 (23:27):
Ads Cold Academy Now And that was in the past.

Speaker 2 (23:34):
That's in the past. So back to the poisoning economy periodicity,
poisoners would be caught and brought to justice. This happened
in sixteen seventy six with the Marquis de Brinvillier, who
poisoned her father and two brothers but failed to poison
her husband. And it's like a weird story. Her lover

(23:55):
who was her accomplice in poisoning the rest of her family.
I don't fully do stand, but he like decides to
feed her husband the antidote because I think maybe of
some strange sense of guilt. So she gets caught and
sentenced and executed, and her trial is a media sensation.
All of these newsletters and whatnot in Paris, Like every

(24:15):
cafe in Paris, people are talking about the trial over
this poisoner, this rich noble woman who is like poisoning
her family, and before one thing they're majorly talking about
is before she is beheaded, she says, it's unfair. I'm
the only one being punished for this, because everyone at
Versailles does this rightful.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
Sticky stuff conversation.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
All exactly, and she's not lying right like, it's extremely
common to do all of this. Now, this is an
accurate complaint and it sets off kind of a public
moral panic over witchcraft and poison. Just about the only
person who had been unaware of the trade and spells
and poisons was the son King. Again, because all of

(24:59):
this is being done in order to get closer to
him and curry favor with him, he orders the parish
chief of police, Gabrielle de Larini, to investigate. What follows
is a three year plunge into the magical underground, where
inheritance powders made of arsenic were sold alongside black masses
performed by priests. From an article in the BBC History

(25:20):
Magazine by Johnny Wilkes, one of the most popular potion
peddlers was La Voisin, who named among her clients those
looking for advantage at Versai the Duke de Luxembourg bought
charms to keep him safe from swords, while a number
of women look for any additive to seduce the key.
I want some sword pills.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
And there's no wealth of way to protect from a sword.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
No, no, no, only only drugs. And it's funny because
at like formal, especially at formal events, but basically all
the time, swords are mandatory dress at Versailles, to the
extent that if you forget one, they'll give you the
loan you a sword at the door. You don't want
to use the loana sword. You don't want to use

(26:02):
the loaner sword. No, no, no, everyone's going to be
at check out. Dickhead over there with the loan of
sword and didn't bring that's that fucker's a rental.

Speaker 3 (26:13):
That's a real sword. It hasn't even got a sword
amula either.

Speaker 2 (26:17):
Yeah, and no sword ambula. What a dick. So, with
Dila Rainy convinced of an epidemic, Louis appointed a special
tribunal in April of sixteen seventy nine. Its sessions took
place in halls lit only by flaming short torches, the
Chamber Ardente Burning Chamber. More than four hundred people were accused,
dozens exiled, and thirty six put to death, including love

(26:40):
with sin. And this is partly because part of why
this gets so bad is they they or at least
Dela Rainey says, there was a plot to poison the
king to death, right right, but like and maybe there
was because people don't enjoy living this way. I was
gonna say, like, it feels like there would have been
more tempios on the case. There's probably was a plot

(27:01):
to poison the king. Yeah, seems like a natural thing
to want to do in the situation to leave like
the frat house were. It's an understandable evolution of I'm
poisoning all of my friends to get close to the king.
What did we just poison the king? Yeah? We could
go home. Yeah we could go home. I could sleep,

(27:25):
I can piss. Quote. Fear spread among a court already
riddled with suspicion, and the deaths continued, but Louis put
an end to things after he heard a name of
someone implicated that alarmed him. The Madame de Montespan, his mistress.
Fearing the king made tire of her, she is said
to have sprinkled love potions into his food potions made
from Spanish fly iron filling sperm and minstrel blood. It

(27:47):
was even claimed she had a priest perform a sacrilegious
mass over her naked body, which involved the sacrifice of
an infant. Monta Span was never tried, but the Trifai
reveiled something dark and rotting at the heart of Louis
Versailles utopia and Jesus that that escalated. That was not subtle. Wow, okay, yeah,

(28:11):
I have a priest to a spell. So the king
likes to me too, Like I'm putting sperm and minstrel
blood in his food.

Speaker 5 (28:18):
I got the minstrel, I forgot the com Where do
we get to come? You over there in the corner?
It now you want to make a dollar?

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Oh man, it's so funny. I don't know that an
infant was sacrificed. Every Satanic panic they talk about sacrificing babies.
I feel like it's pretty uncommon to sacrifice babies. But
maybe like these people are, I wouldn't and they could
get a baby, right. It's not hard to get a

(28:55):
baby counts right wright, of course you do need that
baby might make you immune to taxes, unless it's like
the eleventh baby in which cash, but most of the
babies are dying, so like I can see if like
some richly he's like, hey man, you know that kidd
of yours isn't looking great. I need a baby as well. Also,

(29:18):
do you any com trying to do one? Stop shopping here?
Oh man? What a what a great culture. I love
magic of the Court and Versailles, the common dead baby trade.

(29:39):
This house is like off of the economy, is half
of the rich economy. I mean that's how it costs.
I don't know if they're spending that much each year
because it doesn't make money by this point. But yes,
this this house that costs half of the GDP to build.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah, it's ruining the lives of every noble.

Speaker 2 (29:58):
It's destroying because now driving them insane.

Speaker 3 (30:02):
Again, it's like a gossip industry.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
He has created like the cultural equivalent of a death star,
but it's aimed at his own country, like and.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
It's very people as well.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
Now, all of this, this, like this story, people can't
stop talking about this, and I mean I can't stop
thinking about it. Of course, this wild this and this
massively accelerates the news the growth of a news ecosystem
in Paris, right, and in the news, this kind of

(30:34):
I'm going to lay out how this works. This whole
news ecosystem in Paris sprouts. It existed before Louis, some
aspects of it. There had been these things called libel's
for years, which were like books about different people in
government and politics, and you know, including some of the
King's mistresses, that were like books attacking them, right, which

(30:56):
are usually illegal, but they're sold quite often. Those that
existed before Louis fourteenth. Obviously there had been some kinds
of papers in other countries that would get into France.
But what really accelerates the birth of a massive and
honestly very modern, feeling news ecosystem in Paris is Versailles.
Because now that all of power is centralized at Versailles,

(31:18):
and all of the people in power, including the king,
are no longer having much contact at all with regular people, right,
they're not governing out of the same city that French
people live in. They're increasingly locked in their own world.
So if you're a normal French person, the media becomes
your way to keep in touch with the government, right,

(31:38):
this alien world of Versailles, you know, And so that
is a lot of the fuel by which creates something
very similar to our current social media ecosystem in Paris.
Part of why this is able to work is that
literacy is actually very common in Paris, even among the poor,
Like a significant amount of people do know how to read,

(31:59):
even p who do not come from money. But even
if you don't know how to read, there's like an
equivalent to TV news, which are called I'm not going
to use the French term for it, but they're called
oral newsmongers, right, as in someone who like just tells
you the news, right. These are like the newscasters of
their day. So it's not TV there's, but there is.

(32:21):
There's a large chestnut tree in the center of Paris
called the Tree of Krackowl. And so in the early mornings,
these oral newsmongers will gather up all the newspapers they can,
all the gossip, you know, they collected the night before,
and they'll go out and they'll like read the best
bits out to the crowd, right, and you know, people
will throw them some money for that, and the people

(32:41):
who stand around another chunk of people will stand around
listening to these oral newsmongers. Some of them are just
doing that to get the news in the morning. Some
of them are taking notes on what these people say,
and then these notes sometimes get turned into pamphlets, but
usually they'll just bring them to the cafes and the
bars later in the day and read them out to

(33:02):
everyone there, and as a result, news disseminates in a
very modern way. This is almost like having twenty four
hour TV news, right, a podcast really yeah, or a
podcast right, and that then turns in in some cases
it turns into like print news, but it also turns
into direct gossip that it's closer to, like if you
think of the Tree of Crackout as like TV news,

(33:24):
and then these cafes and bars are like Twitter and Facebook, right.
So it is in a lot of ways. It's an
extremely modern seeming system that develops here.

Speaker 3 (33:34):
It's so crazy how many different systems grew out of
this necessity, yes, to create this insane alien world where
the people that run the government. I was just thinking, like,
these are the people running the government. They're not just
like fucking around. They're also running.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Fronts they are running for and that's why again, pieces
of this aspects of what becomes this news economy existed
before versaill versa. I supercharges it, and it also fuels
it because most much, not maybe if not most well actually, honestly,
usually most of what is being talked about at the
Tree of Crackou and in these cafes starts as gossip.

(34:09):
People at the courts smuggle out, you know, send out
with an eight or whatnot. They'll write it down, they'll
send it to somebody that they know, you know, passes
stuff on to the people making these papers that are
being smuggled in the France, or they'll pass it on
to oral newsmongers. Because I want to get this piece
of gossip out because it's bad for arrival. I want
to get this piece of gossip out because it will

(34:30):
hurt this person close to the king, or it'll embarrass
the king and stop him from doing something that's bad
for me for whatever reason.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Right, and honestly, no one to this group, because it
was fucking insane. If this was going on right now,
this would be all I cad about.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yes, yes, this is the only thing you'd want to
talk about. It's the crazy house. Why would just be like,
what's going on to someone poison the crazy house? Yeah,
he pissed, Yeah, so it was said that if you
during the you know, when these oral newsmongers would get
up and give the news under that chestnut tree, that
if you heard a branch crack, that meant that the
newsmonger had gotten something wrong. And so cr que crack

(35:07):
became slang for fake news. That's the first like fake
news term and the last. From here, people in attendance
would again take notes on the best bits in the
DeCamp for cafes, wine shops and salons. Police would sometimes
confiscate these notes when they could, but this was all
simply too common to stop. The system is still in

(35:28):
its infancy during the reign of the Sun King, but
it starts to really grow during the reign of the
Sun King, and it will evolve over the next two reigns,
and ultimately this is a huge part of why there's
a revolution, right the fact that there's these papers, there's
these revolutionary presses and tracks, and the fact that all
of this gossip about royalty is really bad pr for

(35:50):
the nobility and for the king and the queen.

Speaker 3 (35:53):
They just sound insane.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
They sounded insane and awful, and it's kind of fucked up.
As we'll talk about Eventually, the King and Queen WI
ultimately pay the price, you know, which includes the queen
being Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis the sixteenth are
not nearly as bad as the son king, and in fact,
my opinion of them is they were kind of trying
to do the best they knew how to. But they

(36:17):
were raised number one in this insane place and it
deranged culture that has gotten even crazier by the time
they come in. There's just no chance of them ever fixing, right.

Speaker 3 (36:29):
Question how long has this been going on? So, like,
how long has the SI been around at this point?

Speaker 2 (36:34):
I mean by the time we're into the sixteen eighties,
like twenty years something like that. Oh my god, fifteen
twenty I think. So I don't think it's yeah, we're
in this scene growing up going on. Yeah, well yes, yes,
because again the Sun King reigns seventy two years, right,

(36:54):
so and you know Versailles he starts building when he's
like twenty four, right, so he is around with it
for a long time. People are born and die with
Versailles being the center of the French world during his lifetime,
you know, and his time as the king. Now again
It's important to note that the main reason why this

(37:17):
very modern information ecosystem gets off the ground is there's
this desire of what are called the little people to
understand what the big people are doing at Versailles. As
Robert Darton writes in The Revolutionary Temper, which is a
great book about the way the media worked in Paris
leading up to the Revolution. For most Parisians, especially the
little people, Versaill was an alien world, and politics was

(37:38):
the king's business, transacted in his name by ministers, courtiers,
and power brokers among legrands. That's the big people. Yet
worried about the power plays leaked from Versailles, and it
converged with all sorts of other news in the information
system of Paris. Legrands at the top of society had access.
And these are not just nobles, right, Wealthy merchants are
also at Versailles. And in fact, there's a whole cottage

(38:00):
industry in books for rich people who are not nobles,
who need to understand the stuff that nobles are raised
understanding in order to not embarrass themselves at Versailles. That
becomes like a cottage industry. And yeah, like a big
part of what fuels. This is, you know, these people
doling out rumors and lies, often for social cachet. If

(38:21):
someone makes a crude joke at the king's expense or
flirt with one of his mistresses, they can upset dynamics
at the palace in ways that are beneficial to them. Now,
the downside of this constant churn is that people outside
of Versailles get this feeling that everything going on there
is like illegal, immoral sex, gambling and wasting all of

(38:43):
the country's money. Right, because which is partially largely accurate.

Speaker 3 (38:47):
Right, Yeah, it doesn't sound like they were unreasonable in
believing that.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
What's kind of fucked up is that Marie Antoinette and
Louis the sixteenth are like, compared to Louis the fourteenth,
fairly moral people. They do not engage in at least
nearly the same level of adultery. They are less wasteful
than the kings before them. But because the royalty have
this reputation by their time, they get that reputation too,

(39:14):
right because everyone for a hundred years, all that everyone's
been writing about how fucked up Versailla is. They're not
going to stop now just because these people are like
forty percent less shitty, right, Which is not to say
that Antoinette and Louis the sixteenth weren't shitty or wasteful,
They just weren't as bad as their predecessors. Yeah right.
So as he aged, the Sun King did grow less

(39:36):
promiscuous and more focused on maintaining control. As Johnny Wilkes writes,
Louis turned his life movements and even abolutions, which is like,
you know his toilet has cleaning himself into a daily
performance governed by a seemingly endless list of detailed rituals
and strict rules of etiquette, all in order to keep
the nobles busy. All revolved around the Sun King. Starting

(39:57):
when he first awoke, A select group be granted and
access to the King's bedchamber, although they were not to
cross the railing to get near the bed during during
the ceremonial rising, and only the most senior in the
room had the honor of helping Louis into his shirt.
Did the same thing at cees, Yeah, same thing. Yeah,
that's exactly how we handle ce Now. The fact that

(40:19):
life there was a constant series of balls and parties
necessitated constant grant state expenses for fireworks which sometimes kill people,
and food in the law. But it also kept the
courtiers there in constant debt. Many had to borrow from
the crown to afford the accouterment of life at Versailles. Yeah,
the king.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
They had to get from the king to go to
the king's party.

Speaker 2 (40:41):
Yes, yes, and this is again part of how he
maintains control when the sun came, and part of why
it's so expensive is like what's acceptable fashion changes on
a whim. So when the king starts to go, bald
wigs become fashionable, right, and suddenly everyone should have a
wig because the king does. And when the king has
asked surgery for an anal fistula, people start wearing like

(41:01):
bandages around their crotches like HiT's yeah, mates, yeah, it's
also crazy fucked up man.

Speaker 4 (41:11):
It's like when we saw those guys wearing the ear
bandage at the r this year.

Speaker 2 (41:15):
It is exactly like that.

Speaker 4 (41:17):
So rised.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
This is like coo, just like that. Yes, this is
this is so insane.

Speaker 3 (41:26):
Probably even if even if this was just people partying,
it would be strange. But the fact that this is
the like the economy.

Speaker 2 (41:33):
By the by this point the sixteen eighties a decent
number of the people here have been like raised in this.
You know, they don't know another world exists.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
In sixteen eighty three, the Queen died and Louis married
his current mistress, Madame de Mentinon. He was less of
a rake by this point, in part for the sake
of his immortal soul. A king who was known as
an adulterer couldn't take communion while he lived in sin.
This was a power that the Church had, and even
the king really couldn't force them to do this once

(42:09):
he was no longer in the prime of health. Louis
worried about this more and more, because if you die
not taking communion, you go to hell, even a king. Right,
So that's the understanding that, like if the king is
committing adultery and doesn't stop in time to get forgiven
and you know, given his communion and last rites and whatnot,
then he goes to hell. Even the king will go

(42:30):
to hell. And as he'd gets sicker and older, Louis
worries about this more. Now, As I said, the King
Sun King's reign is impossibly long by the standard, like
thirty years is a long reign for a modern dictator
with access to modern medicine. If you make it to
thirty years as a dictator, you were doing very well, right.

(42:51):
The Son King reigns for seventy two years. He is
the longest recorded reigning monarch in history human history. Now
there's some argument about this with people for whom our
documentation is less good because date keeping was just in
a very different state. But they just I mean, I can't.
It's very hard for someone to be king for longer

(43:11):
than seventy two years, you know.

Speaker 3 (43:13):
And it was likely sustained by the complete insane of
the world he made.

Speaker 2 (43:18):
Well, yeah, it was also the government thing. Yeah. What
if Congress was just Vegas my house?

Speaker 4 (43:24):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (43:24):
What if the House of Representatives was a place they lived?
Yeah and fucked.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
Yeah that said, you know, by the time he's getting
laid in his reign, kings are like anyone else as
they age, the shit that used to work don't work.
And Louis had been for most of his life a
very successful war leader, but in the last decades of
his reign he makes increasingly poor decisions, and some of
these lead him to participate in the War of Spanish

(43:50):
Succession in the early seventeen hundreds. A lot of the
wars in this period are wars of succession. A king
will die without an air everyone will feel like, well, iveyl,
like one of my relatives should be in there, you know,
and then maybe France, you know, can effectively be helping
to govern Spain or whatever. This does not work, or

(44:11):
at least what Louis wants out of the War of
Spanish Succession. He doesn't get. The war is kind of
a mixed bag for France. Her ambitions in Spain are stymied,
but she does close the war out after years with
some strong winds against Austria. Right, so it's not a
total calamity, but it's hideously unpopular and by the end

(44:32):
the country is like bankrupt, and in fact the economy
shits the bed so bad that Louis has to melt
down ten million livres worth of silver furniture at Versailles
to pay the crown's debts. This is not a good
deal because it only results in three million livres worth
of metal. Newsmongers whispered that the king might have made
more headway on the crown's debts if he had sold

(44:53):
the crown diamonds, but Louis couldn't stand the idea. He
loved seeing his female relatives nieces and granddaughters and the like,
wearing diamonds, and he was absolutely unwilling to sell those time.
That's unreasonable to expect of him, of course, of course exactly.
And look, if you don't want to sell your royal diamonds, uh,
you know.

Speaker 3 (45:16):
I wouldn't sell mine.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Buy some diamonds from our sponsors.

Speaker 3 (45:24):
Okay, yep, yeah, I'm good, just emotional that he couldn't
have this, but he can't turn cool Zone Media into
the party house.

Speaker 2 (45:32):
Yeah, this will see, yes, is going to become for
me though. This is inspired me. Yeah, I have always
wanted to create a giant house and make all of
the podcasters live there, podcasting Versailles and called.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
The content It's called a content house.

Speaker 2 (45:46):
It's called a content house.

Speaker 4 (45:47):
And don't look up the suicide race.

Speaker 2 (45:49):
Yeah no, that does sound like a nightmare. The pods
save guys are going to be poisoning each other to
get close. Like I said, Actually that part sounds rad
This sounds great. So we're yeah, I mean we've been back,
but Versailles had to downsize in its last year's right,

(46:10):
Louis the fourteenth is not doing as well at the
end of his reign as he had at beginning. Frances
broke and it will it will be in a kind
of semi constant state of being broke until you know,
Marie Antoinette and her husband get forced out. Right for
an idea of how of how fucked up things get.
At Versailles, at the height of the Sun King's power,

(46:32):
there had been fifteen hundred fountains at Versailles. Right by
the time of Marie Antoinette, there are only three hundred. Yeah, tragic,
It's tragic. You hate to see it.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
I only have two hundred.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
I mean that's yeah, it really is, you know, And
and I've been telling you you could, you'd need another
thirteen hundred fountains. I agree. Just fountain technology is advance
so much it is crazy versus this one palace for
the king had more fountains by a long shot than

(47:08):
Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, like, like way more fountains. How
big were they though? Some of them are pretty big.
They're pretty big, and they have to because the technology
is not as good and there's like getting enough water
is harder. They're having to constantly turn them on and
off as the King approaches different areas, so he doesn't

(47:29):
know that they're not on. And also just because like
you can't have them all functioning at once, there's too many.
So there's this whole network of like people running back
and forth. The King's going here, now, you gotta like
turn this one off, get the flow going to that one.

Speaker 3 (47:42):
Right, there's a decent chance he had no idea that
any of this is happening, just like reality to him
must be complete, must have been completely insane. That's like
life fucking rocks. Yeah, I walk around, there's always fountains.

Speaker 2 (47:56):
There's always fountains. Or he took a lot of joy
in the fact that everyone was like constantly working, and
he there was an extent to which he did want
everyone always obsessed with keeping him happy. Right, But it
is that also that's kind of that causes brain damage, right,
having being this separated from reality and this insulated from

(48:17):
everyone else and living in a situation like this, like
you would be hurting your head less by just standing
next to one hundred and fifty five millimeter howitzer while
it fires all day, right, like it's I cannot overemphasize
how bad this is for you, and how much this

(48:39):
affects his judgment making right.

Speaker 4 (48:42):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
He's also older, right, which means that he's not thinking
as clearly as he used to be. Maybe there's some
aminsha here too. He's sicker, but he makes a lot
of bad decisions, right, and he's aware of this to
some extent. His last words are generally reported as being
I have loved war too much, right, Like, he really

(49:04):
seems to regret, and that's what he passes on to
his successor, don't do as many wars as I did.
It ended badly, right, I got way too into war
and it really was great. We are broke now. I
had to melt down my furniture.

Speaker 3 (49:22):
But also the furniture was made of fucking silver, a
lot of it.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
Yeah, But the fun it's just a bunch of fucking
full metal. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of it's plated. Okay,
I'm sure a decent amount of it's silver plated, but
also not all of it. Right, he does have the
money for pure silver chairs and stuff, you know, the king, Yeah,
so good. And again this is one of kind of

(49:49):
like the I don't know if tragedy is the right
word but one of the things that is like unjust
here is that the last king in his line, Louis
the sixteenth, you know, Marie Antoinette's husband, is going to
be murdered in part as a result of this horrible
system of debt that gets started in the end of
the Sun King's reign. Louis the sixteenth hates war. He's
like the only one of these guys who is not

(50:11):
at all interested in starting wars. He does get involved
in the war that the US has right like our
War of Independence, but he's not like a warmonger in
the same way that his relatives had been, in part
because he sees where it takes the kingdom. But he's
ultimately going to pay with his head the price for
all of the warmongering that is his grandpa and great

(50:34):
grandpa and what not do nor his great grandpa and
I guess great great grandpa. It gets a little confusing
because since Louis this fourteenth had reigned for seventy two years,
he didn't have any kids that are alive, right, Like,
those fuckers all died a while ago, you know, Yeah,
they got poisoned or they got the fucking symholists or whatever. Yeah,

(50:56):
well he's he's got all. He's probably trickled. This really
stopped working right, right, and so it's going to be
his successor who becomes Louis the fifteenth, which, if you've
seen the Sophia Coppola Marie Antoinette movie, this is the
guy rip torn place. Okay, yeah, the second Louis. In
the Versailles line, there are only three kings during the

(51:18):
period of Versailles being the center of France, right the
Sun King, Louis the fifteenth and Louis the sixteenth, and
Louis the fourteenth had reigned so long that Louis the
fifteenth is his great grandson. He was five years old
when he was crowned the king, and this came as
a surprise. He was not expected up until kind of

(51:39):
the last moment that he would be the Delphine, and
Delphine is the French word for the prince that's going
to inherit being the king, right, that's the Delphine, So
this comes as a surprise. Other people are in line
to be the king before him up until the last minute,
right in the last five years of the Sun King's rain.

(52:01):
The Grand and Petite Dauphines which are the first and
second in line for the throne, both die of smallpox
and measles, respectively. Louis the Fifteenth's brother, who was also
ahead of him, becomes Dauphine, but then he gets measles,
and also the Louis the fifteenth gets measles too, right,
they both get mesles at the same time. His older

(52:21):
brother dies, he survives, and again, stories like this are
very common at Versailles in particular. That's not the only obviously,
it's a lot more common to die of sicknesses like
this and for them to sweep through families, even noble families,
all throughout Europe. But everyone, you've got three thousand people
living in one big house, disease spreads more readily, right, and.

Speaker 3 (52:43):
A place where people probably hide their symptoms as well,
because they don't want the king to think.

Speaker 2 (52:47):
Because the king gets angry if you're sick, yeah, because
it's yes, yes. So Louis the fifteenth ultimately becomes king
because every three other guys die in quick success over
the course of a couple of years, and the treatment
for measles that he and his brother both undergo is
blood letting, and that kills his brother. But he survives. Now,

(53:09):
in the Sun King's last days, he rewrote his will
to limit the next king's power and establish a regency
council because he knows that the next king is going
to be five, right, and he also knows it that's
the reason. Well, the bigger reason is that a five
year old can't be king. Yeah, he has to wait
till he's thirteen. But of course the kid's great uncle,

(53:30):
Philip the Second, the Duke of Orleon. He's the guy
who's supposed to be regent so ruling in the king's stead.
The Son King doesn't like the Duke of Orleon because
he's an atheist and a warmonger.

Speaker 4 (53:41):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:41):
Oh okay, that's that's how the Sun King sees him, right,
And instead, the Son King wants his bastard son, the
Duke of Maine, to be the regent until Louis the
fifteenth is old enough to take up the job, so
he rewrites his will. But as soon as the Sun
King dies, Philip leads a coup in the wake of
the Sun King's death, and he goes go to the
Parliament of Paris, this which is again a legal body,

(54:03):
and he convinces them to a null parts of the
King's will. In exchange, he reaffirms what it's going to
be called the right of remonstrance, which is parliament's power
to challenge the king to say no if the King
says I want a new tax or something. Right, and
the fact that the Parliament gets this power back is
going to lead to a number of conflicts that become
contributing factors to the revolution. Right, and it's as a

(54:25):
result of these kind of court politics. Right, Philippe wants
to be the regent. He doesn't want this other guy
to be the regent. You know, after this, you know,
this whole mess with the will is sorted out. The
child King Louis the fifteenth has a normal childhood, you know,
by which I mean at age seven, he's given to
a seventy three year old general and taught military etiquette
and court etiquette. He learns how to ride and hunt,

(54:48):
while Philippe proved that the son king had been right
not to trust him. One of Philip's first big moves
is to make a Scottish economist named John Law the
Controller General of Finances, opens a private bank that becomes
one of the first banks in the world to issue
paper money, right, massive innovation. Unfortunately, the primary purpose of

(55:09):
this bank is to take investments for the Mississippi Company,
which meant to colonize Louisiana. And if you've been there recently,
you know this didn't work out for the French, right,
you know, New Orleans is pretty nice, but like, overall,
they don't Louisiana doesn't become a great functional colony. And

(55:30):
this is kind of like a Ponzi scheme of its
day because it collapses. The plan collapses, which kills the
national bank and bankrupts a huge chunk of the nobility
who had invest it into it. Right, Oh God, Like,
this is like a massive financial disaster of its day.
So more of these guys go in debt to the crown,

(55:50):
and the crown knows primarily how to help these guys.
If you want to help these nobles who are close
to the king rebuild their fortunes, your main way of
doing that is to give them the right to tax
certain areas. And there's only a limited number of these taxes.
You have to create new ones, which means the recovery
of these fortunes by the nobles is going to be

(56:10):
born largely by the poor and the bourgeois. He right.

Speaker 4 (56:13):
Uh huh.

Speaker 2 (56:14):
Louis the fifteenth gets married to one of his cousins,
Marianna Victoria of Spain.

Speaker 1 (56:20):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
This is there's a there's a six year age gap.
She's three and he's nine. Problematic, but not for either
of them. They're not really in charge of this. There again,
a six year old and a three year old or
a nine year old a three year old. The bride

(56:41):
is sent to the Louverra to live with her husband.
But after about four years of this, the.

Speaker 3 (56:46):
Child pride to the child king.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
Then Philippe dies and she gets sent back home because
she's not old enough to have kids. Thank god, there's
that understanding. Seven year old's a little young to have children.

Speaker 3 (57:01):
But you know, it's fucking France.

Speaker 2 (57:02):
They were like thinking about it. They thought about it.
Rack Benjie. Louis the fifteenth takes over ruling duties at
age thirteen in June of seventeen twenty two. And again
when we talk about the degree of complicity, by this point,
Louis the fourteenth totally responsible for his actions. Louis the

(57:22):
Fifteenth partially, but you have to do it. You do
have to take into account this man becomes king at
age thirteen, and again Marie Antoinette married at thirteen. Right,
these are children being thrown into these roles, and to
the head of this insane you are taking a thirteen
year old and saying, hey, you are now the head
of the most like, insidiously fucked up and mentally dominating

(57:47):
cult that has ever existed.

Speaker 6 (57:48):
Built for someone else, built for someone else, good life,
someone else when they were more sane than they are now,
which they were not very sane before, but now they're
really insane.

Speaker 2 (57:59):
This cold designed by like a once in a several
generations political genius Twining who was a mature adult. Yes,
good luck, good luck. So this thing that had Versai
had initially been a way for him to exert control.
By the time his successor takes over, the system is

(58:22):
controlling the king as much as it's controlling the nobles. Right,
they are no longer running things, because this increasingly arcane
system of etiquette has taken on a life of its own,
And so from the beginning Louis the fifteenth is as
much a prisoner of the system as he is the
guy at its head. For an idea of how cloying

(58:44):
and total it could be. A treat is from seventeen
twenty nine on napkin etiquette stated it is ungentlemanly to
use a napkin for wiping the face or scraping the teeth,
and a vulgar error to wipe one's nose with it.
The same there do you do it? You just get
it's a looking napkin, You just keep it.

Speaker 6 (59:04):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:05):
The same treatise went on to insist the person of
highest rank in the company should unfold his napkin first,
all others waiting until he has done so before they
unfold theirs. When all of those present are social equals,
all unfold together with no ceremony.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
For this useless napkin.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
For a napkin, there's books written on napkins sick. Every
night includes a grand dinner, which is a public event.
Anyone who is at Versailles can show up and watch
the dinner, but it's only public in the sense that
the public can watch. Only the royal family gets to
sit and eat. Right, and based on your rank, if

(59:46):
you're a duchess or a princess or someone similarly high ranking,
you might get to sit at a stool. Right, Okay,
everyone else has to stand. The king is the only
one who gets a chair with armrests, I think is why.
I think the king and queen both get armrests in
their chairs, and if another king is visiting, he gets
a chair with armrests. Right, Although this is complicated because

(01:00:09):
of all of this etiquette, Like you can if you're
in a room with a bunch of people, only people
can only start conversations with someone who is an equal
or lower rank to them, so talking about anything is
really fucked up. And generally when kings visit, When kings

(01:00:29):
and queens visit, they visit incognito, which is they pretend
to not be the King of Russia or Prussia or wherever.
They pretend to be just another random nobleman with a
fake name, because then they don't have to deal with
all of this etiquette. Because usually if you're a king
who's heading there, you're heading there to handle some very
serious state business and you don't have the time to

(01:00:51):
deal with all this bullshit, so you just lie and
say you're someone else and everyone knows. But then we
don't have to do as much of the bullshit.

Speaker 3 (01:00:59):
Right, But who decides who the social hierarcky or is
this arbitrary.

Speaker 2 (01:01:04):
It's been decided over the course of years. So I
mean again, a lot of this comes out of the
earlier feudal system, right, but you have princes and princesses
of the blood which you're above, you know, these kind
of lower ranking nobles, and you've got this.

Speaker 3 (01:01:18):
Whole everyone insane. Hi, every single person there is just
experiencing psyches.

Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
Yes, old times people are people are constantly like it's this,
It's this maddening thing. Like if you are if you
are handing the and this happens if you're handing the
king or the queen. If you're the highest ranking guy
in the room, when they wake up and you're handing
them their shirt and someone else walks in who is
of an equal or higher rank, you have to stop
and give the shirt to them. There's a at one

(01:01:46):
point when Marie Antoinette is like new to the palace.
This happens like four or five times in a row,
and she's just standing there naked in the freezing cold, like,
for the love of God, somebody please give me clothes,
you know, like that that's an actual thing that happens.
Oh no, another guy walked in. Another lady walked in. No, no, no,
she gets the shirt. Now, look, we literally you are

(01:02:06):
not allowed as the king, like by this point, if
you're the king and the queen, you are an absolute
monarch and you are literally not allowed to touch your
own shirt because that would be this hideous violation of
etiquette that would like upset this very intricate social system
that everyone is reliant too. And the fear was that
if you break any of these protocol everything kind of

(01:02:28):
everything collapses. Right, that's exactly it, right.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
The most expensive cultival time.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
It's such a stupid system. It's so fucking funny, it's
it's really funny and dumb. So doors could not be
knocked on, right, You can't knock on a door because
the sun King was annoyed by knocking. And so again
another of intricate etiquette revolves around how you let someone
know you're at the door, because you also can't open doors.

(01:02:55):
Only courtiers can open only like like staff can open doors, basically, right,
no one else can open So you're you're not opening
any doors. If you want to get in, you have
to scratch the door with your left little finger and
you're right now, you're right. Courtiers start growing this left
fingernail out like the left lower little fingernail out like
a coke nail, so that they can more effectively scratch

(01:03:19):
the door to get whatever Lewis is reigning's attention at
the time. Just like a little like a talon, like
a towel. You got a little towel, You got a cokenail,
the king's expression, yeah, lovely. Etiquette enthusiast and Etiquette Apedia
editor Marra Graber lays out how absolutely claustrophobic the system

(01:03:40):
was by Louis the fifteenth reign quote. At the palace,
the courtiers lived under the despotic surveillance of the king,
and upon their good behavior, their deference, and their observance
of etiquette, their whole careers depended. If you displeased a Louis,
he would simply not see you the following day, his
gaze would pass over you as he surveyed the people
before him, and not being seen by the King was

(01:04:02):
tantamount to ceasing to count. At Versailles, a whole timetable
of ceremonies followed, much of it revolving around the King's
own person. Intimacy with Louis meant power and power was
symbolically expressed and attending to certain of the king's most
private and physical needs, handing him his stockings to put
on in the morning, being present as he used like
the bathroom, right rushing when the signal sounded, to be

(01:04:24):
present as he got ready for bed. It mattered desperately.
What closeness did the king allowed you, whether he spoke
to you in front of whom, and for how long.
The point about Versailles was that there was no escape.
The courtiers had to make it where they were. The
stage was the Louis, and the rules and the roles
that could be played were designed by him. It was
up to each courtier to fit him or herself into

(01:04:44):
one of the slots provided. The leaders of all the
other towns and villages of France were made largely through
the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudeness and
judicious sliding by the tax collecting intendants to feel their subordination,
their distance from the court. That's a good system of government.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
Yeah sounds it feels like you just live in this
constant state of paranoia. It reminds me of like the
death of Stalin as well. Yes, just like apologizing to
people or like not apologizing because that emits guiled.

Speaker 2 (01:05:16):
Whenever you have an absolute monarchy, right and again, you
know Stalin Stalin's Russia isn't technically a monarchy, but it's
you've got it's an absolute dictatorship that they're all more
similar than they all are different. And anytime you have
one that's this absolute, it it's it is a cult
at the top, right, Yeah, because everything surrounding the ruler

(01:05:38):
has to be both an altered reality, because there's certain
things he refuses to see and does not have to
be aware of. Right, Yeah, it's pretty good. I'm glad
that doesn't happen now to people like, for example, the
president or billionaires. I'm glad billionaires don't also live in
their own functionally isolated realities where they they have no

(01:06:00):
real contact with the world and no one ever argues
them with them or tells them their ideas are bad,
and every moment of their lives is them getting exactly
what they want at any given moment. That obviously does
not cause them the kind of brain damage that all
of the kings of France got before the Revolution of
seventeen eighty nine.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Yeah, of course, I mean what I'm like, totally differ
So don't have like CEOs of public companies like this.

Speaker 2 (01:06:23):
No, just like bench capitalist. This doesn't happen to every
rich guy. Right, every rich guy doesn't have his own Versailles.
You know that would be crazy. They wish it, almost
wishes they'd all be insane. Anyway, let's read about the
town in Texas he owns now? Anyway? Yeah, school or
the school. Now. The one method that out of favor

(01:06:45):
or distant nobles and wealthy business owners had of getting
the King's attention outside of cutting through this Gordian out
of palace etiquette, was to get a story true or libelous,
to go viral among the popular media. I talk right,
I talked post Yeah, they're posters. Yeah. As time went on,
when more nobles, certain nobles start hosting, some of them

(01:07:06):
host printing presses, others host basically bookstores for these libels.
These books that are like unauthorized biographies of the king
or his minister or his mistress. Right, and these are
full sized books, but they're usually take it. They're cobbled
together from day's worth of notes like taken at the
Tree of Crackou and from reports sent on the sly

(01:07:27):
By Versailles regulars. Right, people will compile these all into
books that are like you know that guy, what's his name,
the dude who's written like a couple of books about
the inside of the Trump administration, Michael Wolf. Yes, that's
he's doing labels right where some of what sent them's true,
some of what's in them bullshit, nobody ever really knows.

(01:07:49):
But they're these books that are meant to be slanderous
and popular among the masses by giving you, like the
gory details from inside in the lives of these people
who are of all the power, right, and these are
illegal to be sold in France, but certain nobles who
have big properties in France will let people sell books

(01:08:10):
or newsletters there and then the police can't raid them, right,
because that's the Duke's house or whatever. Effectively, so the
other major thing that I haven't talked about yet that
is honestly maybe the number one way in which a
lot of gossip gets out. And this is again it's
effectively like we've talked about, how like the salons and stuff,

(01:08:33):
these cafes where we will take their notes from you know,
the morning newsmonger speeches. That's like Twitter and Facebook, the
TikTok of the day, the songs popular songs. There's a
couple of there's a dozen or more different melodies that
people regularly just rewrite new lyrics for, And so everybody
knows all these melodies, and on a daily basis new

(01:08:55):
versions of the song. You'll hear someone singing it at
the market, You'll start sing it. They'll go viral among
the whole city, and a lot of gossip and news
gets out this way. This is again effectively like the
TikTok of its day. One explanation at the time, this
is a contemporary writer talking about this kind of weird
musical culture in Paris described it this way. A dastardly
courtier puts them slanderous rumors into rhyming couplets, and by

(01:09:19):
means of lowly servants, has then planted in market stalls
and street stands. From the markets there passed on to artisans,
who in turn relay them back to the nobleman who
had composed them, and who, without losing a moment, take
off for a meeting place in the Palace of Versailles
and whisper to one another in a tone of consummate hypocrisy.
Have you read them?

Speaker 3 (01:09:38):
Here?

Speaker 2 (01:09:38):
They are They're circulating among the common people of Paris.
Know this is not just song, but a lot of
it does come in the form of like these rhyming
little couplets. Right now. In Louis the fifteenth reign, the
most popular of these songs, gossip songs, were about his mistresses,
because he was the kind of king who was seen
by his wife as little as possible, and by the

(01:10:01):
mid seventeen hundreds this had reached a fever pitch of unpopularity. Again,
anknown adulterer couldn't receive the sacrament, and when the king
got seriously ill, which happened with some regularity given how
disease spread at Versailles, he would have to dismiss his
mistress in order to take communion. Right this happened in
seventeen forty four, and when it's generally accepted, you dismiss

(01:10:24):
your mistress, then you're good with God again. You can
go to heaven if you die. But if you dismiss
her and you get better, you're not supposed to take
her back. Right at most, you're supposed to find a
new mistress. But Louis the fifteenth got really attached to
his mistresses, and so he takes this lady back, and
that scandalizes the people, and it pisses off the church.

(01:10:45):
And the big part of why people are pissed about
this is that they see this as having a major
impact on public health, because it's this very fun belief.
At the time, it was widely believed that when he
was made the king, the king gained the magical power
that was known as the royal touch, right, And so

(01:11:06):
a king, by touching you could cure what was called
the king's disease, which was scrofula. Now scrofula is a
kind of tuberculosis, right, and it's a kind of thing
that spreads a lot in society where people don't wash
their fucking hands. And the understanding is that when the
king ascends, he gets the power to cure scrofula by
touching people, but he loses it if God's not happy

(01:11:29):
with him, right. And the practical issue here is that
once a year at Eastern mass the king would go
to Paris and a huge all of everyone with scrofula
would line up and he would touch them all, right,
And obviously this presents there's some danger of the king
getting sick from this, right, But this also provides them

(01:11:52):
with a degree of safety because every year a huge
number of like the poor people in Paris make direct
contact with the king in a way where they see
him as saving them. Can you think of how that
protect the king from the mob?

Speaker 3 (01:12:07):
Right, regardless whether they're actually here healed of their scropula
or whatever, like.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
That matters less than everyone sees the king is a
part of our public health system. And also he is
coming on he helps me directly. I'm not going to
murder the king, you know, why would I do that? Right?
But Louis the fifteenth loses this power, and so he
stops going to these eastern masses and touching people, and

(01:12:36):
it cuts off a very important connection between the crowned
line and the masses in Paris. Right, this is going
to contribute to revolutionary conditions. Again, all these are just
like pieces of why this happens. But the fact that
the king is under Louis the fifteenth, what contact the king?
You know, Louis the fourteenth already had reduced significantly. By

(01:12:59):
moving out of pair Ris, the King's contact with regular people.
Louis the fifteenth cuts off one of the last vestiges
of that because he won't stop fucking his mistresses and
he gets canceled by the church. Another issue is that
the church threatens to take away because he won't stop
fucking his mistresses. The church threatens to take away the

(01:13:19):
Jubilee in seventeen fifty every twenty five years, the church
would forgive everyone in France's sins, right, so you don't
have to pay, You don't have to It's like a
big deal, right, and the king of it. They don't
ultimately go through with this. The church, the king is
able to lean on them, but for a long time,
everyone thinks that the King has cost them the Jubilee

(01:13:40):
because he can't keep his dick in his pants. And
that makes them very angry, right right, Like this isn't
just them being judgmental. They are seeing significant public health costs.
That's how we're going to hell. People are gonna go
to hell over here, man, what the fuck? And the
popular media goes nuts about this rumor. As Robert Darton writes,

(01:14:04):
one novelist published a letter from a correspondent who vilified
Louis for depriving his people of the jubilee. It is
monstrous that all of French should be deprived of it
because the king, by his own fault, is not in
a state of to receive this grace. The general resentment
was expressed by some of the crudest poems Lewis the
Badly Loved, make your Jubilee, give up your whoreor Madame

(01:14:25):
le pompadour and give us bread. Oh this is one
of those songs, right, it sounds better in the original French,
but not when I say it. Yeah, no, and you
don't have the French. I don't have the French gene. No,
but yeah, this is like popular songs. Honestly, they're like, yeah,
I describe it as TikTok. You might even describe it

(01:14:46):
as like punk rock in the eighties, right, these like
songs people are singing about this kind of criticizing power.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
It is very culturally, very cool that there's like this
weird like cottage journalism industry and this weird.

Speaker 2 (01:14:56):
Like this this trash shit. Yeah, this is It is
interesting that you can almost look at this as like
a common point of origin for like journalism, hip hop,
punk rock, and TikTok. Right, Yeah, fucking the king and
Versailles not being able to keep his dick in his pants. Yeah, yeah,

(01:15:18):
So what we see throughout Louis the fifteenth reign is
a king whose decisions, and some of his decisions are good,
constantly drive a wedge between him and everyone outside of
Versailles because of the media ecosystem, which at this point
has grown to be entirely like predicated on critiquing the
king and his nobles. Right, and to everyone's surprise, what's

(01:15:41):
happened here is without anyone meaning for this to evolve
this way, This emergent media ecosystem has created a check
on the king's absolute power. As a Parisian comedian Nicholas
Chamfort said, France is quote an absolute monarchy tempered by songs.

Speaker 3 (01:16:01):
That is actually that is actually very love fucking awesome
here and the controlling animal house.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Yeah over here is people making up means songs about
him like.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
That's what in fact, that he was too horny. I
guess he was right the level horny.

Speaker 2 (01:16:21):
Kendrick's like obliquely ship talking Trump through his presentation at
the super Bowl, Right, It's in some ways it hasn't changed.
It's just always been understood that if you are good
enough at music, no dictator will be brave enough to
kill you. Yeah, this is why Billy Joel was allowed

(01:16:42):
to go to the USSR. You know the power of
the piano man.

Speaker 3 (01:16:47):
And why Stephen Sgal is fine as well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:49):
Is right, is right? Is very safe? Uh everywhere music
is great music. When he went to war uh Louis
the fifteenth and seventh teen forty alongside the Austrians against
an alliance of British people, Hessians, Hanovarians and the hated Dutch,
there was a vicious battle near the village of Lawfeld.
In real terms, it was a tactical victory for France.

(01:17:13):
They take the village, but either a strategic defeat or
at best to draw because they lose so many men
taking this town they can't continue the offensive that they
had intended in support of the Austrians. That said, they
do take the town, so the king declares it a victory.
But the newspapers, and again all of the newspapers that

(01:17:34):
get into France are printed in Amsterdam, who are fighting
against the king. The King sends back his messengers to
declare victory in Paris. The newspapers that arrive at the
same time all say France lost the battle. Right police
spies informed the government. Hey, most of the media says,
we actually lost this, and it's kind of generating unrest.

(01:17:57):
An effort gets made, this distribute counter propaganda. But it's
like when the government tries to make tiktoks, right, nobody
like that. Like the police aren't good at making songs.

Speaker 7 (01:18:08):
People want to sing, you know, I wonder what the
police songs were like. No, they must have sucked as
they did not slap. It was literally the police. This
is this is, this is where Sting gets his start.
Very horny guy as well, so very horny man as well.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
He would have fit in. So Now by this point, again,
this this modern ecosystem had largely a lot of it
had developed as a way to keep abreast with palace gossip.
But at this point it pivots, you know, and it
pivots to This is almost the first time where you
see something like a modern ecosystem obsessing over a major

(01:18:52):
world war in media res right in the same way
people did about like the Gulf War or or you know,
more recently the expanded judging the government well and judging
the government for it. The government has this is a
very rare thing and it's really kind of what. I
don't know if it's the first time this has happened,
but I don't know that it's ever happened before on

(01:19:13):
this scale, where the absolute monarchy completely loses control of
the information coming out of a conflict on foreign soil. Right,
that's a big deal. And this war, the War of
Austrian Succession, it's one of a number of wars that
that some historians will argue should be counted as the
first real World War. I don't care to get into

(01:19:35):
that argument, but this is a massive conflict, right right,
And the fact that the government of France has completely
lost control due to the independent media is incredibly noteworthy.
I want to quote again from that book. Reports of
the overseas warfare appeared, and the gazettes and the Cafe
Sophisticates discussed them, but most Parisians, if they followed foreign

(01:19:57):
affairs at all, concentrated on the fighting nearby and the
low countries where Martial de Sachs scored his victories. They
were appalled. Therefore, as soon as they learned about the
preliminaries to the peace, to discover that Louis the fifteenth
had agreed to return everything France had won at such
expense and suffering. In exchange, he received virtually nothing he'd

(01:20:17):
got back Louisbourg, a fortress on the Cape Breton Island,
while he surrendered Madras, a greater prize to the British.
To ordinary Parisians with an uncertain grasp of geography, the
global readjustment and the balance of power, insofar as they
were aware of it, mattered less than the sacrifice of
the fortresses in Flanders. Most Parisians, moreover, experienced the war
as hardship inflicted on their daily lives in the form

(01:20:39):
of increased taxes, scarcer goods, and higher prices. The Dixim,
a special tax levied since seventeen forty one to support
the war, fell on virtually all revenue, although the clergy
negotiated an exemption. Salaries were exempt, so laborers did not
suffer directly. But the Dixem was a bitter blow to rentiers, merchants,
artisans and shopkeepers. So there's both this this thing that

(01:21:06):
in an earlier era the king would have been able
to spend as we've got a piece. We forced a
piece on them after all these victories, and that's kind
of what I would have gotten out Instead, there's all
this reporting on everything that France is giving up in
the piece because the Dutch have a vested interest in
that information getting out to the people of France because
it and it's being printed over too, yes, and it's
being printed over there too, and so people gain a

(01:21:30):
real understanding of the fact that oh, no, no, we're
being lied to about this war that has fucked up
my life. You know, I'm paying a lot more in
taxes because of this, and we just gave everything up
what my son died. You know.

Speaker 3 (01:21:42):
It's two very different ecosystems, media ecosystems as well, because
you've got the internal palace intrigue quite literally, yeah, which
is controlling the nobles with this weird system of rules sotalia.

Speaker 2 (01:21:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:21:53):
And then but they've shown no interest for actually controlling
the real problem, like the real the independent media that's
bucking the rosses off.

Speaker 2 (01:22:01):
No, because like the king is, he's monitoring everyone's male right.
When they send out gossip, they have to be very
secret about it. People get punished for this. So inside
the palace it's as close to a totalitarian state as
it can be. And then in Paris it's like a
very free media environment. Even though this is all technically illegal,

(01:22:21):
everything is getting out.

Speaker 3 (01:22:24):
Yeah, it's probably because there's so much shit that they
do with inviside that they can't control it at this point.

Speaker 2 (01:22:28):
Well yeah, and they don't. They're not really as aware
because they have no connection to Paris really, right, the
most of the nobility and certainly not the king. So
the dic same pisses off a lot of people in
the bourgeoisie. There's another tax that just everyone has to pay,
which is kind of Louis the fifteenth. He was because
the nobles were subject to it too, so you could

(01:22:50):
see it as him trying to modernize and make things fairer.
But it just creates more anger and unrest because it's
just another tax. He also puts through tariffs on consumer goods.
Prices for the necessities of life start to surge to
an unsustainable level. There are bread riots, you know, people
are starving. In order to try and mitigate this. When
the war finally ends, the king orders two days of

(01:23:12):
celebration and the crown provides a feast like food and
wine all you can eat for two days for the
little people of Paris. Right, So there's a massive party
and this is the kind of thing in the past
that would have got everybody back to being fans of
the king, right, but people know everything that went on
behind the scenes, and so for the first time, when

(01:23:34):
the king goes through Paris on like his victory march,
people don't during this massive party where they're all getting
free food and booze, no one shouts vive le roi.
Nobody shouts like long live the King right right, It's
like commoners refuse to do this, and popular gossip notes
that women in the market start arguing, like making fun

(01:23:55):
of each other by saying, you are as stupid as
the peace right. It's become this rule. It's a calamity
for them for the crown. A dozen people are also
crushed to death during a fireworks display due to a
bottleneck in the streets, and this is reported on massively right.
People talk about this all that like constantly. It is

(01:24:17):
like a massive topic of discussion in the media, and
every mistake, every attendant death, and all of the suffering
of the masses, every bad thing that happens adds to
the crush of a hostile papers, books and songs attacking
the regime, and rather than trying to deal with any
of this or trying to directly engage with the people.
Louis the fifteenth largely responds to a hostile public by

(01:24:39):
drawing inwards and retreating to Versailles. After the failed celebrations
of seventeen forty eight, the king avoids the capital. In
seventeen forty nine and seventeen fifty he doesn't go there
at all. Rumors spread through songs, through small papers and
newsmongers that he fears sparking a riot, and so people
really start talking for the first time, is the case

(01:25:00):
scared of the mob? Do we maybe as a group
of angry people in Paris have power to threaten the monarchy?
This is when people really start talking about that. You know,
this is an important step on the road to seventeen
eighty nine, right, Yeah, in mid seventeen, Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:25:20):
They just lost control of everything they did. They they
didn't really, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:25:24):
They're starting to again. They get another forty years before
this all falls, right, But these are important idea If
this marinating isn't brilliant, Yes, it takes a while for
this to marinate, and this is part of like what
leads things to collapse. In mid seventeen forty nine, a
major government minister is brought down by a song. The

(01:25:46):
victim is Compte de Moripas, who was the king's most
powerful minister. He's a close friend to the king and
he is like his basically his number one advisor, right,
And one day the king retires, you know, he doesn't
always like to be surrounded the crowd, so he goes
to his royal bedchambers with his mistress, Madame de Pompadour,
and her cousin Madame de'estrade and the Comte de morrepass

(01:26:09):
And I think they're all kind of fucking right, Like
I don't know, yeah, or at least they're both fucking
at the same time. Over the course of the night,
Madame Pompadour hands out wyatt white hyacinths as gifts, and
this private moment hits the streets of Paris days later,
set to the tune of a popular love song by
your Noble and free manner Iris. You enchant our hearts

(01:26:31):
on our path. You strew flowers, but they are white flowers,
And that doesn't seem super scandalous, right It is, though,
because the word for flower is very similar to a
colloquial term for vaginal discharge. And what this song is
saying is that the King's mistress spread VD and this

(01:26:52):
priort private moment in the royal chambers, she got that.
That's what the white flowers are like, white vaginal this charge. Right,
It's it's like she's she had an STD and she
spread it to the king in Moropaus. Right, that's kind
of what the song is a legend. I don't know,
I don't think that's actually what happened, because that's what
the song is like, yeah, go through well, and here's

(01:27:15):
the big thing. There are four people in the room
when this happens, right, And that was what I was thinking, like,
write this, well, it's Moropas, right, is the compt de Maropaus?
Because obviously the King's mistress isn't gonna lake this. Her
cousin's unlikely to sure shit, not the king, right. And
what makes this even more obvious is that Moropaus is

(01:27:37):
a famous and beloved popular songwriter, and he had four
years used music to launder gossip and attacks on his
enemies at Versailles into Paris, and in fact, a lot
of the a lot of what we have from this
period from this aspect of culture. These like popular political
like like slander songs are ones that Maropaus wrote. Forty

(01:28:01):
five volumes of his lyrics survived to this day.

Speaker 3 (01:28:04):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (01:28:05):
So this guy was prolific, right again, Yeah, and so
when this thing that four people are for leaks out
in song form, everyone immediately know like, this has to
be you, right, Marapas he had tried to spread this
verse to damage the king's mistress because he was closer
to the queen. Right, This whole thing had been I

(01:28:26):
want to like separate her from the king. But this
blows up because he's very sloppy about how he does it,
and he tries to blame the whole debacle on Marshall Richelieu,
who's one of his rivals. But Richelieu figures out what's
going on and tells the king. As Darton writes, this
version of Marpas's fall owed a great deal to the
rumor mill of the court and the baroque character of

(01:28:47):
politics in Versailles. Parisians, who had little contact with that
alien world, could not be certain about what lay behind
Maropas's fall, but they knew that songs precipitated it, and
that the result was a realignment of power, and so
kind of by this period, you know, seventeen forty nine,
you've got the king has gotten scared out of Paris

(01:29:09):
by the mob, and now people have realized that like
these songs, these like popular this popular media has the
ability to uproot and force government ministers out of their office.
Right in addition to this, you've created this permanent because
of how negative a lot of this media is, this
really permanent breach between the crown and the people. In

(01:29:31):
seventeen fifty one, the King's attempts a return to Paris.
He goes to a mass at Notre Dame and as
he rides in the crowd around him maintains near total silence,
an experience so upsetting that Louis the fifteenth has a
road built so he can avoid Paris in the future
when traveling to his various properties. And by this point
seventeen fifty one, the roth that's going to lead to

(01:29:55):
the revolution is probably terminal. Right, there's almost certainly no
because this system that the next king is going to
come up in, that is going to continue governing, is
like it can't do anything but make this system worse.
By its nature, it feeds this media ecosystem that is
so toxic to the crown. By its nature, it creates

(01:30:16):
a ruling class who has no contact or understanding with
regular people and who will constantly fuck them over and
over order to pay and afford keeping their fancy party
house going. Right, all of this, all of this has
happened by seventeen fifty one.

Speaker 3 (01:30:31):
No, it's people everything about it, and they know people well,
they constantly yes, and what they know about it is
just told in the most scandalous, ridiculous way.

Speaker 2 (01:30:40):
Very a lot of it's yeah, yeah, a lot of
it's also told in catchy songs. It's cold and catchy songs.
They're gonna be catchy songs about like Marie Antoinette being
a spy for her home in Austria and she's not.
There's a lot of valid critiques of Marie Antoinette, but
she like legitimately did not do any of the things
her family wanted her to do in turn of like
influencing France to be pro Austria. Like they were constantly

(01:31:04):
pissed at her, but it didn't matter in terms of
her unpopularity because the mob was convinced and the popular
media was convinced that she was effectively a spy. Right, yeah, well, probably.

Speaker 3 (01:31:16):
Good for this one, but not good for now when
good things.

Speaker 2 (01:31:19):
Happen, yeah, you know, it's it's we'll see again. This
all moved. The media moved pretty fast in Paris of
this day, but not as fast as it works today.
And I guess if I have a hopeful thing in
terms of you know, these v are are modern day
people attempting to make an aristocracy or you know, honestly

(01:31:40):
trying to make a monarchy with themselves as the Crat's
what Curtis Yarvin and the like one. They want to
be nobles in this new hereditary order under CEO kings,
and things move faster now, and the same dynamics that
caused every thing to fall apart for the people running

(01:32:02):
Versailles are human dynamics. And these people, I think are
convinced that they can force that out of us by
taking control of social media, you know, by breeding it
out of people or whatever. I don't think that they can.

Speaker 7 (01:32:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:32:19):
In fact, the very dynamics discussed in this these episodes
is kind of suggesting why they can't, because people will
just eventually go what the fuck?

Speaker 2 (01:32:27):
Yeah, Yeah, there's there's more to talk about. We may
do you know soon episodes on you know, kind of
the end of this process and what happens with Marie
Antoinette and her husband. Louis the sixteenth is also interesting.
They're just not really bastards in the same way that
Louis the fifteenth and fourteenth are right, right, Like, they

(01:32:48):
make a lot of mistakes, and they do do some
like they do do bad things right like every king
and queen does. But these guys are why the system
had pissed people off so much that those two needed
to lose their heads, right. The terror is largely fueled
by the ship that had by the ship that Louis

(01:33:08):
the fourteenth creates at Versailles, and that Louis the fifteenth perpetuates,
right Like, that's all of that anger gets built up
as a result of that period of time, and you
know that's cool.

Speaker 3 (01:33:22):
Yeah, seems like it ended well for everyone involved.

Speaker 2 (01:33:26):
It doesn't it ends great for everyone. Louis the fourteenth,
how do he collp it just disaus uh oh Louis, No,
he gets some he gets a small box. Oh okay, yeah,
he gets a small box. He has to send away
his mistress, but he's like in his seventies. No, yeah,
he also reigns a crazy lung. He reigns for decades. Again,

(01:33:48):
this whole period like is like there's more than a
century of Versailles, even though there's only like three kings, right,
so it lasts a while. It just isn't you know
by I think by probably like seventeen forty nine to
seventeen fifty one, somewhere around then. I think the revolution

(01:34:10):
was inevitable. There was all There was probably no way
just functionally because I don't think Versailles, I think Versite.
Among other things, the fact that it was so ossified
by this point it was incapable of changing. Right, how
do you feel any of reform things. You're spending all
your time worrying about who's holding your shirt as the kids,

(01:34:31):
You have very little time to fix the way the
government works, right Yeah, yeah, the Napkin situation is really
bogging you down by this point. And again, all of
this was around how the government was run too. Yeah,
very good, exactly, Jesus, yep, it's great.

Speaker 3 (01:34:50):
Christ three times on this show now, and every time
you find a new freak, oh series of freaks.

Speaker 2 (01:34:56):
The freak Collection because Duo of Freaks. That's that's the show.

Speaker 1 (01:35:01):
That's the podcasta Ed, you have a podcast, I do it.

Speaker 3 (01:35:07):
It's called Better Offline. Got a betrofline dot com? Emailing
me easy at better better off line dot com. If
you hate me or love me, ideally the latter. And
if you want to set up a bizarre series of
rules that I will make you live by, go to
our reddit, which is our slash bet off line. We're
already working on a Vasai like system there.

Speaker 2 (01:35:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so I check that out. You know,
when finally when he when he lives, When when Ed
lives completely surrounded by the nobility of France, that's when
podcasts and we'll finally reach its apex oh wait.

Speaker 1 (01:35:46):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 4 (01:35:59):
Behind the Bastards you're now available on YouTube, new episodes
every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel YouTube dot
com slash at Behind the Bastards