Speaker 1: Also media.
Speaker 2: Ah, we're back, and you know we're talking about Versailles,
Speaker 2: me and my friend ed Edward Zitron. I've never called Edward.
Speaker 2: It feels wrong. It's mostly what my mother calls me.
Speaker 3: When I've done something like Edward Edward Benjamin Zitron. That's
Speaker 3: when I know I'm in real trouble.
Speaker 2: Edward Benjamin Zitron.
Speaker 3: That's when the that's that's yeah, that's that's when I'm about.
Speaker 2: To really do that. Yeah, I feel like I need
Speaker 2: to punish you for something. Just hearing that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's exactly it.
Speaker 2: It's the punishment phrase. So ed a better offline. We're
Speaker 2: talking about Versailles and the weird culture of oligarchy. Well
Speaker 2: it wasn't. I mean, it's an aristocracy, but whatever. Like,
Speaker 2: we're talking about this weird subculture that Louis the fourteenth creator.
Speaker 4: During that during that break between recording episodes, neither of
Speaker 4: you peede right because I'm not okay with that.
Speaker 2: I I pissed, behead you, behead you. It's done. Fortress.
Speaker 2: Honestly though, it'd be pretty cool if I just got
Speaker 2: to live in a fortress forever. I would not mind
Speaker 2: a nice fortress stead. But don't pee as long as
Speaker 2: it's all the time.
Speaker 3: I drink so many diet cokes I would be beheaded.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you would not have lasted a minute in verse
Speaker 2: I me, I'm great at holding my pe. I'd have
Speaker 2: been the fucking king's best friend. We'd have gotten wasted together.
Speaker 2: We'd have been gambling. It is funny to me that
Speaker 2: like all of these royal well every night gambling, constantly
Speaker 2: losing and making fortunes, like while the country. A big
Speaker 2: part of like why people get increasingly angry in the
Speaker 2: period from here up to seventeen eighty nine when the
Speaker 2: revolution happens, is like every day in these like newspapers
Speaker 2: that are getting smuggled into France and you know these
Speaker 2: other different like kind of news delivering methods. We'll talk
Speaker 2: about that whole news ecosystem in Paris in a little bit.
Speaker 2: But every day people are reading stories about like who
Speaker 2: lost how much money? And Versailles. So they're like, oh,
Speaker 2: the price of bread just tripled, my family's going to
Speaker 2: starve and die. And the Duke de Orleone gambled away
Speaker 2: seven hundred thousand livres like just burnt it for nothing.
Speaker 2: Kind of pissed about that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, no, it's the case, may.
Speaker 2: Be, yeah right, I would dare not be pissed about
Speaker 2: it in front of the King. You know, the fact
Speaker 2: that gambling is absolutely central to the culture of this
Speaker 2: leadership caste, who all live at Versailles with the King.
Speaker 2: I can't not think about crypto and how central that
Speaker 2: is to the people who are trying to make themselves
Speaker 2: the new the American nobility, right, who want to be
Speaker 2: our hereditary aristocracy that rules things, and how they spend
Speaker 2: most of their time and money gambling on crypto. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 2: I don't know, interesting interesting history, yes, yes, and they
Speaker 2: even have their own you know, they've got mar A Lago,
Speaker 2: which Trump clearly wants to be a sort of Versailles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he lacks the atrocity gene, true, like I'm sure
Speaker 3: he would love to do one, but like he lacks
Speaker 3: the killer instinct of these perverts.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, he did not have to literally fight a
Speaker 2: series of wars in over to get where order to
Speaker 2: get where he is, which again, that's consistently the best
Speaker 2: thing we have going for us.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's the same as like, well, at least this generation
Speaker 2: of fascists didn't all spend four years fighting in close
Speaker 2: quarters in trenches. You know that said neither did we.
Speaker 2: So the social constitution of Versailles took a lot from
Speaker 2: its founder, which meant that the whole place was a
Speaker 2: huge adultery club all the time. There's a great story
Speaker 2: in Nancy Mitford's book that might be apocryphal, but it
Speaker 2: tells of a high ranking noble returning home early from
Speaker 2: a trip abroad to find his wife in bed with
Speaker 2: her lover, and he apologized to both of them. He
Speaker 2: was like, oh my god, I didn't warn you I'd
Speaker 2: come home early. Of course you're fucking some dude. Oh
Speaker 2: my god, I am so embarrassed. This is on me.
Speaker 2: You know, it's not Poland, yeah, it's like Portland completely
Speaker 2: my bad.
Speaker 3: You should apologize.
Speaker 2: Oh rude. The normalization of this behavior among the ruling
Speaker 2: class contributed to a growing break with the bourgeoisie in
Speaker 2: the working class of France, because while these nobles who
Speaker 2: are living together, they don't really most of them. There
Speaker 2: are conflicts that emerge, but most of them aren't super
Speaker 2: judgmental about adultery, right, It is just kind of considered
Speaker 2: something you do. The working class and most of the
Speaker 2: bourgeoisie are extremely Catholic and they are not okay with this.
Speaker 2: And again, as more of this stuff leaks and gets
Speaker 2: leaked out, right, if you want to, if you are
Speaker 2: politically opposed to Madame de montespan right or whichever of
Speaker 2: the King's lovers, you leak out stories of her doing
Speaker 2: fucked up shit, you know, gambling irresponsibly, being drunk, sleeping
Speaker 2: around on the king right, or whatever, and that both
Speaker 2: makes the king look bad and it makes the King
Speaker 2: more likely to send her away right right.
Speaker 3: And because the peasantry would get morally offended, well, I mean,
Speaker 3: that's kind of a by product, right.
Speaker 2: The reason why you, as a noble at Versailles, are
Speaker 2: leaking out stories about her is you want to hurt
Speaker 2: her position, right, And the stories will get out into
Speaker 2: the press, and then the police will find out that
Speaker 2: peasants are talking about this and bourgeoisiser talking about this.
Speaker 2: They'll bring that story back to the King and then
Speaker 2: he'll know that he's been embarrassed. And so your goal
Speaker 2: is a noble leaking that is to influence that situation.
Speaker 2: But the byproduct of this is that the peasantry and
Speaker 2: the like the regular people of France are constantly hearing
Speaker 2: about how the king is sleeping around and not being
Speaker 2: a good Catholic, and that makes them increasingly angry and
Speaker 2: disaffected from the monarchy. This is a process that occurs
Speaker 2: over like a century, but this, the sheer weight of
Speaker 2: all these stories, changes completely how regular people think about
Speaker 2: their rulers, right, in a way that is very negative
Speaker 2: and that contributes to the growth of revolutionary sentiment. Right,
Speaker 2: it's a part of it, you know. So this whole
Speaker 2: process gets really escalated when Madame DeMont Span succeeds in
Speaker 2: using magic to win the king over as her lover. Now,
Speaker 2: Madame de Montespand had a husband, and in most cases,
Speaker 2: when the king fucks your wife, you're cool with it.
Speaker 2: For one thing. As a noble you are rarely married
Speaker 2: for love. Right. You got married with this lady because
Speaker 2: of a money thing, because of a political alliance. So like,
Speaker 2: you don't really care who she fucks as long as
Speaker 2: you're able to fuck who you like. Right. This is
Speaker 2: not the case with Madame de Montespan's wife and the king.
Speaker 2: Normally his thing is like to the husband, Hey, here
Speaker 2: have a couple of privileges. You you get all the
Speaker 2: tax money from this specific and it's something king, yes,
Speaker 2: oh yes, you get very well rewarded. Right. And it's
Speaker 2: also there's no shame in being cucked by the king, right,
Speaker 2: he's the king, you know, like it's kind of a
Speaker 2: bragging point of like, yeah, my wife is shtup in
Speaker 2: the king. Now I get all of the taxes paid
Speaker 2: on you know, fine leather work in Normandy or whatever,
Speaker 2: you know. But this guy felt differently. And his uncle
Speaker 2: was the Archbishop of Sins, right, so his uncle is
Speaker 2: a high ranking member of the Catholic clergy. This guy's
Speaker 2: pissed that the king is fucking his wife, and so
Speaker 2: the archbishop his uncle, in order to punish the king,
Speaker 2: finds a different married woman in his bishopric who's cheating
Speaker 2: on her husband, and he makes her do public penance. Right,
Speaker 2: He like puts her in public and punishes her, and
Speaker 2: he posts public warnings about the sin of adultery. Now, again,
Speaker 2: there's no free press in France, but numerous French papers
Speaker 2: and pamphlets are printed in Amsterdam or the Hague and
Speaker 2: sent across and the population is generally aware of what's
Speaker 2: going on. As a result, the scandal peters out. Eventually
Speaker 2: largely because the son king refuses to give a shit
Speaker 2: about it or stop traveling around with his wife, his
Speaker 2: pregnant former mistress, and his new mistress all in this
Speaker 2: shit same carriage. There's a very funny moment where they're
Speaker 2: all like traveling to the front together one day after
Speaker 2: they work out their differences and get along, and some
Speaker 2: of the soldiers they pass are like, I just saw
Speaker 2: the king and the three queens of France.
Speaker 3: Damn Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the fact they're alive. Will we're allowed to live? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I don't know the rest of that thirty one year
Speaker 2: old life. Yeah, right now. Speaking of which, travel in
Speaker 2: the king's carriage was one of the great honors the
Speaker 2: Versailles set competed over whenever he went on a trip.
Speaker 2: If he picked you to travel with him, that's a
Speaker 2: big deal, right, You've like won a major win. But
Speaker 2: it's also miserable. As Mitford writes, these journeys, except for
Speaker 2: the prestige they gave, were a real torment to his
Speaker 2: companions and the coldest weather, all the windows had to
Speaker 2: be kept open, as he could not bear stuffiness. The
Speaker 2: ladies were expected to be merry eat a great deal.
Speaker 2: He hated people to refuse food and to have no
Speaker 2: physical needs that would force them to leave the coach,
Speaker 2: and they hit, no, they can't do it any just
Speaker 2: if by any chance they were taken ill, fainted, or
Speaker 2: felt sick, they could expect no sympathy. On the contrary,
Speaker 2: Disfavor said it, he's such a freak. Louis the fourteenth
Speaker 2: had no sympathy for his pregnant mistresses either. He's going
Speaker 2: to get you pregnant, and he's going to take care
Speaker 2: of his bastard kids. He pays for them, He pays
Speaker 2: for them well, they live very well, and he's like
Speaker 2: the treats the kids reasonably nice. He hates pregnancy, so
Speaker 2: his mistresses, when he gets them pregnant, are ordered to
Speaker 2: hide their condition from him and the like. It's understood,
Speaker 2: if you get pregnant, you need to not tell me.
Speaker 2: You need to do everything you can to hide it,
Speaker 2: and you need to have the kid quietly and then
Speaker 2: smuggle it out of the palace into the hands of
Speaker 2: some common maid or a poor noble or someone who
Speaker 2: I will pay them to raise this kid. Right, So
Speaker 2: does this guy like every nine months or so, just
Speaker 2: find out he has a you child yes, Oh, okay,
Speaker 2: you basically Louis the fourteenth Life. Yeah, I'm kids crazy,
Speaker 2: another kid, Okay, some money, pay some random lady to
Speaker 2: take care of it. I don't want to hear about
Speaker 2: it though. Yeah, there's just one weird story. There's this
Speaker 2: lady who he like. He like, pays her to take
Speaker 2: care of one of his bastards because he hates her
Speaker 2: and he wants her away from Versailles. And then the
Speaker 2: kid dies immediately, and she's so sad about it that
Speaker 2: he starts to like her, and he's like, oh, you
Speaker 2: know what, then she got sad when my kid died.
Speaker 2: Now I think she's cool. He is, He's a weird
Speaker 2: he's nothing like then nothing would. Yeah. In general, one
Speaker 2: thing you are struck by reading about Versailles under the
Speaker 2: Sun King is that everyone lives in constant terror of
Speaker 2: pissing this one dude off. One of his courtiers who
Speaker 2: never quite made it to the inner circle later said falseness, servility,
Speaker 2: admiring glances, combined with a dependent and cringing attitude above
Speaker 2: all in appearance of being nothing without him, were the
Speaker 2: only means of pleasing him. Cool dad to hang out with.
Speaker 3: Hey, I'm joining my my economy ruining house.
Speaker 2: It would be miserable. It's built up bones and costs
Speaker 2: half of France to run.
Speaker 3: The Twilight Zone episode about this with like a child.
Speaker 2: Sounds horrifying. This sounds great for him. Yeah, yeah, now
Speaker 2: the end. Oh, I don't know that we have a
Speaker 2: full idea, but a bunch a bunch of bastards and
Speaker 2: some legit kids, okay, Now, a displeased king could be
Speaker 2: a terrifying thing. A representative story came when a group
Speaker 2: of the King's friends got lost hunting one day. They
Speaker 2: stumbled upon a cabin twenty miles or so from Versailles,
Speaker 2: and the old man who lived there took them in
Speaker 2: and fed them right. During a conversation while they're having
Speaker 2: dinner that night, they found out that he had been
Speaker 2: a frondeur, that is, a member of the rebellion in
Speaker 2: Louis the fourteenth childhood, right that we started the episode
Speaker 2: talking about. So the King's friends returned to Versailles and
Speaker 2: they're like, hey, man, you'll never believe this. You know,
Speaker 2: we met this old dude. He was part of the
Speaker 2: rebellion years ago. He just lives right next to Versailles.
Speaker 2: Very nice guy. You know, and they thought the King
Speaker 2: would find it amusing. The King was livid and he
Speaker 2: had the man trapped down and executed immediately. So real,
Speaker 2: not a forgiving fellow. What of For another example of
Speaker 2: like how Mercury old this guy could be one of
Speaker 2: his closest friends in confidants was a guy named la Zune,
Speaker 2: and la Zune got the idea in his mind one
Speaker 2: day that he wanted to marry the King's cousin. Now
Speaker 2: the same like at the same time as he's like
Speaker 2: being like, hey, man, you should let me do this,
Speaker 2: he starts making jokes which annoy the king, and the
Speaker 2: King gets increasingly pissed off over the course of the night.
Speaker 2: At like the fact that this guy is joking around
Speaker 2: and talking about marrying his cousin, the King has his
Speaker 2: very good friend arrested and locked away in a fortress
Speaker 2: for ten years.
Speaker 3: So the guy, well, the guys, the guy, the guy,
Speaker 3: the guy, Okay, cool. Why does anyone joke with Louis?
Speaker 2: Yeah it is. Is there a reward for being funny?
Speaker 2: I suppose yes, because a big, big part of why
Speaker 2: he likes the mistresses he likes is they can make
Speaker 2: him laugh. If you can make him laugh, you can
Speaker 2: get close to him, and there's you can get a
Speaker 2: lot of benefits from that. But obviously comedy is a
Speaker 2: very two edged sort, you know, kolemedy is both legal
Speaker 2: illegal again, yes, yeah, it really depends on how the
Speaker 2: sun King feels in any given moment. So very a
Speaker 2: dangerous place to take make jokes. This is this is
Speaker 2: truly insane.
Speaker 3: This is just like but it's like, there's a completely
Speaker 3: there's a set of laws social and financial, and you
Speaker 3: could just die because you were slightly.
Speaker 2: Rude, yes, yes, in a way that you would never
Speaker 2: have been able to guess, like you'll never find out
Speaker 2: because your dad Yeah yeah, yeah, your dad are or
Speaker 2: and usually just locked away. But if you're noble, usually
Speaker 2: you just get locked away. So by the sixteen seventies,
Speaker 2: the late sixteen seventies, Louis has created a captive society
Speaker 2: of increasingly deranged, terrified, out of touch nobles whose entire
Speaker 2: life revolves around trying to get him to like them.
Speaker 2: The stakes are life and death. A bad joke can
Speaker 2: get you locked in a fortress, and so again, people
Speaker 2: increasingly turn to black magic. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that's happening, as I said, A lot of this is nonsense,
Speaker 2: like these black masses and stuff I don't think are
Speaker 2: doing anything real, but there is a lot of real
Speaker 2: stuff being sold by these witches.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: Witchcraft has always been heavily tied to early medicine, and
Speaker 2: particularly the use of botanical drugs. This often meant a
Speaker 2: border of fasciants, right, like if you got pregnant and
Speaker 2: didn't want to be, if it was bad for you
Speaker 2: to be pregnant, especially all of the fucking that goes
Speaker 2: on in you know, between these nobles, it's not always
Speaker 2: a good idea to get pregnant with the person you're fucking.
Speaker 2: You can get an abortion from these from these witches,
Speaker 2: right the witch but they also offer they offer what
Speaker 2: are called inheritance powders, which is literally poisoned to kill
Speaker 2: the guy you will inherit his like the money of right,
Speaker 2: like offer your husband. And over the middle of the
Speaker 2: sun King's reign, it becomes very common to poison rivals
Speaker 2: for his affections. In other words, you are trying to
Speaker 2: kill people if they are closer to the king, and
Speaker 2: you want to be close to the king. For the
Speaker 2: most popular poisons are arsenic and antimony. In Versailles, these
Speaker 2: were often snuck. How would you guess? What would you
Speaker 2: guess is the most common way to poison people to
Speaker 2: death in versai Well, poison them death. We're talking about
Speaker 2: tron spoiling.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna guess. No, no, no, I'm gonna guess that.
Speaker 4: It is like they sneak it into the food.
Speaker 2: M Okay, you're gonna guess food and you get a
Speaker 2: guess for the most common way to poison someone at
Speaker 2: versa something.
Speaker 3: To do with clothing, some sort of like some sort
Speaker 3: of accessory perhaps that can have a poison on it.
Speaker 2: That is actually one of them. But that's not the
Speaker 2: most common method. So I'm gonna give you a partial Sophie,
Speaker 2: you're wrong. The most common way to poison people at
Speaker 2: Versailles is to put poison in their enemas. So social
Speaker 2: life at the palace, there's huge feasts all the time, right,
Speaker 2: Like you're still be having these big feasts, and the
Speaker 2: king is obsessed. He hates it when people don't eat.
Speaker 2: If he is offering you food, you have to eat.
Speaker 2: You have to eat a lot.
Speaker 5: Don't ship in any.
Speaker 3: Presenting less you use the shitting the anima thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's fine then, is now didn't want to
Speaker 2: get fat? Right, Like there's a degree of stigma around that,
Speaker 2: especially for like women at the court. And more to
Speaker 2: the point, well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, body shaving.
Speaker 2: Do better sunking. The kind of food, the kind of
Speaker 2: foods people are eating, these very rich foods, a lot
Speaker 2: of cheese. People don't poop very well after eating feasts.
Speaker 2: So inimas, everyone is taking enemas regularly because it's the
Speaker 2: only way to relieve yourself after the king forces you
Speaker 2: to eat six thousand calories of final and meat. Here
Speaker 2: was this as well, This is like the sixteen seventy sixteen.
Speaker 3: How many people died from these fucking things? Like, we
Speaker 3: must have been a lot of infections.
Speaker 2: We'll never know because like number one, arsenic looks like
Speaker 2: a couple of other things, and somebody has a feast
Speaker 2: and then has a heart attack or gets it. People
Speaker 2: get sick and die for all sorts of reasons, and
Speaker 2: we're bad at diagnosing, right. We do know there are
Speaker 2: a number of proven poisonings, but we don't know how
Speaker 2: many of the deaths at Versailles because Versaia is also
Speaker 2: it's very easy to get sick there because you live
Speaker 2: in a big house with three thousand people.
Speaker 3: Well, like pissing and pooping disease in weird places.
Speaker 2: That's probably that's not much of the problem. It's more
Speaker 2: just that you know, flu season comes around and everyone
Speaker 2: is in the same big room together, right, you know,
Speaker 2: it's just easy to get sick. Again.
Speaker 4: The thought that you had in part one, the smell
Speaker 4: of this place.
Speaker 2: The smell of this place because people are also yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean they're using they're doing their enemas in their
Speaker 2: private apartments, in the chamber pots. But enemas are a
Speaker 2: daily thing for a number of people. And yeah, that's
Speaker 2: an easy way to kill them. As you just put
Speaker 2: arsenic in their enema, they'll shoot it out their ass
Speaker 2: and get sick. Now ed, you got this right, a
Speaker 2: very common method of poisoning. You would also impregnate someone's
Speaker 2: clothes with arsenic, right, So you would put it unlike
Speaker 2: the arms of their clothing or whatever, and that wouldn't
Speaker 2: do anything unless they like touch their mouth or their eyes.
Speaker 2: But people do that all the time, right, So the
Speaker 2: idea is that you put it in the garment, they'll
Speaker 2: get it on their hands. Eventually they'll touch themselves somewhere
Speaker 2: that the poison can get in, right, and the symptoms
Speaker 2: of arsenic are being are kind of similar to syphilis,
Speaker 2: So it has this benefit of if they don't know
Speaker 2: they've been poisoned, everyone thinks they've caught syphilis, and there's
Speaker 2: a huge social stigma to getting syphilis. So again, if
Speaker 2: you're trying to damage your rival, you don't necessarily have
Speaker 2: to kill them. If you can make people think they
Speaker 2: have syphilis, you can do some damage to their reputation.
Speaker 2: They won't be able to fuck people anymore, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's an issue now. Doctors had developed methods for testing
Speaker 2: poison by this point, and they are awful. The main
Speaker 2: one was if you think someone was poisoned, right, if
Speaker 2: some guy gets sick suddenly and he's like, I think
Speaker 2: I was poisoned, you feed whatever liquid or powder they
Speaker 2: think that they were poisoned with to a dog, and
Speaker 2: if the dog survives, it's not poison. If the dog dies,
Speaker 2: it's poison. Right. Pretty brutal, but like it makes sense now.
Speaker 2: Because the stakes were high and royalty is at risk,
Speaker 2: doctors are constantly pushed to innovate and create antidotes, and
Speaker 2: they don't really know what they're doing very rarely do
Speaker 2: these work, and in order to try and figure out
Speaker 2: if they do work. There's enough of science is becoming
Speaker 2: a thing in this period. Right, we're not quite at
Speaker 2: the Enlightenment, but people are starting to do science. And
Speaker 2: one of the ways in which they try to scientifically
Speaker 2: create antidotes is when a doctor thinks he's figured out
Speaker 2: an antidote to a poison, they'll find a death row
Speaker 2: prisoner who volunteers, and they'll poison them and then given
Speaker 2: the antidote, and if they survive, their sentence is commuted,
Speaker 2: they get off of the row.
Speaker 3: Right, I honestly would believe that they were just send
Speaker 3: back to prison.
Speaker 2: Like now they're they're not there's a reward. People usually
Speaker 2: don't survive. Right.
Speaker 3: Was all of this testing created specifically because of the sign?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean not, that's not the I guess there
Speaker 2: are people others accelerates are getting poisoned. This is not
Speaker 2: only a thing in France, right, Elements of this exists elsewhere,
Speaker 2: but this poisoning economy is created and largely develops because
Speaker 2: it's the shit like this existed under the Roman Empire
Speaker 2: and further back. People always provided poisons and stuff, but
Speaker 2: this specific industry, like version of the industry crops up
Speaker 2: as a result of Versailles.
Speaker 3: Right, you've got the which economy, You've got the poison economy,
Speaker 3: and of course the devil economy.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, Basically the extant poisoning and devil economy that
Speaker 2: had existed in France that was probably similar to the
Speaker 2: way it works in its neighbors, becomes this specific thing
Speaker 2: because of Versailles. Right, that's fair to say. I think
Speaker 2: I don't want to be like no one else poisons people, right,
Speaker 2: everyone's poisoning people. You know, we poison people today. We've
Speaker 2: gotten very good at it thanks to the Russians, you know,
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Speaker 3: You know, I'm just saving my first like ad read
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Speaker 2: I mean we're working on a Raitheon sponsorship for you,
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Speaker 2: The Sikorski like it doing black Hawk.
Speaker 3: Ads Cold Academy Now And that was in the past.
Speaker 2: That's in the past. So back to the poisoning economy periodicity,
Speaker 2: poisoners would be caught and brought to justice. This happened
Speaker 2: in sixteen seventy six with the Marquis de Brinvillier, who
Speaker 2: poisoned her father and two brothers but failed to poison
Speaker 2: her husband. And it's like a weird story. Her lover
Speaker 2: who was her accomplice in poisoning the rest of her family.
Speaker 2: I don't fully do stand, but he like decides to
Speaker 2: feed her husband the antidote because I think maybe of
Speaker 2: some strange sense of guilt. So she gets caught and
Speaker 2: sentenced and executed, and her trial is a media sensation.
Speaker 2: All of these newsletters and whatnot in Paris, Like every
Speaker 2: cafe in Paris, people are talking about the trial over
Speaker 2: this poisoner, this rich noble woman who is like poisoning
Speaker 2: her family, and before one thing they're majorly talking about
Speaker 2: is before she is beheaded, she says, it's unfair. I'm
Speaker 2: the only one being punished for this, because everyone at
Speaker 2: Versailles does this rightful.
Speaker 3: Sticky stuff conversation.
Speaker 2: All exactly, and she's not lying right like, it's extremely
Speaker 2: common to do all of this. Now, this is an
Speaker 2: accurate complaint and it sets off kind of a public
Speaker 2: moral panic over witchcraft and poison. Just about the only
Speaker 2: person who had been unaware of the trade and spells
Speaker 2: and poisons was the son King. Again, because all of
Speaker 2: this is being done in order to get closer to
Speaker 2: him and curry favor with him, he orders the parish
Speaker 2: chief of police, Gabrielle de Larini, to investigate. What follows
Speaker 2: is a three year plunge into the magical underground, where
Speaker 2: inheritance powders made of arsenic were sold alongside black masses
Speaker 2: performed by priests. From an article in the BBC History
Speaker 2: Magazine by Johnny Wilkes, one of the most popular potion
Speaker 2: peddlers was La Voisin, who named among her clients those
Speaker 2: looking for advantage at Versai the Duke de Luxembourg bought
Speaker 2: charms to keep him safe from swords, while a number
Speaker 2: of women look for any additive to seduce the key.
Speaker 2: I want some sword pills.
Speaker 3: And there's no wealth of way to protect from a sword.
Speaker 2: No, no, no, only only drugs. And it's funny because
Speaker 2: at like formal, especially at formal events, but basically all
Speaker 2: the time, swords are mandatory dress at Versailles, to the
Speaker 2: extent that if you forget one, they'll give you the
Speaker 2: loan you a sword at the door. You don't want
Speaker 2: to use the loana sword. You don't want to use
Speaker 2: the loaner sword. No, no, no, everyone's going to be
Speaker 2: at check out. Dickhead over there with the loan of
Speaker 2: sword and didn't bring that's that fucker's a rental.
Speaker 3: That's a real sword. It hasn't even got a sword
Speaker 3: amula either.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and no sword ambula. What a dick. So, with
Speaker 2: Dila Rainy convinced of an epidemic, Louis appointed a special
Speaker 2: tribunal in April of sixteen seventy nine. Its sessions took
Speaker 2: place in halls lit only by flaming short torches, the
Speaker 2: Chamber Ardente Burning Chamber. More than four hundred people were accused,
Speaker 2: dozens exiled, and thirty six put to death, including love
Speaker 2: with sin. And this is partly because part of why
Speaker 2: this gets so bad is they they or at least
Speaker 2: Dela Rainey says, there was a plot to poison the
Speaker 2: king to death, right right, but like and maybe there
Speaker 2: was because people don't enjoy living this way. I was
Speaker 2: gonna say, like, it feels like there would have been
Speaker 2: more tempios on the case. There's probably was a plot
Speaker 2: to poison the king. Yeah, seems like a natural thing
Speaker 2: to want to do in the situation to leave like
Speaker 2: the frat house were. It's an understandable evolution of I'm
Speaker 2: poisoning all of my friends to get close to the king.
Speaker 2: What did we just poison the king? Yeah? We could
Speaker 2: go home. Yeah we could go home. I could sleep,
Speaker 2: I can piss. Quote. Fear spread among a court already
Speaker 2: riddled with suspicion, and the deaths continued, but Louis put
Speaker 2: an end to things after he heard a name of
Speaker 2: someone implicated that alarmed him. The Madame de Montespan, his mistress.
Speaker 2: Fearing the king made tire of her, she is said
Speaker 2: to have sprinkled love potions into his food potions made
Speaker 2: from Spanish fly iron filling sperm and minstrel blood. It
Speaker 2: was even claimed she had a priest perform a sacrilegious
Speaker 2: mass over her naked body, which involved the sacrifice of
Speaker 2: an infant. Monta Span was never tried, but the Trifai
Speaker 2: reveiled something dark and rotting at the heart of Louis
Speaker 2: Versailles utopia and Jesus that that escalated. That was not subtle. Wow, okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: I have a priest to a spell. So the king
Speaker 2: likes to me too, Like I'm putting sperm and minstrel
Speaker 2: blood in his food.
Speaker 5: I got the minstrel, I forgot the com Where do
Speaker 5: we get to come? You over there in the corner?
Speaker 5: It now you want to make a dollar?
Speaker 2: Oh man, it's so funny. I don't know that an
Speaker 2: infant was sacrificed. Every Satanic panic they talk about sacrificing babies.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's pretty uncommon to sacrifice babies. But
Speaker 2: maybe like these people are, I wouldn't and they could
Speaker 2: get a baby, right. It's not hard to get a
Speaker 2: baby counts right wright, of course you do need that
Speaker 2: baby might make you immune to taxes, unless it's like
Speaker 2: the eleventh baby in which cash, but most of the
Speaker 2: babies are dying, so like I can see if like
Speaker 2: some richly he's like, hey man, you know that kidd
Speaker 2: of yours isn't looking great. I need a baby as well. Also,
Speaker 2: do you any com trying to do one? Stop shopping here?
Speaker 2: Oh man? What a what a great culture. I love
Speaker 2: magic of the Court and Versailles, the common dead baby trade.
Speaker 2: This house is like off of the economy, is half
Speaker 2: of the rich economy. I mean that's how it costs.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they're spending that much each year
Speaker 2: because it doesn't make money by this point. But yes,
Speaker 2: this this house that costs half of the GDP to build.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's ruining the lives of every noble.
Speaker 2: It's destroying because now driving them insane.
Speaker 3: Again, it's like a gossip industry.
Speaker 2: He has created like the cultural equivalent of a death star,
Speaker 2: but it's aimed at his own country, like and.
Speaker 3: It's very people as well.
Speaker 2: Now, all of this, this, like this story, people can't
Speaker 2: stop talking about this, and I mean I can't stop
Speaker 2: thinking about it. Of course, this wild this and this
Speaker 2: massively accelerates the news the growth of a news ecosystem
Speaker 2: in Paris, right, and in the news, this kind of
Speaker 2: I'm going to lay out how this works. This whole
Speaker 2: news ecosystem in Paris sprouts. It existed before Louis, some
Speaker 2: aspects of it. There had been these things called libel's
Speaker 2: for years, which were like books about different people in
Speaker 2: government and politics, and you know, including some of the
Speaker 2: King's mistresses, that were like books attacking them, right, which
Speaker 2: are usually illegal, but they're sold quite often. Those that
Speaker 2: existed before Louis fourteenth. Obviously there had been some kinds
Speaker 2: of papers in other countries that would get into France.
Speaker 2: But what really accelerates the birth of a massive and
Speaker 2: honestly very modern, feeling news ecosystem in Paris is Versailles.
Speaker 2: Because now that all of power is centralized at Versailles,
Speaker 2: and all of the people in power, including the king,
Speaker 2: are no longer having much contact at all with regular people, right,
Speaker 2: they're not governing out of the same city that French
Speaker 2: people live in. They're increasingly locked in their own world.
Speaker 2: So if you're a normal French person, the media becomes
Speaker 2: your way to keep in touch with the government, right,
Speaker 2: this alien world of Versailles, you know, And so that
Speaker 2: is a lot of the fuel by which creates something
Speaker 2: very similar to our current social media ecosystem in Paris.
Speaker 2: Part of why this is able to work is that
Speaker 2: literacy is actually very common in Paris, even among the poor,
Speaker 2: Like a significant amount of people do know how to read,
Speaker 2: even p who do not come from money. But even
Speaker 2: if you don't know how to read, there's like an
Speaker 2: equivalent to TV news, which are called I'm not going
Speaker 2: to use the French term for it, but they're called
Speaker 2: oral newsmongers, right, as in someone who like just tells
Speaker 2: you the news, right. These are like the newscasters of
Speaker 2: their day. So it's not TV there's, but there is.
Speaker 2: There's a large chestnut tree in the center of Paris
Speaker 2: called the Tree of Krackowl. And so in the early mornings,
Speaker 2: these oral newsmongers will gather up all the newspapers they can,
Speaker 2: all the gossip, you know, they collected the night before,
Speaker 2: and they'll go out and they'll like read the best
Speaker 2: bits out to the crowd, right, and you know, people
Speaker 2: will throw them some money for that, and the people
Speaker 2: who stand around another chunk of people will stand around
Speaker 2: listening to these oral newsmongers. Some of them are just
Speaker 2: doing that to get the news in the morning. Some
Speaker 2: of them are taking notes on what these people say,
Speaker 2: and then these notes sometimes get turned into pamphlets, but
Speaker 2: usually they'll just bring them to the cafes and the
Speaker 2: bars later in the day and read them out to
Speaker 2: everyone there, and as a result, news disseminates in a
Speaker 2: very modern way. This is almost like having twenty four
Speaker 2: hour TV news, right, a podcast really yeah, or a
Speaker 2: podcast right, and that then turns in in some cases
Speaker 2: it turns into like print news, but it also turns
Speaker 2: into direct gossip that it's closer to, like if you
Speaker 2: think of the Tree of Crackout as like TV news,
Speaker 2: and then these cafes and bars are like Twitter and Facebook, right.
Speaker 2: So it is in a lot of ways. It's an
Speaker 2: extremely modern seeming system that develops here.
Speaker 3: It's so crazy how many different systems grew out of
Speaker 3: this necessity, yes, to create this insane alien world where
Speaker 3: the people that run the government. I was just thinking, like,
Speaker 3: these are the people running the government. They're not just
Speaker 3: like fucking around. They're also running.
Speaker 2: Fronts they are running for and that's why again, pieces
Speaker 2: of this aspects of what becomes this news economy existed
Speaker 2: before versaill versa. I supercharges it, and it also fuels
Speaker 2: it because most much, not maybe if not most well actually, honestly,
Speaker 2: usually most of what is being talked about at the
Speaker 2: Tree of Crackou and in these cafes starts as gossip.
Speaker 2: People at the courts smuggle out, you know, send out
Speaker 2: with an eight or whatnot. They'll write it down, they'll
Speaker 2: send it to somebody that they know, you know, passes
Speaker 2: stuff on to the people making these papers that are
Speaker 2: being smuggled in the France, or they'll pass it on
Speaker 2: to oral newsmongers. Because I want to get this piece
Speaker 2: of gossip out because it's bad for arrival. I want
Speaker 2: to get this piece of gossip out because it will
Speaker 2: hurt this person close to the king, or it'll embarrass
Speaker 2: the king and stop him from doing something that's bad
Speaker 2: for me for whatever reason.
Speaker 3: Right, and honestly, no one to this group, because it
Speaker 3: was fucking insane. If this was going on right now,
Speaker 3: this would be all I cad about.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, this is the only thing you'd want to
Speaker 2: talk about. It's the crazy house. Why would just be like,
Speaker 2: what's going on to someone poison the crazy house? Yeah,
Speaker 2: he pissed, Yeah, so it was said that if you
Speaker 2: during the you know, when these oral newsmongers would get
Speaker 2: up and give the news under that chestnut tree, that
Speaker 2: if you heard a branch crack, that meant that the
Speaker 2: newsmonger had gotten something wrong. And so cr que crack
Speaker 2: became slang for fake news. That's the first like fake
Speaker 2: news term and the last. From here, people in attendance
Speaker 2: would again take notes on the best bits in the
Speaker 2: DeCamp for cafes, wine shops and salons. Police would sometimes
Speaker 2: confiscate these notes when they could, but this was all
Speaker 2: simply too common to stop. The system is still in
Speaker 2: its infancy during the reign of the Sun King, but
Speaker 2: it starts to really grow during the reign of the
Speaker 2: Sun King, and it will evolve over the next two reigns,
Speaker 2: and ultimately this is a huge part of why there's
Speaker 2: a revolution, right the fact that there's these papers, there's
Speaker 2: these revolutionary presses and tracks, and the fact that all
Speaker 2: of this gossip about royalty is really bad pr for
Speaker 2: the nobility and for the king and the queen.
Speaker 3: They just sound insane.
Speaker 2: They sounded insane and awful, and it's kind of fucked up.
Speaker 2: As we'll talk about Eventually, the King and Queen WI
Speaker 2: ultimately pay the price, you know, which includes the queen
Speaker 2: being Marie Antoinette and her husband Louis the sixteenth are
Speaker 2: not nearly as bad as the son king, and in fact,
Speaker 2: my opinion of them is they were kind of trying
Speaker 2: to do the best they knew how to. But they
Speaker 2: were raised number one in this insane place and it
Speaker 2: deranged culture that has gotten even crazier by the time
Speaker 2: they come in. There's just no chance of them ever fixing, right.
Speaker 3: Question how long has this been going on? So, like,
Speaker 3: how long has the SI been around at this point?
Speaker 2: I mean by the time we're into the sixteen eighties,
Speaker 2: like twenty years something like that. Oh my god, fifteen
Speaker 2: twenty I think. So I don't think it's yeah, we're
Speaker 2: in this scene growing up going on. Yeah, well yes, yes,
Speaker 2: because again the Sun King reigns seventy two years, right,
Speaker 2: so and you know Versailles he starts building when he's
Speaker 2: like twenty four, right, so he is around with it
Speaker 2: for a long time. People are born and die with
Speaker 2: Versailles being the center of the French world during his lifetime,
Speaker 2: you know, and his time as the king. Now again
Speaker 2: It's important to note that the main reason why this
Speaker 2: very modern information ecosystem gets off the ground is there's
Speaker 2: this desire of what are called the little people to
Speaker 2: understand what the big people are doing at Versailles. As
Speaker 2: Robert Darton writes in The Revolutionary Temper, which is a
Speaker 2: great book about the way the media worked in Paris
Speaker 2: leading up to the Revolution. For most Parisians, especially the
Speaker 2: little people, Versaill was an alien world, and politics was
Speaker 2: the king's business, transacted in his name by ministers, courtiers,
Speaker 2: and power brokers among legrands. That's the big people. Yet
Speaker 2: worried about the power plays leaked from Versailles, and it
Speaker 2: converged with all sorts of other news in the information
Speaker 2: system of Paris. Legrands at the top of society had access.
Speaker 2: And these are not just nobles, right, Wealthy merchants are
Speaker 2: also at Versailles. And in fact, there's a whole cottage
Speaker 2: industry in books for rich people who are not nobles,
Speaker 2: who need to understand the stuff that nobles are raised
Speaker 2: understanding in order to not embarrass themselves at Versailles. That
Speaker 2: becomes like a cottage industry. And yeah, like a big
Speaker 2: part of what fuels. This is, you know, these people
Speaker 2: doling out rumors and lies, often for social cachet. If
Speaker 2: someone makes a crude joke at the king's expense or
Speaker 2: flirt with one of his mistresses, they can upset dynamics
Speaker 2: at the palace in ways that are beneficial to them. Now,
Speaker 2: the downside of this constant churn is that people outside
Speaker 2: of Versailles get this feeling that everything going on there
Speaker 2: is like illegal, immoral sex, gambling and wasting all of
Speaker 2: the country's money. Right, because which is partially largely accurate.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it doesn't sound like they were unreasonable in
Speaker 3: believing that.
Speaker 2: What's kind of fucked up is that Marie Antoinette and
Speaker 2: Louis the sixteenth are like, compared to Louis the fourteenth,
Speaker 2: fairly moral people. They do not engage in at least
Speaker 2: nearly the same level of adultery. They are less wasteful
Speaker 2: than the kings before them. But because the royalty have
Speaker 2: this reputation by their time, they get that reputation too,
Speaker 2: right because everyone for a hundred years, all that everyone's
Speaker 2: been writing about how fucked up Versailla is. They're not
Speaker 2: going to stop now just because these people are like
Speaker 2: forty percent less shitty, right, Which is not to say
Speaker 2: that Antoinette and Louis the sixteenth weren't shitty or wasteful,
Speaker 2: They just weren't as bad as their predecessors. Yeah right.
Speaker 2: So as he aged, the Sun King did grow less
Speaker 2: promiscuous and more focused on maintaining control. As Johnny Wilkes writes,
Speaker 2: Louis turned his life movements and even abolutions, which is like,
Speaker 2: you know his toilet has cleaning himself into a daily
Speaker 2: performance governed by a seemingly endless list of detailed rituals
Speaker 2: and strict rules of etiquette, all in order to keep
Speaker 2: the nobles busy. All revolved around the Sun King. Starting
Speaker 2: when he first awoke, A select group be granted and
Speaker 2: access to the King's bedchamber, although they were not to
Speaker 2: cross the railing to get near the bed during during
Speaker 2: the ceremonial rising, and only the most senior in the
Speaker 2: room had the honor of helping Louis into his shirt.
Speaker 2: Did the same thing at cees, Yeah, same thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's exactly how we handle ce Now. The fact that
Speaker 2: life there was a constant series of balls and parties
Speaker 2: necessitated constant grant state expenses for fireworks which sometimes kill people,
Speaker 2: and food in the law. But it also kept the
Speaker 2: courtiers there in constant debt. Many had to borrow from
Speaker 2: the crown to afford the accouterment of life at Versailles. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the king.
Speaker 3: They had to get from the king to go to
Speaker 3: the king's party.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, and this is again part of how he
Speaker 2: maintains control when the sun came, and part of why
Speaker 2: it's so expensive is like what's acceptable fashion changes on
Speaker 2: a whim. So when the king starts to go, bald
Speaker 2: wigs become fashionable, right, and suddenly everyone should have a
Speaker 2: wig because the king does. And when the king has
Speaker 2: asked surgery for an anal fistula, people start wearing like
Speaker 2: bandages around their crotches like HiT's yeah, mates, yeah, it's
Speaker 2: also crazy fucked up man.
Speaker 4: It's like when we saw those guys wearing the ear
Speaker 4: bandage at the r this year.
Speaker 2: It is exactly like that.
Speaker 4: So rised.
Speaker 2: This is like coo, just like that. Yes, this is
Speaker 2: this is so insane.
Speaker 3: Probably even if even if this was just people partying,
Speaker 3: it would be strange. But the fact that this is
Speaker 3: the like the economy.
Speaker 2: By the by this point the sixteen eighties a decent
Speaker 2: number of the people here have been like raised in this.
Speaker 2: You know, they don't know another world exists.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: In sixteen eighty three, the Queen died and Louis married
Speaker 2: his current mistress, Madame de Mentinon. He was less of
Speaker 2: a rake by this point, in part for the sake
Speaker 2: of his immortal soul. A king who was known as
Speaker 2: an adulterer couldn't take communion while he lived in sin.
Speaker 2: This was a power that the Church had, and even
Speaker 2: the king really couldn't force them to do this once
Speaker 2: he was no longer in the prime of health. Louis
Speaker 2: worried about this more and more, because if you die
Speaker 2: not taking communion, you go to hell, even a king. Right,
Speaker 2: So that's the understanding that, like if the king is
Speaker 2: committing adultery and doesn't stop in time to get forgiven
Speaker 2: and you know, given his communion and last rites and whatnot,
Speaker 2: then he goes to hell. Even the king will go
Speaker 2: to hell. And as he'd gets sicker and older, Louis
Speaker 2: worries about this more. Now, As I said, the King
Speaker 2: Sun King's reign is impossibly long by the standard, like
Speaker 2: thirty years is a long reign for a modern dictator
Speaker 2: with access to modern medicine. If you make it to
Speaker 2: thirty years as a dictator, you were doing very well, right.
Speaker 2: The Son King reigns for seventy two years. He is
Speaker 2: the longest recorded reigning monarch in history human history. Now
Speaker 2: there's some argument about this with people for whom our
Speaker 2: documentation is less good because date keeping was just in
Speaker 2: a very different state. But they just I mean, I can't.
Speaker 2: It's very hard for someone to be king for longer
Speaker 2: than seventy two years, you know.
Speaker 3: And it was likely sustained by the complete insane of
Speaker 3: the world he made.
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, it was also the government thing. Yeah. What
Speaker 2: if Congress was just Vegas my house?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 3: What if the House of Representatives was a place they lived?
Speaker 3: Yeah and fucked.
Speaker 2: Yeah that said, you know, by the time he's getting
Speaker 2: laid in his reign, kings are like anyone else as
Speaker 2: they age, the shit that used to work don't work.
Speaker 2: And Louis had been for most of his life a
Speaker 2: very successful war leader, but in the last decades of
Speaker 2: his reign he makes increasingly poor decisions, and some of
Speaker 2: these lead him to participate in the War of Spanish
Speaker 2: Succession in the early seventeen hundreds. A lot of the
Speaker 2: wars in this period are wars of succession. A king
Speaker 2: will die without an air everyone will feel like, well, iveyl,
Speaker 2: like one of my relatives should be in there, you know,
Speaker 2: and then maybe France, you know, can effectively be helping
Speaker 2: to govern Spain or whatever. This does not work, or
Speaker 2: at least what Louis wants out of the War of
Speaker 2: Spanish Succession. He doesn't get. The war is kind of
Speaker 2: a mixed bag for France. Her ambitions in Spain are stymied,
Speaker 2: but she does close the war out after years with
Speaker 2: some strong winds against Austria. Right, so it's not a
Speaker 2: total calamity, but it's hideously unpopular and by the end
Speaker 2: the country is like bankrupt, and in fact the economy
Speaker 2: shits the bed so bad that Louis has to melt
Speaker 2: down ten million livres worth of silver furniture at Versailles
Speaker 2: to pay the crown's debts. This is not a good
Speaker 2: deal because it only results in three million livres worth
Speaker 2: of metal. Newsmongers whispered that the king might have made
Speaker 2: more headway on the crown's debts if he had sold
Speaker 2: the crown diamonds, but Louis couldn't stand the idea. He
Speaker 2: loved seeing his female relatives nieces and granddaughters and the like,
Speaker 2: wearing diamonds, and he was absolutely unwilling to sell those time.
Speaker 2: That's unreasonable to expect of him, of course, of course exactly.
Speaker 2: And look, if you don't want to sell your royal diamonds, uh,
Speaker 2: you know.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't sell mine.
Speaker 2: Buy some diamonds from our sponsors.
Speaker 3: Okay, yep, yeah, I'm good, just emotional that he couldn't
Speaker 3: have this, but he can't turn cool Zone Media into
Speaker 3: the party house.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this will see, yes, is going to become for
Speaker 2: me though. This is inspired me. Yeah, I have always
Speaker 2: wanted to create a giant house and make all of
Speaker 2: the podcasters live there, podcasting Versailles and called.
Speaker 1: The content It's called a content house.
Speaker 2: It's called a content house.
Speaker 4: And don't look up the suicide race.
Speaker 2: Yeah no, that does sound like a nightmare. The pods
Speaker 2: save guys are going to be poisoning each other to
Speaker 2: get close. Like I said, Actually that part sounds rad
Speaker 2: This sounds great. So we're yeah, I mean we've been back,
Speaker 2: but Versailles had to downsize in its last year's right,
Speaker 2: Louis the fourteenth is not doing as well at the
Speaker 2: end of his reign as he had at beginning. Frances
Speaker 2: broke and it will it will be in a kind
Speaker 2: of semi constant state of being broke until you know,
Speaker 2: Marie Antoinette and her husband get forced out. Right for
Speaker 2: an idea of how of how fucked up things get.
Speaker 2: At Versailles, at the height of the Sun King's power,
Speaker 2: there had been fifteen hundred fountains at Versailles. Right by
Speaker 2: the time of Marie Antoinette, there are only three hundred. Yeah, tragic,
Speaker 2: It's tragic. You hate to see it.
Speaker 3: I only have two hundred.
Speaker 2: I mean that's yeah, it really is, you know, And
Speaker 2: and I've been telling you you could, you'd need another
Speaker 2: thirteen hundred fountains. I agree. Just fountain technology is advance
Speaker 2: so much it is crazy versus this one palace for
Speaker 2: the king had more fountains by a long shot than
Speaker 2: Las Vegas, Nevada. Yeah, like, like way more fountains. How
Speaker 2: big were they though? Some of them are pretty big.
Speaker 2: They're pretty big, and they have to because the technology
Speaker 2: is not as good and there's like getting enough water
Speaker 2: is harder. They're having to constantly turn them on and
Speaker 2: off as the King approaches different areas, so he doesn't
Speaker 2: know that they're not on. And also just because like
Speaker 2: you can't have them all functioning at once, there's too many.
Speaker 2: So there's this whole network of like people running back
Speaker 2: and forth. The King's going here, now, you gotta like
Speaker 2: turn this one off, get the flow going to that one.
Speaker 3: Right, there's a decent chance he had no idea that
Speaker 3: any of this is happening, just like reality to him
Speaker 3: must be complete, must have been completely insane. That's like
Speaker 3: life fucking rocks. Yeah, I walk around, there's always fountains.
Speaker 2: There's always fountains. Or he took a lot of joy
Speaker 2: in the fact that everyone was like constantly working, and
Speaker 2: he there was an extent to which he did want
Speaker 2: everyone always obsessed with keeping him happy. Right, But it
Speaker 2: is that also that's kind of that causes brain damage, right,
Speaker 2: having being this separated from reality and this insulated from
Speaker 2: everyone else and living in a situation like this, like
Speaker 2: you would be hurting your head less by just standing
Speaker 2: next to one hundred and fifty five millimeter howitzer while
Speaker 2: it fires all day, right, like it's I cannot overemphasize
Speaker 2: how bad this is for you, and how much this
Speaker 2: affects his judgment making right.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: He's also older, right, which means that he's not thinking
Speaker 2: as clearly as he used to be. Maybe there's some
Speaker 2: aminsha here too. He's sicker, but he makes a lot
Speaker 2: of bad decisions, right, and he's aware of this to
Speaker 2: some extent. His last words are generally reported as being
Speaker 2: I have loved war too much, right, Like, he really
Speaker 2: seems to regret, and that's what he passes on to
Speaker 2: his successor, don't do as many wars as I did.
Speaker 2: It ended badly, right, I got way too into war
Speaker 2: and it really was great. We are broke now. I
Speaker 2: had to melt down my furniture.
Speaker 3: But also the furniture was made of fucking silver, a
Speaker 3: lot of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the fun it's just a bunch of fucking
Speaker 2: full metal. Yeah. Yeah, I think a lot of it's plated. Okay,
Speaker 2: I'm sure a decent amount of it's silver plated, but
Speaker 2: also not all of it. Right, he does have the
Speaker 2: money for pure silver chairs and stuff, you know, the king, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so good. And again this is one of kind of
Speaker 2: like the I don't know if tragedy is the right
Speaker 2: word but one of the things that is like unjust
Speaker 2: here is that the last king in his line, Louis
Speaker 2: the sixteenth, you know, Marie Antoinette's husband, is going to
Speaker 2: be murdered in part as a result of this horrible
Speaker 2: system of debt that gets started in the end of
Speaker 2: the Sun King's reign. Louis the sixteenth hates war. He's
Speaker 2: like the only one of these guys who is not
Speaker 2: at all interested in starting wars. He does get involved
Speaker 2: in the war that the US has right like our
Speaker 2: War of Independence, but he's not like a warmonger in
Speaker 2: the same way that his relatives had been, in part
Speaker 2: because he sees where it takes the kingdom. But he's
Speaker 2: ultimately going to pay with his head the price for
Speaker 2: all of the warmongering that is his grandpa and great
Speaker 2: grandpa and what not do nor his great grandpa and
Speaker 2: I guess great great grandpa. It gets a little confusing
Speaker 2: because since Louis this fourteenth had reigned for seventy two years,
Speaker 2: he didn't have any kids that are alive, right, Like,
Speaker 2: those fuckers all died a while ago, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they got poisoned or they got the fucking symholists or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well he's he's got all. He's probably trickled. This really
Speaker 2: stopped working right, right, and so it's going to be
Speaker 2: his successor who becomes Louis the fifteenth, which, if you've
Speaker 2: seen the Sophia Coppola Marie Antoinette movie, this is the
Speaker 2: guy rip torn place. Okay, yeah, the second Louis. In
Speaker 2: the Versailles line, there are only three kings during the
Speaker 2: period of Versailles being the center of France, right the
Speaker 2: Sun King, Louis the fifteenth and Louis the sixteenth, and
Speaker 2: Louis the fourteenth had reigned so long that Louis the
Speaker 2: fifteenth is his great grandson. He was five years old
Speaker 2: when he was crowned the king, and this came as
Speaker 2: a surprise. He was not expected up until kind of
Speaker 2: the last moment that he would be the Delphine, and
Speaker 2: Delphine is the French word for the prince that's going
Speaker 2: to inherit being the king, right, that's the Delphine, So
Speaker 2: this comes as a surprise. Other people are in line
Speaker 2: to be the king before him up until the last minute,
Speaker 2: right in the last five years of the Sun King's rain.
Speaker 2: The Grand and Petite Dauphines which are the first and
Speaker 2: second in line for the throne, both die of smallpox
Speaker 2: and measles, respectively. Louis the Fifteenth's brother, who was also
Speaker 2: ahead of him, becomes Dauphine, but then he gets measles,
Speaker 2: and also the Louis the fifteenth gets measles too, right,
Speaker 2: they both get mesles at the same time. His older
Speaker 2: brother dies, he survives, and again, stories like this are
Speaker 2: very common at Versailles in particular. That's not the only obviously,
Speaker 2: it's a lot more common to die of sicknesses like
Speaker 2: this and for them to sweep through families, even noble families,
Speaker 2: all throughout Europe. But everyone, you've got three thousand people
Speaker 2: living in one big house, disease spreads more readily, right, and.
Speaker 3: A place where people probably hide their symptoms as well,
Speaker 3: because they don't want the king to think.
Speaker 2: Because the king gets angry if you're sick, yeah, because
Speaker 2: it's yes, yes. So Louis the fifteenth ultimately becomes king
Speaker 2: because every three other guys die in quick success over
Speaker 2: the course of a couple of years, and the treatment
Speaker 2: for measles that he and his brother both undergo is
Speaker 2: blood letting, and that kills his brother. But he survives. Now,
Speaker 2: in the Sun King's last days, he rewrote his will
Speaker 2: to limit the next king's power and establish a regency
Speaker 2: council because he knows that the next king is going
Speaker 2: to be five, right, and he also knows it that's
Speaker 2: the reason. Well, the bigger reason is that a five
Speaker 2: year old can't be king. Yeah, he has to wait
Speaker 2: till he's thirteen. But of course the kid's great uncle,
Speaker 2: Philip the Second, the Duke of Orleon. He's the guy
Speaker 2: who's supposed to be regent so ruling in the king's stead.
Speaker 2: The Son King doesn't like the Duke of Orleon because
Speaker 2: he's an atheist and a warmonger.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, that's that's how the Sun King sees him, right,
Speaker 2: And instead, the Son King wants his bastard son, the
Speaker 2: Duke of Maine, to be the regent until Louis the
Speaker 2: fifteenth is old enough to take up the job, so
Speaker 2: he rewrites his will. But as soon as the Sun
Speaker 2: King dies, Philip leads a coup in the wake of
Speaker 2: the Sun King's death, and he goes go to the
Speaker 2: Parliament of Paris, this which is again a legal body,
Speaker 2: and he convinces them to a null parts of the
Speaker 2: King's will. In exchange, he reaffirms what it's going to
Speaker 2: be called the right of remonstrance, which is parliament's power
Speaker 2: to challenge the king to say no if the King
Speaker 2: says I want a new tax or something. Right, and
Speaker 2: the fact that the Parliament gets this power back is
Speaker 2: going to lead to a number of conflicts that become
Speaker 2: contributing factors to the revolution. Right, and it's as a
Speaker 2: result of these kind of court politics. Right, Philippe wants
Speaker 2: to be the regent. He doesn't want this other guy
Speaker 2: to be the regent. You know, after this, you know,
Speaker 2: this whole mess with the will is sorted out. The
Speaker 2: child King Louis the fifteenth has a normal childhood, you know,
Speaker 2: by which I mean at age seven, he's given to
Speaker 2: a seventy three year old general and taught military etiquette
Speaker 2: and court etiquette. He learns how to ride and hunt,
Speaker 2: while Philippe proved that the son king had been right
Speaker 2: not to trust him. One of Philip's first big moves
Speaker 2: is to make a Scottish economist named John Law the
Speaker 2: Controller General of Finances, opens a private bank that becomes
Speaker 2: one of the first banks in the world to issue
Speaker 2: paper money, right, massive innovation. Unfortunately, the primary purpose of
Speaker 2: this bank is to take investments for the Mississippi Company,
Speaker 2: which meant to colonize Louisiana. And if you've been there recently,
Speaker 2: you know this didn't work out for the French, right,
Speaker 2: you know, New Orleans is pretty nice, but like, overall,
Speaker 2: they don't Louisiana doesn't become a great functional colony. And
Speaker 2: this is kind of like a Ponzi scheme of its
Speaker 2: day because it collapses. The plan collapses, which kills the
Speaker 2: national bank and bankrupts a huge chunk of the nobility
Speaker 2: who had invest it into it. Right, Oh God, Like,
Speaker 2: this is like a massive financial disaster of its day.
Speaker 2: So more of these guys go in debt to the crown,
Speaker 2: and the crown knows primarily how to help these guys.
Speaker 2: If you want to help these nobles who are close
Speaker 2: to the king rebuild their fortunes, your main way of
Speaker 2: doing that is to give them the right to tax
Speaker 2: certain areas. And there's only a limited number of these taxes.
Speaker 2: You have to create new ones, which means the recovery
Speaker 2: of these fortunes by the nobles is going to be
Speaker 2: born largely by the poor and the bourgeois. He right.
Speaker 4: Uh huh.
Speaker 2: Louis the fifteenth gets married to one of his cousins,
Speaker 2: Marianna Victoria of Spain.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: This is there's a there's a six year age gap.
Speaker 2: She's three and he's nine. Problematic, but not for either
Speaker 2: of them. They're not really in charge of this. There again,
Speaker 2: a six year old and a three year old or
Speaker 2: a nine year old a three year old. The bride
Speaker 2: is sent to the Louverra to live with her husband.
Speaker 2: But after about four years of this, the.
Speaker 3: Child pride to the child king.
Speaker 2: Then Philippe dies and she gets sent back home because
Speaker 2: she's not old enough to have kids. Thank god, there's
Speaker 2: that understanding. Seven year old's a little young to have children.
Speaker 3: But you know, it's fucking France.
Speaker 2: They were like thinking about it. They thought about it.
Speaker 2: Rack Benjie. Louis the fifteenth takes over ruling duties at
Speaker 2: age thirteen in June of seventeen twenty two. And again
Speaker 2: when we talk about the degree of complicity, by this point,
Speaker 2: Louis the fourteenth totally responsible for his actions. Louis the
Speaker 2: Fifteenth partially, but you have to do it. You do
Speaker 2: have to take into account this man becomes king at
Speaker 2: age thirteen, and again Marie Antoinette married at thirteen. Right,
Speaker 2: these are children being thrown into these roles, and to
Speaker 2: the head of this insane you are taking a thirteen
Speaker 2: year old and saying, hey, you are now the head
Speaker 2: of the most like, insidiously fucked up and mentally dominating
Speaker 2: cult that has ever existed.
Speaker 6: Built for someone else, built for someone else, good life,
Speaker 6: someone else when they were more sane than they are now,
Speaker 6: which they were not very sane before, but now they're
Speaker 6: really insane.
Speaker 2: This cold designed by like a once in a several
Speaker 2: generations political genius Twining who was a mature adult. Yes,
Speaker 2: good luck, good luck. So this thing that had Versai
Speaker 2: had initially been a way for him to exert control.
Speaker 2: By the time his successor takes over, the system is
Speaker 2: controlling the king as much as it's controlling the nobles. Right,
Speaker 2: they are no longer running things, because this increasingly arcane
Speaker 2: system of etiquette has taken on a life of its own,
Speaker 2: And so from the beginning Louis the fifteenth is as
Speaker 2: much a prisoner of the system as he is the
Speaker 2: guy at its head. For an idea of how cloying
Speaker 2: and total it could be. A treat is from seventeen
Speaker 2: twenty nine on napkin etiquette stated it is ungentlemanly to
Speaker 2: use a napkin for wiping the face or scraping the teeth,
Speaker 2: and a vulgar error to wipe one's nose with it.
Speaker 2: The same there do you do it? You just get
Speaker 2: it's a looking napkin, You just keep it.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The same treatise went on to insist the person of
Speaker 2: highest rank in the company should unfold his napkin first,
Speaker 2: all others waiting until he has done so before they
Speaker 2: unfold theirs. When all of those present are social equals,
Speaker 2: all unfold together with no ceremony.
Speaker 3: For this useless napkin.
Speaker 2: For a napkin, there's books written on napkins sick. Every
Speaker 2: night includes a grand dinner, which is a public event.
Speaker 2: Anyone who is at Versailles can show up and watch
Speaker 2: the dinner, but it's only public in the sense that
Speaker 2: the public can watch. Only the royal family gets to
Speaker 2: sit and eat. Right, and based on your rank, if
Speaker 2: you're a duchess or a princess or someone similarly high ranking,
Speaker 2: you might get to sit at a stool. Right, Okay,
Speaker 2: everyone else has to stand. The king is the only
Speaker 2: one who gets a chair with armrests, I think is why.
Speaker 2: I think the king and queen both get armrests in
Speaker 2: their chairs, and if another king is visiting, he gets
Speaker 2: a chair with armrests. Right, Although this is complicated because
Speaker 2: of all of this etiquette, Like you can if you're
Speaker 2: in a room with a bunch of people, only people
Speaker 2: can only start conversations with someone who is an equal
Speaker 2: or lower rank to them, so talking about anything is
Speaker 2: really fucked up. And generally when kings visit, When kings
Speaker 2: and queens visit, they visit incognito, which is they pretend
Speaker 2: to not be the King of Russia or Prussia or wherever.
Speaker 2: They pretend to be just another random nobleman with a
Speaker 2: fake name, because then they don't have to deal with
Speaker 2: all of this etiquette. Because usually if you're a king
Speaker 2: who's heading there, you're heading there to handle some very
Speaker 2: serious state business and you don't have the time to
Speaker 2: deal with all this bullshit, so you just lie and
Speaker 2: say you're someone else and everyone knows. But then we
Speaker 2: don't have to do as much of the bullshit.
Speaker 3: Right, But who decides who the social hierarcky or is
Speaker 3: this arbitrary.
Speaker 2: It's been decided over the course of years. So I
Speaker 2: mean again, a lot of this comes out of the
Speaker 2: earlier feudal system, right, but you have princes and princesses
Speaker 2: of the blood which you're above, you know, these kind
Speaker 2: of lower ranking nobles, and you've got this.
Speaker 3: Whole everyone insane. Hi, every single person there is just
Speaker 3: experiencing psyches.
Speaker 2: Yes, old times people are people are constantly like it's this,
Speaker 2: It's this maddening thing. Like if you are if you
Speaker 2: are handing the and this happens if you're handing the
Speaker 2: king or the queen. If you're the highest ranking guy
Speaker 2: in the room, when they wake up and you're handing
Speaker 2: them their shirt and someone else walks in who is
Speaker 2: of an equal or higher rank, you have to stop
Speaker 2: and give the shirt to them. There's a at one
Speaker 2: point when Marie Antoinette is like new to the palace.
Speaker 2: This happens like four or five times in a row,
Speaker 2: and she's just standing there naked in the freezing cold, like,
Speaker 2: for the love of God, somebody please give me clothes,
Speaker 2: you know, like that that's an actual thing that happens.
Speaker 2: Oh no, another guy walked in. Another lady walked in. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: she gets the shirt. Now, look, we literally you are
Speaker 2: not allowed as the king, like by this point, if
Speaker 2: you're the king and the queen, you are an absolute
Speaker 2: monarch and you are literally not allowed to touch your
Speaker 2: own shirt because that would be this hideous violation of
Speaker 2: etiquette that would like upset this very intricate social system
Speaker 2: that everyone is reliant too. And the fear was that
Speaker 2: if you break any of these protocol everything kind of
Speaker 2: everything collapses. Right, that's exactly it, right.
Speaker 3: The most expensive cultival time.
Speaker 2: It's such a stupid system. It's so fucking funny, it's
Speaker 2: it's really funny and dumb. So doors could not be
Speaker 2: knocked on, right, You can't knock on a door because
Speaker 2: the sun King was annoyed by knocking. And so again
Speaker 2: another of intricate etiquette revolves around how you let someone
Speaker 2: know you're at the door, because you also can't open doors.
Speaker 2: Only courtiers can open only like like staff can open doors, basically, right,
Speaker 2: no one else can open So you're you're not opening
Speaker 2: any doors. If you want to get in, you have
Speaker 2: to scratch the door with your left little finger and
Speaker 2: you're right now, you're right. Courtiers start growing this left
Speaker 2: fingernail out like the left lower little fingernail out like
Speaker 2: a coke nail, so that they can more effectively scratch
Speaker 2: the door to get whatever Lewis is reigning's attention at
Speaker 2: the time. Just like a little like a talon, like
Speaker 2: a towel. You got a little towel, You got a cokenail,
Speaker 2: the king's expression, yeah, lovely. Etiquette enthusiast and Etiquette Apedia
Speaker 2: editor Marra Graber lays out how absolutely claustrophobic the system
Speaker 2: was by Louis the fifteenth reign quote. At the palace,
Speaker 2: the courtiers lived under the despotic surveillance of the king,
Speaker 2: and upon their good behavior, their deference, and their observance
Speaker 2: of etiquette, their whole careers depended. If you displeased a Louis,
Speaker 2: he would simply not see you the following day, his
Speaker 2: gaze would pass over you as he surveyed the people
Speaker 2: before him, and not being seen by the King was
Speaker 2: tantamount to ceasing to count. At Versailles, a whole timetable
Speaker 2: of ceremonies followed, much of it revolving around the King's
Speaker 2: own person. Intimacy with Louis meant power and power was
Speaker 2: symbolically expressed and attending to certain of the king's most
Speaker 2: private and physical needs, handing him his stockings to put
Speaker 2: on in the morning, being present as he used like
Speaker 2: the bathroom, right rushing when the signal sounded, to be
Speaker 2: present as he got ready for bed. It mattered desperately.
Speaker 2: What closeness did the king allowed you, whether he spoke
Speaker 2: to you in front of whom, and for how long.
Speaker 2: The point about Versailles was that there was no escape.
Speaker 2: The courtiers had to make it where they were. The
Speaker 2: stage was the Louis, and the rules and the roles
Speaker 2: that could be played were designed by him. It was
Speaker 2: up to each courtier to fit him or herself into
Speaker 2: one of the slots provided. The leaders of all the
Speaker 2: other towns and villages of France were made largely through
Speaker 2: the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudeness and
Speaker 2: judicious sliding by the tax collecting intendants to feel their subordination,
Speaker 2: their distance from the court. That's a good system of government.
Speaker 3: Yeah sounds it feels like you just live in this
Speaker 3: constant state of paranoia. It reminds me of like the
Speaker 3: death of Stalin as well. Yes, just like apologizing to
Speaker 3: people or like not apologizing because that emits guiled.
Speaker 2: Whenever you have an absolute monarchy, right and again, you
Speaker 2: know Stalin Stalin's Russia isn't technically a monarchy, but it's
Speaker 2: you've got it's an absolute dictatorship that they're all more
Speaker 2: similar than they all are different. And anytime you have
Speaker 2: one that's this absolute, it it's it is a cult
Speaker 2: at the top, right, Yeah, because everything surrounding the ruler
Speaker 2: has to be both an altered reality, because there's certain
Speaker 2: things he refuses to see and does not have to
Speaker 2: be aware of. Right, Yeah, it's pretty good. I'm glad
Speaker 2: that doesn't happen now to people like, for example, the
Speaker 2: president or billionaires. I'm glad billionaires don't also live in
Speaker 2: their own functionally isolated realities where they they have no
Speaker 2: real contact with the world and no one ever argues
Speaker 2: them with them or tells them their ideas are bad,
Speaker 2: and every moment of their lives is them getting exactly
Speaker 2: what they want at any given moment. That obviously does
Speaker 2: not cause them the kind of brain damage that all
Speaker 2: of the kings of France got before the Revolution of
Speaker 2: seventeen eighty nine.
Speaker 3: Yeah, of course, I mean what I'm like, totally differ
Speaker 3: So don't have like CEOs of public companies like this.
Speaker 2: No, just like bench capitalist. This doesn't happen to every
Speaker 2: rich guy. Right, every rich guy doesn't have his own Versailles.
Speaker 2: You know that would be crazy. They wish it, almost
Speaker 2: wishes they'd all be insane. Anyway, let's read about the
Speaker 2: town in Texas he owns now? Anyway? Yeah, school or
Speaker 2: the school. Now. The one method that out of favor
Speaker 2: or distant nobles and wealthy business owners had of getting
Speaker 2: the King's attention outside of cutting through this Gordian out
Speaker 2: of palace etiquette, was to get a story true or libelous,
Speaker 2: to go viral among the popular media. I talk right,
Speaker 2: I talked post Yeah, they're posters. Yeah. As time went on,
Speaker 2: when more nobles, certain nobles start hosting, some of them
Speaker 2: host printing presses, others host basically bookstores for these libels.
Speaker 2: These books that are like unauthorized biographies of the king
Speaker 2: or his minister or his mistress. Right, and these are
Speaker 2: full sized books, but they're usually take it. They're cobbled
Speaker 2: together from day's worth of notes like taken at the
Speaker 2: Tree of Crackou and from reports sent on the sly
Speaker 2: By Versailles regulars. Right, people will compile these all into
Speaker 2: books that are like you know that guy, what's his name,
Speaker 2: the dude who's written like a couple of books about
Speaker 2: the inside of the Trump administration, Michael Wolf. Yes, that's
Speaker 2: he's doing labels right where some of what sent them's true,
Speaker 2: some of what's in them bullshit, nobody ever really knows.
Speaker 2: But they're these books that are meant to be slanderous
Speaker 2: and popular among the masses by giving you, like the
Speaker 2: gory details from inside in the lives of these people
Speaker 2: who are of all the power, right, and these are
Speaker 2: illegal to be sold in France, but certain nobles who
Speaker 2: have big properties in France will let people sell books
Speaker 2: or newsletters there and then the police can't raid them, right,
Speaker 2: because that's the Duke's house or whatever. Effectively, so the
Speaker 2: other major thing that I haven't talked about yet that
Speaker 2: is honestly maybe the number one way in which a
Speaker 2: lot of gossip gets out. And this is again it's
Speaker 2: effectively like we've talked about, how like the salons and stuff,
Speaker 2: these cafes where we will take their notes from you know,
Speaker 2: the morning newsmonger speeches. That's like Twitter and Facebook, the
Speaker 2: TikTok of the day, the songs popular songs. There's a
Speaker 2: couple of there's a dozen or more different melodies that
Speaker 2: people regularly just rewrite new lyrics for, And so everybody
Speaker 2: knows all these melodies, and on a daily basis new
Speaker 2: versions of the song. You'll hear someone singing it at
Speaker 2: the market, You'll start sing it. They'll go viral among
Speaker 2: the whole city, and a lot of gossip and news
Speaker 2: gets out this way. This is again effectively like the
Speaker 2: TikTok of its day. One explanation at the time, this
Speaker 2: is a contemporary writer talking about this kind of weird
Speaker 2: musical culture in Paris described it this way. A dastardly
Speaker 2: courtier puts them slanderous rumors into rhyming couplets, and by
Speaker 2: means of lowly servants, has then planted in market stalls
Speaker 2: and street stands. From the markets there passed on to artisans,
Speaker 2: who in turn relay them back to the nobleman who
Speaker 2: had composed them, and who, without losing a moment, take
Speaker 2: off for a meeting place in the Palace of Versailles
Speaker 2: and whisper to one another in a tone of consummate hypocrisy.
Speaker 2: Have you read them?
Speaker 3: Here?
Speaker 2: They are They're circulating among the common people of Paris.
Speaker 2: Know this is not just song, but a lot of
Speaker 2: it does come in the form of like these rhyming
Speaker 2: little couplets. Right now. In Louis the fifteenth reign, the
Speaker 2: most popular of these songs, gossip songs, were about his mistresses,
Speaker 2: because he was the kind of king who was seen
Speaker 2: by his wife as little as possible, and by the
Speaker 2: mid seventeen hundreds this had reached a fever pitch of unpopularity. Again,
Speaker 2: anknown adulterer couldn't receive the sacrament, and when the king
Speaker 2: got seriously ill, which happened with some regularity given how
Speaker 2: disease spread at Versailles, he would have to dismiss his
Speaker 2: mistress in order to take communion. Right this happened in
Speaker 2: seventeen forty four, and when it's generally accepted, you dismiss
Speaker 2: your mistress, then you're good with God again. You can
Speaker 2: go to heaven if you die. But if you dismiss
Speaker 2: her and you get better, you're not supposed to take
Speaker 2: her back. Right at most, you're supposed to find a
Speaker 2: new mistress. But Louis the fifteenth got really attached to
Speaker 2: his mistresses, and so he takes this lady back, and
Speaker 2: that scandalizes the people, and it pisses off the church.
Speaker 2: And the big part of why people are pissed about
Speaker 2: this is that they see this as having a major
Speaker 2: impact on public health, because it's this very fun belief.
Speaker 2: At the time, it was widely believed that when he
Speaker 2: was made the king, the king gained the magical power
Speaker 2: that was known as the royal touch, right, And so
Speaker 2: a king, by touching you could cure what was called
Speaker 2: the king's disease, which was scrofula. Now scrofula is a
Speaker 2: kind of tuberculosis, right, and it's a kind of thing
Speaker 2: that spreads a lot in society where people don't wash
Speaker 2: their fucking hands. And the understanding is that when the
Speaker 2: king ascends, he gets the power to cure scrofula by
Speaker 2: touching people, but he loses it if God's not happy
Speaker 2: with him, right. And the practical issue here is that
Speaker 2: once a year at Eastern mass the king would go
Speaker 2: to Paris and a huge all of everyone with scrofula
Speaker 2: would line up and he would touch them all, right,
Speaker 2: And obviously this presents there's some danger of the king
Speaker 2: getting sick from this, right, But this also provides them
Speaker 2: with a degree of safety because every year a huge
Speaker 2: number of like the poor people in Paris make direct
Speaker 2: contact with the king in a way where they see
Speaker 2: him as saving them. Can you think of how that
Speaker 2: protect the king from the mob?
Speaker 3: Right, regardless whether they're actually here healed of their scropula
Speaker 3: or whatever, like.
Speaker 2: That matters less than everyone sees the king is a
Speaker 2: part of our public health system. And also he is
Speaker 2: coming on he helps me directly. I'm not going to
Speaker 2: murder the king, you know, why would I do that? Right?
Speaker 2: But Louis the fifteenth loses this power, and so he
Speaker 2: stops going to these eastern masses and touching people, and
Speaker 2: it cuts off a very important connection between the crowned
Speaker 2: line and the masses in Paris. Right, this is going
Speaker 2: to contribute to revolutionary conditions. Again, all these are just
Speaker 2: like pieces of why this happens. But the fact that
Speaker 2: the king is under Louis the fifteenth, what contact the king?
Speaker 2: You know, Louis the fourteenth already had reduced significantly. By
Speaker 2: moving out of pair Ris, the King's contact with regular people.
Speaker 2: Louis the fifteenth cuts off one of the last vestiges
Speaker 2: of that because he won't stop fucking his mistresses and
Speaker 2: he gets canceled by the church. Another issue is that
Speaker 2: the church threatens to take away because he won't stop
Speaker 2: fucking his mistresses. The church threatens to take away the
Speaker 2: Jubilee in seventeen fifty every twenty five years, the church
Speaker 2: would forgive everyone in France's sins, right, so you don't
Speaker 2: have to pay, You don't have to It's like a
Speaker 2: big deal, right, and the king of it. They don't
Speaker 2: ultimately go through with this. The church, the king is
Speaker 2: able to lean on them, but for a long time,
Speaker 2: everyone thinks that the King has cost them the Jubilee
Speaker 2: because he can't keep his dick in his pants. And
Speaker 2: that makes them very angry, right right, Like this isn't
Speaker 2: just them being judgmental. They are seeing significant public health costs.
Speaker 2: That's how we're going to hell. People are gonna go
Speaker 2: to hell over here, man, what the fuck? And the
Speaker 2: popular media goes nuts about this rumor. As Robert Darton writes,
Speaker 2: one novelist published a letter from a correspondent who vilified
Speaker 2: Louis for depriving his people of the jubilee. It is
Speaker 2: monstrous that all of French should be deprived of it
Speaker 2: because the king, by his own fault, is not in
Speaker 2: a state of to receive this grace. The general resentment
Speaker 2: was expressed by some of the crudest poems Lewis the
Speaker 2: Badly Loved, make your Jubilee, give up your whoreor Madame
Speaker 2: le pompadour and give us bread. Oh this is one
Speaker 2: of those songs, right, it sounds better in the original French,
Speaker 2: but not when I say it. Yeah, no, and you
Speaker 2: don't have the French. I don't have the French gene. No,
Speaker 2: but yeah, this is like popular songs. Honestly, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 2: I describe it as TikTok. You might even describe it
Speaker 2: as like punk rock in the eighties, right, these like
Speaker 2: songs people are singing about this kind of criticizing power.
Speaker 3: It is very culturally, very cool that there's like this
Speaker 3: weird like cottage journalism industry and this weird.
Speaker 2: Like this this trash shit. Yeah, this is It is
Speaker 2: interesting that you can almost look at this as like
Speaker 2: a common point of origin for like journalism, hip hop,
Speaker 2: punk rock, and TikTok. Right, Yeah, fucking the king and
Speaker 2: Versailles not being able to keep his dick in his pants. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So what we see throughout Louis the fifteenth reign is
Speaker 2: a king whose decisions, and some of his decisions are good,
Speaker 2: constantly drive a wedge between him and everyone outside of
Speaker 2: Versailles because of the media ecosystem, which at this point
Speaker 2: has grown to be entirely like predicated on critiquing the
Speaker 2: king and his nobles. Right, and to everyone's surprise, what's
Speaker 2: happened here is without anyone meaning for this to evolve
Speaker 2: this way, This emergent media ecosystem has created a check
Speaker 2: on the king's absolute power. As a Parisian comedian Nicholas
Speaker 2: Chamfort said, France is quote an absolute monarchy tempered by songs.
Speaker 3: That is actually that is actually very love fucking awesome
Speaker 3: here and the controlling animal house.
Speaker 2: Yeah over here is people making up means songs about
Speaker 2: him like.
Speaker 3: That's what in fact, that he was too horny. I
Speaker 3: guess he was right the level horny.
Speaker 2: Kendrick's like obliquely ship talking Trump through his presentation at
Speaker 2: the super Bowl, Right, It's in some ways it hasn't changed.
Speaker 2: It's just always been understood that if you are good
Speaker 2: enough at music, no dictator will be brave enough to
Speaker 2: kill you. Yeah, this is why Billy Joel was allowed
Speaker 2: to go to the USSR. You know the power of
Speaker 2: the piano man.
Speaker 3: And why Stephen Sgal is fine as well.
Speaker 2: Is right, is right? Is very safe? Uh everywhere music
Speaker 2: is great music. When he went to war uh Louis
Speaker 2: the fifteenth and seventh teen forty alongside the Austrians against
Speaker 2: an alliance of British people, Hessians, Hanovarians and the hated Dutch,
Speaker 2: there was a vicious battle near the village of Lawfeld.
Speaker 2: In real terms, it was a tactical victory for France.
Speaker 2: They take the village, but either a strategic defeat or
Speaker 2: at best to draw because they lose so many men
Speaker 2: taking this town they can't continue the offensive that they
Speaker 2: had intended in support of the Austrians. That said, they
Speaker 2: do take the town, so the king declares it a victory.
Speaker 2: But the newspapers, and again all of the newspapers that
Speaker 2: get into France are printed in Amsterdam, who are fighting
Speaker 2: against the king. The King sends back his messengers to
Speaker 2: declare victory in Paris. The newspapers that arrive at the
Speaker 2: same time all say France lost the battle. Right police
Speaker 2: spies informed the government. Hey, most of the media says,
Speaker 2: we actually lost this, and it's kind of generating unrest.
Speaker 2: An effort gets made, this distribute counter propaganda. But it's
Speaker 2: like when the government tries to make tiktoks, right, nobody
Speaker 2: like that. Like the police aren't good at making songs.
Speaker 7: People want to sing, you know, I wonder what the
Speaker 7: police songs were like. No, they must have sucked as
Speaker 7: they did not slap. It was literally the police. This
Speaker 7: is this is, this is where Sting gets his start.
Speaker 7: Very horny guy as well, so very horny man as well.
Speaker 2: He would have fit in. So Now by this point, again,
Speaker 2: this this modern ecosystem had largely a lot of it
Speaker 2: had developed as a way to keep abreast with palace gossip.
Speaker 2: But at this point it pivots, you know, and it
Speaker 2: pivots to This is almost the first time where you
Speaker 2: see something like a modern ecosystem obsessing over a major
Speaker 2: world war in media res right in the same way
Speaker 2: people did about like the Gulf War or or you know,
Speaker 2: more recently the expanded judging the government well and judging
Speaker 2: the government for it. The government has this is a
Speaker 2: very rare thing and it's really kind of what. I
Speaker 2: don't know if it's the first time this has happened,
Speaker 2: but I don't know that it's ever happened before on
Speaker 2: this scale, where the absolute monarchy completely loses control of
Speaker 2: the information coming out of a conflict on foreign soil. Right,
Speaker 2: that's a big deal. And this war, the War of
Speaker 2: Austrian Succession, it's one of a number of wars that
Speaker 2: that some historians will argue should be counted as the
Speaker 2: first real World War. I don't care to get into
Speaker 2: that argument, but this is a massive conflict, right right,
Speaker 2: And the fact that the government of France has completely
Speaker 2: lost control due to the independent media is incredibly noteworthy.
Speaker 2: I want to quote again from that book. Reports of
Speaker 2: the overseas warfare appeared, and the gazettes and the Cafe
Speaker 2: Sophisticates discussed them, but most Parisians, if they followed foreign
Speaker 2: affairs at all, concentrated on the fighting nearby and the
Speaker 2: low countries where Martial de Sachs scored his victories. They
Speaker 2: were appalled. Therefore, as soon as they learned about the
Speaker 2: preliminaries to the peace, to discover that Louis the fifteenth
Speaker 2: had agreed to return everything France had won at such
Speaker 2: expense and suffering. In exchange, he received virtually nothing he'd
Speaker 2: got back Louisbourg, a fortress on the Cape Breton Island,
Speaker 2: while he surrendered Madras, a greater prize to the British.
Speaker 2: To ordinary Parisians with an uncertain grasp of geography, the
Speaker 2: global readjustment and the balance of power, insofar as they
Speaker 2: were aware of it, mattered less than the sacrifice of
Speaker 2: the fortresses in Flanders. Most Parisians, moreover, experienced the war
Speaker 2: as hardship inflicted on their daily lives in the form
Speaker 2: of increased taxes, scarcer goods, and higher prices. The Dixim,
Speaker 2: a special tax levied since seventeen forty one to support
Speaker 2: the war, fell on virtually all revenue, although the clergy
Speaker 2: negotiated an exemption. Salaries were exempt, so laborers did not
Speaker 2: suffer directly. But the Dixem was a bitter blow to rentiers, merchants,
Speaker 2: artisans and shopkeepers. So there's both this this thing that
Speaker 2: in an earlier era the king would have been able
Speaker 2: to spend as we've got a piece. We forced a
Speaker 2: piece on them after all these victories, and that's kind
Speaker 2: of what I would have gotten out Instead, there's all
Speaker 2: this reporting on everything that France is giving up in
Speaker 2: the piece because the Dutch have a vested interest in
Speaker 2: that information getting out to the people of France because
Speaker 2: it and it's being printed over too, yes, and it's
Speaker 2: being printed over there too, and so people gain a
Speaker 2: real understanding of the fact that oh, no, no, we're
Speaker 2: being lied to about this war that has fucked up
Speaker 2: my life. You know, I'm paying a lot more in
Speaker 2: taxes because of this, and we just gave everything up
Speaker 2: what my son died. You know.
Speaker 3: It's two very different ecosystems, media ecosystems as well, because
Speaker 3: you've got the internal palace intrigue quite literally, yeah, which
Speaker 3: is controlling the nobles with this weird system of rules sotalia.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then but they've shown no interest for actually controlling
Speaker 3: the real problem, like the real the independent media that's
Speaker 3: bucking the rosses off.
Speaker 2: No, because like the king is, he's monitoring everyone's male right.
Speaker 2: When they send out gossip, they have to be very
Speaker 2: secret about it. People get punished for this. So inside
Speaker 2: the palace it's as close to a totalitarian state as
Speaker 2: it can be. And then in Paris it's like a
Speaker 2: very free media environment. Even though this is all technically illegal,
Speaker 2: everything is getting out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's probably because there's so much shit that they
Speaker 3: do with inviside that they can't control it at this point.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, and they don't. They're not really as aware
Speaker 2: because they have no connection to Paris really, right, the
Speaker 2: most of the nobility and certainly not the king. So
Speaker 2: the dic same pisses off a lot of people in
Speaker 2: the bourgeoisie. There's another tax that just everyone has to pay,
Speaker 2: which is kind of Louis the fifteenth. He was because
Speaker 2: the nobles were subject to it too, so you could
Speaker 2: see it as him trying to modernize and make things fairer.
Speaker 2: But it just creates more anger and unrest because it's
Speaker 2: just another tax. He also puts through tariffs on consumer goods.
Speaker 2: Prices for the necessities of life start to surge to
Speaker 2: an unsustainable level. There are bread riots, you know, people
Speaker 2: are starving. In order to try and mitigate this. When
Speaker 2: the war finally ends, the king orders two days of
Speaker 2: celebration and the crown provides a feast like food and
Speaker 2: wine all you can eat for two days for the
Speaker 2: little people of Paris. Right, So there's a massive party
Speaker 2: and this is the kind of thing in the past
Speaker 2: that would have got everybody back to being fans of
Speaker 2: the king, right, but people know everything that went on
Speaker 2: behind the scenes, and so for the first time, when
Speaker 2: the king goes through Paris on like his victory march,
Speaker 2: people don't during this massive party where they're all getting
Speaker 2: free food and booze, no one shouts vive le roi.
Speaker 2: Nobody shouts like long live the King right right, It's
Speaker 2: like commoners refuse to do this, and popular gossip notes
Speaker 2: that women in the market start arguing, like making fun
Speaker 2: of each other by saying, you are as stupid as
Speaker 2: the peace right. It's become this rule. It's a calamity
Speaker 2: for them for the crown. A dozen people are also
Speaker 2: crushed to death during a fireworks display due to a
Speaker 2: bottleneck in the streets, and this is reported on massively right.
Speaker 2: People talk about this all that like constantly. It is
Speaker 2: like a massive topic of discussion in the media, and
Speaker 2: every mistake, every attendant death, and all of the suffering
Speaker 2: of the masses, every bad thing that happens adds to
Speaker 2: the crush of a hostile papers, books and songs attacking
Speaker 2: the regime, and rather than trying to deal with any
Speaker 2: of this or trying to directly engage with the people.
Speaker 2: Louis the fifteenth largely responds to a hostile public by
Speaker 2: drawing inwards and retreating to Versailles. After the failed celebrations
Speaker 2: of seventeen forty eight, the king avoids the capital. In
Speaker 2: seventeen forty nine and seventeen fifty he doesn't go there
Speaker 2: at all. Rumors spread through songs, through small papers and
Speaker 2: newsmongers that he fears sparking a riot, and so people
Speaker 2: really start talking for the first time, is the case
Speaker 2: scared of the mob? Do we maybe as a group
Speaker 2: of angry people in Paris have power to threaten the monarchy?
Speaker 2: This is when people really start talking about that. You know,
Speaker 2: this is an important step on the road to seventeen
Speaker 2: eighty nine, right, Yeah, in mid seventeen, Yeah.
Speaker 3: They just lost control of everything they did. They they
Speaker 3: didn't really, Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're starting to again. They get another forty years before
Speaker 2: this all falls, right, But these are important idea If
Speaker 2: this marinating isn't brilliant, Yes, it takes a while for
Speaker 2: this to marinate, and this is part of like what
Speaker 2: leads things to collapse. In mid seventeen forty nine, a
Speaker 2: major government minister is brought down by a song. The
Speaker 2: victim is Compte de Moripas, who was the king's most
Speaker 2: powerful minister. He's a close friend to the king and
Speaker 2: he is like his basically his number one advisor, right,
Speaker 2: And one day the king retires, you know, he doesn't
Speaker 2: always like to be surrounded the crowd, so he goes
Speaker 2: to his royal bedchambers with his mistress, Madame de Pompadour,
Speaker 2: and her cousin Madame de'estrade and the Comte de morrepass
Speaker 2: And I think they're all kind of fucking right, Like
Speaker 2: I don't know, yeah, or at least they're both fucking
Speaker 2: at the same time. Over the course of the night,
Speaker 2: Madame Pompadour hands out wyatt white hyacinths as gifts, and
Speaker 2: this private moment hits the streets of Paris days later,
Speaker 2: set to the tune of a popular love song by
Speaker 2: your Noble and free manner Iris. You enchant our hearts
Speaker 2: on our path. You strew flowers, but they are white flowers,
Speaker 2: And that doesn't seem super scandalous, right It is, though,
Speaker 2: because the word for flower is very similar to a
Speaker 2: colloquial term for vaginal discharge. And what this song is
Speaker 2: saying is that the King's mistress spread VD and this
Speaker 2: priort private moment in the royal chambers, she got that.
Speaker 2: That's what the white flowers are like, white vaginal this charge. Right,
Speaker 2: It's it's like she's she had an STD and she
Speaker 2: spread it to the king in Moropaus. Right, that's kind
Speaker 2: of what the song is a legend. I don't know,
Speaker 2: I don't think that's actually what happened, because that's what
Speaker 2: the song is like, yeah, go through well, and here's
Speaker 2: the big thing. There are four people in the room
Speaker 2: when this happens, right, And that was what I was thinking, like,
Speaker 2: write this, well, it's Moropas, right, is the compt de Maropaus?
Speaker 2: Because obviously the King's mistress isn't gonna lake this. Her
Speaker 2: cousin's unlikely to sure shit, not the king, right. And
Speaker 2: what makes this even more obvious is that Moropaus is
Speaker 2: a famous and beloved popular songwriter, and he had four
Speaker 2: years used music to launder gossip and attacks on his
Speaker 2: enemies at Versailles into Paris, and in fact, a lot
Speaker 2: of the a lot of what we have from this
Speaker 2: period from this aspect of culture. These like popular political
Speaker 2: like like slander songs are ones that Maropaus wrote. Forty
Speaker 2: five volumes of his lyrics survived to this day.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2: So this guy was prolific, right again, Yeah, and so
Speaker 2: when this thing that four people are for leaks out
Speaker 2: in song form, everyone immediately know like, this has to
Speaker 2: be you, right, Marapas he had tried to spread this
Speaker 2: verse to damage the king's mistress because he was closer
Speaker 2: to the queen. Right, This whole thing had been I
Speaker 2: want to like separate her from the king. But this
Speaker 2: blows up because he's very sloppy about how he does it,
Speaker 2: and he tries to blame the whole debacle on Marshall Richelieu,
Speaker 2: who's one of his rivals. But Richelieu figures out what's
Speaker 2: going on and tells the king. As Darton writes, this
Speaker 2: version of Marpas's fall owed a great deal to the
Speaker 2: rumor mill of the court and the baroque character of
Speaker 2: politics in Versailles. Parisians, who had little contact with that
Speaker 2: alien world, could not be certain about what lay behind
Speaker 2: Maropas's fall, but they knew that songs precipitated it, and
Speaker 2: that the result was a realignment of power, and so
Speaker 2: kind of by this period, you know, seventeen forty nine,
Speaker 2: you've got the king has gotten scared out of Paris
Speaker 2: by the mob, and now people have realized that like
Speaker 2: these songs, these like popular this popular media has the
Speaker 2: ability to uproot and force government ministers out of their office.
Speaker 2: Right in addition to this, you've created this permanent because
Speaker 2: of how negative a lot of this media is, this
Speaker 2: really permanent breach between the crown and the people. In
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty one, the King's attempts a return to Paris.
Speaker 2: He goes to a mass at Notre Dame and as
Speaker 2: he rides in the crowd around him maintains near total silence,
Speaker 2: an experience so upsetting that Louis the fifteenth has a
Speaker 2: road built so he can avoid Paris in the future
Speaker 2: when traveling to his various properties. And by this point
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty one, the roth that's going to lead to
Speaker 2: the revolution is probably terminal. Right, there's almost certainly no
Speaker 2: because this system that the next king is going to
Speaker 2: come up in, that is going to continue governing, is
Speaker 2: like it can't do anything but make this system worse.
Speaker 2: By its nature, it feeds this media ecosystem that is
Speaker 2: so toxic to the crown. By its nature, it creates
Speaker 2: a ruling class who has no contact or understanding with
Speaker 2: regular people and who will constantly fuck them over and
Speaker 2: over order to pay and afford keeping their fancy party
Speaker 2: house going. Right, all of this, all of this has
Speaker 2: happened by seventeen fifty one.
Speaker 3: No, it's people everything about it, and they know people well,
Speaker 3: they constantly yes, and what they know about it is
Speaker 3: just told in the most scandalous, ridiculous way.
Speaker 2: Very a lot of it's yeah, yeah, a lot of
Speaker 2: it's also told in catchy songs. It's cold and catchy songs.
Speaker 2: They're gonna be catchy songs about like Marie Antoinette being
Speaker 2: a spy for her home in Austria and she's not.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of valid critiques of Marie Antoinette, but
Speaker 2: she like legitimately did not do any of the things
Speaker 2: her family wanted her to do in turn of like
Speaker 2: influencing France to be pro Austria. Like they were constantly
Speaker 2: pissed at her, but it didn't matter in terms of
Speaker 2: her unpopularity because the mob was convinced and the popular
Speaker 2: media was convinced that she was effectively a spy. Right, yeah, well, probably.
Speaker 3: Good for this one, but not good for now when
Speaker 3: good things.
Speaker 2: Happen, yeah, you know, it's it's we'll see again. This
Speaker 2: all moved. The media moved pretty fast in Paris of
Speaker 2: this day, but not as fast as it works today.
Speaker 2: And I guess if I have a hopeful thing in
Speaker 2: terms of you know, these v are are modern day
Speaker 2: people attempting to make an aristocracy or you know, honestly
Speaker 2: trying to make a monarchy with themselves as the Crat's
Speaker 2: what Curtis Yarvin and the like one. They want to
Speaker 2: be nobles in this new hereditary order under CEO kings,
Speaker 2: and things move faster now, and the same dynamics that
Speaker 2: caused every thing to fall apart for the people running
Speaker 2: Versailles are human dynamics. And these people, I think are
Speaker 2: convinced that they can force that out of us by
Speaker 2: taking control of social media, you know, by breeding it
Speaker 2: out of people or whatever. I don't think that they can.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: In fact, the very dynamics discussed in this these episodes
Speaker 3: is kind of suggesting why they can't, because people will
Speaker 3: just eventually go what the fuck?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, there's there's more to talk about. We may
Speaker 2: do you know soon episodes on you know, kind of
Speaker 2: the end of this process and what happens with Marie
Speaker 2: Antoinette and her husband. Louis the sixteenth is also interesting.
Speaker 2: They're just not really bastards in the same way that
Speaker 2: Louis the fifteenth and fourteenth are right, right, Like, they
Speaker 2: make a lot of mistakes, and they do do some
Speaker 2: like they do do bad things right like every king
Speaker 2: and queen does. But these guys are why the system
Speaker 2: had pissed people off so much that those two needed
Speaker 2: to lose their heads, right. The terror is largely fueled
Speaker 2: by the ship that had by the ship that Louis
Speaker 2: the fourteenth creates at Versailles, and that Louis the fifteenth perpetuates,
Speaker 2: right Like, that's all of that anger gets built up
Speaker 2: as a result of that period of time, and you
Speaker 2: know that's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, seems like it ended well for everyone involved.
Speaker 2: It doesn't it ends great for everyone. Louis the fourteenth,
Speaker 2: how do he collp it just disaus uh oh Louis, No,
Speaker 2: he gets some he gets a small box. Oh okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: he gets a small box. He has to send away
Speaker 2: his mistress, but he's like in his seventies. No, yeah,
Speaker 2: he also reigns a crazy lung. He reigns for decades. Again,
Speaker 2: this whole period like is like there's more than a
Speaker 2: century of Versailles, even though there's only like three kings, right,
Speaker 2: so it lasts a while. It just isn't you know
Speaker 2: by I think by probably like seventeen forty nine to
Speaker 2: seventeen fifty one, somewhere around then. I think the revolution
Speaker 2: was inevitable. There was all There was probably no way
Speaker 2: just functionally because I don't think Versailles, I think Versite.
Speaker 2: Among other things, the fact that it was so ossified
Speaker 2: by this point it was incapable of changing. Right, how
Speaker 2: do you feel any of reform things. You're spending all
Speaker 2: your time worrying about who's holding your shirt as the kids,
Speaker 2: You have very little time to fix the way the
Speaker 2: government works, right Yeah, yeah, the Napkin situation is really
Speaker 2: bogging you down by this point. And again, all of
Speaker 2: this was around how the government was run too. Yeah,
Speaker 2: very good, exactly, Jesus, yep, it's great.
Speaker 3: Christ three times on this show now, and every time
Speaker 3: you find a new freak, oh series of freaks.
Speaker 2: The freak Collection because Duo of Freaks. That's that's the show.
Speaker 1: That's the podcasta Ed, you have a podcast, I do it.
Speaker 3: It's called Better Offline. Got a betrofline dot com? Emailing
Speaker 3: me easy at better better off line dot com. If
Speaker 3: you hate me or love me, ideally the latter. And
Speaker 3: if you want to set up a bizarre series of
Speaker 3: rules that I will make you live by, go to
Speaker 3: our reddit, which is our slash bet off line. We're
Speaker 3: already working on a Vasai like system there.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, so I check that out. You know,
Speaker 2: when finally when he when he lives, When when Ed
Speaker 2: lives completely surrounded by the nobility of France, that's when
Speaker 2: podcasts and we'll finally reach its apex oh wait.
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