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

call zone media ah we're back and you know we're talking about versailles me and my friend ed edward zitron i've never called you edward it feels wrong it's mostly what my mother calls me when i've done something like edward just edward benjamin zitron it's just that's when i know i'm in real trouble. Edward Benjamin Zitron.
Yeah, that's when I'm about to really get yelled at. Yeah, I feel like I need to punish you for something just hearing that.
Yeah, that's exactly it. It's the punishment phrase.
So, Ed, a better off line. We're talking about Versailles and the weird culture of oligarchy.
Well, it wasn't. I mean, it's an aristocracy, but whatever.
but like we're talking about versailles and the weird culture of oligarchy well it wasn't i mean it's an aristocracy but whatever but like we're talking about this weird subculture that louis the 14th created uh during that during that break between recording episodes neither of you peed right because i'm not okay with that uh i pissed i went and peed what what the french gonna do to do to me? Behead you. Behead you.

It's done.

No, lock you in a fortress.

Honestly, though, it'd be pretty cool if I just got to live in a fortress forever.

I would not mind a nice fortress stay.

But don't pee.

As long as it's like a nice fortress.

I piss all the time.

I drink so many Diet Cokes.

I would be beheaded.

Yeah.

No, you would not have lasted a minute in Versailles.

Me, I'm great at holding my pee.

I'd have been the fucking king's best friend. We'd have gotten wasted together.
Fortlocks of piss. We'd have been gambling.
It is funny to me that like all of these royals. We're gambling as well.
Every night, gambling constantly, losing and making fortunes. Like while the country, a big part of like why people get increasingly angry in the period from here up to 1789 when the revolution happens is like every day in these like newspapers that are getting smuggled into France and, you know, these other different like kind of news delivering methods.
We'll talk about that whole news ecosystem in Paris in a little bit, but every day people are reading stories about like who lost how much money in Versailles.

So they're like, oh, the price of bread just tripled.

My family's going to starve and die. And the.
people are reading stories about like who lost how much money in Versailles. So they're like, oh, the price of bread just tripled.

My family's going to starve and die.

And the Duke d'Orléans gambled away 700,000 livres.

Like just burnt it for nothing.

Kind of pissed about that.

Yeah.

Or not as the case may be.

Yeah, right.

I would dare not be pissed about it in front of the king.

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That's adamandeve.com, code IHEART for 50% off. You know, the fact that gambling is absolutely central to the culture of this, this leadership cast who all live at Versailles with the king.
I can't not think about crypto and how central that is to the people who are trying to make themselves the new, the American nobility, right? Who want to be our hereditary aristocracy that rules things and how they spend most of their time and money gambling on crypto yeah anyway i don't know interesting interesting the way history rhymes yes yes and they even have their own you know they've got mar-a-lago which trump clearly wants to be a sort of versailles yeah he lacks the atroc atrocity gene. I'm sure he would love to do one, but he lacks the killer instinct of these perverts.
Well, yeah, he did not have to literally fight a series of wars in order to get where he is, which, again, that's consistently the best thing we have going for us. It's the same as, well, at least this generation of fascists didn't all spend four years fighting in close quarters and trenches.
You know, that said, neither did we. So the social constitution of Versailles took a lot from its founder, which meant that the whole place was a huge adultery club all the time.
There's a great story in Nancy Mitford's book that might be apocryphal, but it tells of a high ranking noble returning home early from a trip abroad to find his wife in bed with her lover. And he apologized to both of them.
He was like, oh my god, I didn't warn you I'd come home early. Of course you're fucking some dude.
Oh my god, I am so embarrassed. This is on me.
You know? It's like Portland. Yeah, it's like Portland.
Completely my bad. You should be.
You should apologize. The normalization of this behavior among the ruling class contributed to a growing break with the bourgeoisie and the working class of France.
Because while these nobles who are all living together, they don't really, most of them, there are conflicts that emerge, but most of them aren't super judgmental about adultery, right? It is just kind of considered something you do. The working class and most of the bourgeoisie are extremely Catholic and they are not okay with this.
And again, as more of this stuff leaks and gets leaked out, right?

If you want to, if you are politically opposed to Madame de Montespan, right?

Or whichever of the king's lovers, you leak out stories of her doing fucked up shit, you know, gambling irresponsibly, being drunk, sleeping around on the king, right?

Or whatever. And that both makes the king look bad and it on the king, right? Or whatever.

And that both makes the king look bad and it makes the king more likely to send her away,

right?

Right.

And because the peasantry would get morally offended.

Well, I mean, that's kind of a byproduct, right?

The reason why you as a noble at Versailles are leaking out stories about her is you want

to hurt her position, right?

And the stories will get out into the press and then the police will find out that peasants are talking about this and bourgeoisie are talking about this. They'll bring that story back to the king and then he'll know that he's been embarrassed.
And so your goal as a noble leaking that is to influence that situation. But the byproduct of this is that the peasantry and the regular people of France are constantly hearing about how the king is sleeping around and not being a good Catholic.
And that makes them increasingly angry and disaffected from the monarchy. This is a process that occurs over like a century, but the sheer weight of all these stories changes completely how regular people think about their rulers, right? In a way that is very negative and that contributes to the growth of revolutionary sentiment, right? It's a part of it, you know? So this whole process gets really escalated when Madame de Montespan succeeds in using magic to win the king over as her lover.
Now, Madame de Montespan had a husband. And in most cases, when the king fucks your wife, you're cool with it.
For one thing, as a noble, you are rarely married for love, right? You got married with this lady because of a money thing, because of a political alliance. So, like, you don't really care who she fucks as long as you're able to fuck who you like, right? This is not the case with Madame de Montespan's wife.
And the king, normally his thing is like to the husband, hey, here, have a couple of privileges. You get all the tax money from this specific industry in this region.
Yes, you get something from the king, stooping your wife Yes. Oh, yes.
You get very well rewarded, right?

And it's also, there's no shame in being cucked by the king, right?

He's the king, you know?

Like, it's kind of a bragging point of like, yeah, my wife is shtuping the king.

Now I get all of the taxes paid on, you know, fine leather work in Normandy or whatever,

you know?

But this guy felt differently. And his uncle was the archbishop of sins, right? So his uncle is a high-ranking member of the Catholic clergy.
This guy's pissed that the king is fucking his wife. And so the archbishop, his uncle, in order to punish the king, finds a different married woman in his bishopric who's cheating on her husband.
And he makes her do public penance, right? He puts her in public and punishes her, and he posts public warnings about the sin of adultery. Now, again, there's no free press in France, but numerous French papers and pamphlets are printed in Amsterdam or The Hague and sent across, and the population is generally aware of what's going on as a result.
The scandal peters out eventually, largely because the son king refuses to give a shit about it or stop traveling around with his wife, his pregnant former mistress, and his new mistress, all in the same carriage. There's a very funny moment where they're all traveling to the front together one day after they work out their differences and get along.
And some of the soldiers they pass are like, I just saw the king and the three queens of France. Damn.
Jesus Christ. Yeah.
The fact they're alive or allowed to live, I don't know, the rest of their 31-year-old life. Yeah, right.
Well into their 20s. And, speaking of which, travel in the king's carriage was one of the great honors the Versailles set competed over.
Whenever he went on a trip, if he picked you to travel with him, that's a big deal, right? You've like won a major win. But it's also miserable, as Mitford writes.
These journeys, except for the prestige they gave, were a real torment to his companions. In the coldest weather, all the windows had to be kept open as he could not bear stuffiness.
The ladies were expected to be merry, eat a great deal. He hated people to refuse food and to have no physical needs that would force them to leave the coach.
And they all have UTIs. They're eating a ton and they can't ship.
No, they can't do anything. They're just freezing.
That's right. It's like cold and you need to poo.
If by any chance they were taken ill, fainted, or felt sick, they could expect no sympathy. On the contrary, disfavor set in.
He's such a freak. Louis XIV had no sympathy for his pregnant mistresses either.
He's going to get you pregnant, and he's going to take care of his bastard kids. He pays for them.
He pays for them well. They live very well, and he treats the kids reasonably nice.
He hates pregnancy. So his mistresses, when he gets them pregnant, are ordered to hide their condition from him.
And it's understood if you get pregnant, you need to not tell me. you need to do everything you can to hide their condition from him.
And the, like it's understood if you get pregnant,

you need to not tell me you need to do everything you can to hide it.

And you need to have the kid quietly and then smuggle it out of the palace

into the hands of some common maid or a poor noble or someone who I will pay

them to raise this kid.

Right.

So this,

this guy like every nine months or so just find out he has a new child.

Yes.

Oh, okay. Louis the like you must then.
That's basically Louis XIV's life. Yeah.
Oh, got another kid. That's crazy.
Got another kid. Okay.
Send me some money. Pay some random lady to take care of it.
I don't want to hear about it though. Yeah.
There's just one weird story. There's this lady who he like, he like pays her to take care of one of his bastards because he hates her and he wants her away from Versailles.
And then the kid dies immediately. And she's so sad about it that he starts to like her.
And he's like, oh, you know what? Then she got sad when my kid died. Now I think she's cool.
He's a weird man. Yeah, he's nothing like Elon Musk then.
Nothing like Elon Musk. Yeah.
In general, one thing you are struck by reading about Versailles under the Sun King is that everyone lives in constant terror of pissing this one dude off.

One of his courtiers, who never quite made it to the inner circle, later said, falseness, servility, admiring glances combined with a dependent and cringing attitude

above all an appearance of being

nothing without him were the only means

of pleasing him

cool day combined with a dependent and cringing attitude, above all an appearance of being nothing without him, were the only means of pleasing him. Cool dude to hang out with.
Hey, come join me at my economy-ruining house. It will be miserable.
It's built on bones and costs half of France to run. Isn't there a Twilight Zone episode about this with like a child? Yeah, kind of.
Sounds horrifying. This sounds great for him.
Yeah, it's great. He has a kid every so often.
Yeah. How many children did he have? Oh, I don't know that we have a full idea, but a bunch of bastards and some legit kids.
Nice. Okay.
Now a displeased King could be a terrifying thing.

A representative story came when a group of the King's friends got lost

hunting one day.

They stumbled upon a cabin,

cabin 20 miles or so from Versailles.

And the old man who lived there took them in and fed them.

Right.

During conversation while they're having dinner that night,

they found out that he had been a frondeur.

That is a member of the rebellion in Louis the 14th childhood, right, that we started the episode talking about. So the king's friends returned to Versailles, and they're like, hey, man, you'll never believe this.
You know, we met this old dude. He was part of the rebellion years ago.
He just lives right next to Versailles. Very nice guy, you know.
And they thought the king would find it amusing. The king was li livid and he had the man trapped down and

executed immediately um so real not a forgiving fellow one of for another example of like how

mercurial this guy could be one of his closest friends and confidants was a guy named lazun

and lazun got the idea in his mind one day that he wanted to marry the king's cousin

now the same

like at the same time

as he's like

being like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should

like

hey man

you should let me do this. He starts making jokes, which annoy the king.
And the king gets increasingly pissed off over the course of the night at like the fact that this guy is joking around and talking about marrying his cousin. The king has his very good friend arrested and locked away in a fortress for 10 years.
So the guy, well, the guy's- The guy. The guy.
The guy. Okay, cool.
Why does anyone joke with Louis? Yeah. Is it because, is there a reward for being funny, I suppose? Yes.
Because a big part of why he likes the mistresses he likes is they can make him laugh. If you can make him laugh can get close to him and there's you can get a lot of benefits from that but obviously comedy is a very a two-edged sword you know comedy is both legal and illegal yes yeah it really depends on how the sun king feels in any given moment so oh my god dangerous place to take make jokes this isn't this is a truly insane it's just like bastards but it's like there's a completely there's a set of laws social and financial and you could just die because you were slightly rude yes yes in a way that you would never have been able to guess like and you'll never find out because you're dead yeah yeah yeah you're dead or and usually just locked away but um if But if you're noble, usually you just get locked away.
Right. So by the 1670s, the late 1670s, Louis has created a captive society of increasingly deranged, terrified, out-of-touch nobles whose entire life revolves around trying to get him to like them.
The stakes are life and death. A bad joke can get you locked in a fortress.
And so again, people increasingly turn to black magic. And one of the things that's happening, as I said, a lot of this is nonsense, like these black masses and stuff, I don't think are doing anything real, but there is a lot of real stuff being sold by these witches, right? Witchcraft has always been heavily tied to early medicine and particularly the use of botanical drugs.
This often meant abortifacients, right? Like if you got pregnant and didn't want to be, if it was bad for you to be pregnant, especially all of the fucking that goes on in, you know, between these nobles, it's not always a good idea to get pregnant with the person you're fucking. You can get an abortion from these witches, right? From the witch.
But they also offer what are called inheritance powders, which is literally poison to kill a guy you will inherit the money of, right? Right. Like, often your husband.
And over the middle of the Sun King's reign, it becomes very common to poison rivals for his affections. in other words you are trying to kill people if they are closer to the king and you want to be

close to the king. The most popular poisons are arsenic and antimony.
In Versailles, these were often snuck. How would you guess? What would you guess is the most common way to poison people to death in Versailles? Well, poison them to death.
I thought we'd talk about transporting.

I'm going to guess.

No, no, no.

I'm going to guess that it is like they sneak it into the food.

Okay.

You're going to guess food.

And you get a guess for the most common way to poison someone at Versailles.

Something to do with clothing, some sort of like some sort of accessory, perhaps that can have a poison poison on it that is actually one of them um but that's not the most common method um so i'm gonna give you a partial uh sophie you're wrong the most common way to poison people at versailles is to put poison in their enemas so oh what a horrible way to go what a pain in the ass social life at the palace there's huge feasts all the time right like you're constantly having these big feasts and the king is obsessed he hates it when people don't eat if he is offering you food you have to eat you have to eat but don't shit but don't his presence. Unless you use the shitting, the anima thing.
Yeah. Then that's fine.
Then as now, didn't want to get fat, right? Like there's a degree of stigma around that, especially for like women at the court. And more to the point.
Well, yeah, body shaming has been around forever. Do better, Sun King.
The kind of foods people are eating, these very rich foods, a lot of cheese. People don't poop very well after eating feasts.
Sure, sure. Enemas, everyone is taking enemas regularly because it's the only way to relieve yourself.
And then getting poisoned. eat 6 000 calories of fine cheese and meat what year was this as well this is like the 1670s 1680s how many people died from these fucking things like there must have been a lot of infections and we'll never know because like number one arsenic looks like a couple of other things and somebody has a feast and and then has a heart attack or people get sick and die for all sorts of reasons.

And we're bad at diagnosing, right?

Right.

We do know there are a number of proven poisonings, but we don't know how many of the deaths at Versailles.

Because Versailles is also, it's very easy to get sick there because you live in a big house with 3, 3000 people. People like pissing and pooping in weird places.
That's not much of the problem. It's more just that flu season comes around and everyone is in the same big room together.
Right? It's just easy to get sick. Again, the thought that you had in part one, the smell of this place.
The smell of this place. You know, it's so crazy in that.
Because people are also, yeah, I mean, they're doing their enemas in their private apartments in the chamber pots, but enemas are a daily thing for a number of people. And yeah, that's an easy way to kill them is you just put arsenic in their enema, they'll shoot it up their ass and get sick.
Right. Now, Ed, you got this right.

A very common method of poisoning,

you would also impregnate someone's clothes with arsenic, right?

So you would put it on like the arms of their clothing or whatever,

and that wouldn't do anything unless they like touch their mouth or their eyes,

but people do that all the time, right?

So the idea is that you put it in the garment,

they'll get it on their hands. Eventually, they'll touch themselves somewhere that the poison can get in, right? And the symptoms of arsenic are kind of similar to syphilis.
So it has this benefit of if they don't know they've been poisoned, everyone thinks they've caught syphilis, and there's a huge social stigma to getting syphilis. So again, if you're trying to damage a rival, you don't necessarily have to kill them.
If you can make people think they have syphilis, you can do some damage to their reputation. They won't be able to fuck people anymore.
You know? Yeah, it's an issue. Now, doctors had developed methods for testing poison by this point, and they are awful.
The main one was, if you think someone was poisoned, right? If some guy gets sick suddenly, and he's like, I think I was poisoned, And you are awful. The main one was if you think someone was poisoned, right? If some guy gets sick suddenly and he's like, I think I was poisoned, you feed whatever liquid or powder they think that they were poisoned with to a dog.
And if the dog survives, it's not poison. If the dog dies, it's poison, right? Pretty brutal, but like, it makes sense.
Now, because the stakes were high and royalty is at risk, doctors are constantly pushed to innovate and create antidotes and they don't really know what they're doing. Very rarely do these work.
And in order to try and figure out if they do work, there's enough of science is becoming a thing in this period. Right.
We're not quite at the enlightenment, but people are starting to do science. And one of the ways in which they try to scientifically create antidotes is when a doctor thinks he's figured out an antidote to a poison, they'll find a death row prisoner who volunteers and they'll poison them and then give them the antidote.
And if they survive, their sentence is commuted. They get off of death row, row right i honestly would believe that they were just sent back to prison like no they're they're not there's a reward um people usually don't survive right was all of this testing created specifically because of a sigh yeah i mean not not i mean that's not the i guess there are people other people in Europe are getting poisoned.
This is not only a thing in France, right? Elements of this exist elsewhere. But this poisoning economy is created and largely develops.
Because of the big sex house. Shit like this existed under the Roman Empire and further back.
People have always provided poisons and stuff. But this specific version of the industry crops up as a result of versailles right you've got the witch economy you've got the poison economy and of course the devil economy yeah yeah basically the the extant poisoning and devil economy that had existed in france that was probably similar to the way it works in its neighbors becomes this specific thing because of Versailles, right? That's fair to say, I think.
I don't want to be like, no one else poisons people, right? Everyone's poisoning people, you know? We poison people today. We've gotten very good at it, thanks to the Russians, you know? I thought it was going to be an ad break.
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Ed, I can't believe you didn't accept the Novichuk ads for better offline it really seems like a natural uh move for you you know i'm just saving my first like ad read for like hanwa i think like or lockheed you know the the greats the really i want to associate with the brand i mean we're working on a raytheon sponsorship for you thank Thank you. This is Cool Zone Media.
Yeah. You get the best.
Largely sponsored by Raytheon. Oh, God.
Or a fucking, who is it? The Sikorsky? Like, get Ed doing Blackhawk ads? We're called Academy now. And that's in the past.
That's in the past. Oh, God.
So back to the poisoning economy. Periodically, poisoners would be caught and brought to justice.
This happened in 1676 with the Marquis de Brinvilliers, who poisoned her father and two brothers, but failed to poison her husband. And it's like a weird story.
Her lover, who was her accomplice in poisoning the rest of her family, I don't fully understand, but he decides to feed her husband the antidote because I think maybe of some strange sense of guilt. So she gets caught and sentenced and executed.
And her trial is a media sensation. All of these newsletters and whatnot in Paris, like every cafe in Paris, people are talking about the trial over this poisoner, this rich noble woman who is poisoning her family.
And one thing they're majorly talking about is before she is beheaded, she says, it's unfair. I'm the only one being punished for this because everyone at Versailles does this, right? All of the nobility does the same behavior.
It's the baseball sticky stuff conversation all over again. It's like when they ban the substance.
Exactly. And she's not lying, right? No.
It's extremely common to do all of this. Now, this is an accurate complaint and it sets off kind of a public moral panic over witchcraft and poison.
Just about the only person who had been unaware of the trade in spells and poisons was the Sun King. Again, because all of this is being done in order to get closer to him and curry favor with him.
He orders the parish chief of police, Gabriel de Leraini, to investigate. What follows is a three-year plunge into the magical underground, where inheritance powders made of arsenic were sold alongside black masses performed by priests.
From an article in the BBC History magazine by Johnny Wilkes, one of the most popular potion peddlers was La Voicenne, who named among her clients those looking for advantage at Versailles. The Duke de Luxembourg bought charms to keep him safe from swords, while a number of women looked for any additive to seduce the king.
I want some sword pills. And there's no other way to protect from a sword.
No, no, no. Only drugs.
And it's funny because swords, at like formal, especially at formal events, but basically all the time, swords are mandatory dress at Versailles, to the extent that if you forget one, they'll give you the loan you a sword at the door.

Oh, you don't want to use the loaner sword.

You don't want to use the loaner sword.

No, no, no.

Everyone's going to be like, check out Dickhead over there with the loaner sword.

He didn't bring his own sword.

That fucker's a rental.

That's a rental sword.

He hasn't even got a sword amulet either. Yeah.
And no sword amulet. What a dick.
So with D'LaRaini convinced of an epidemic, Louis appointed a special tribunal in April of 1679. Its sessions took place in halls lit only by flaming torches, the Chamber Ardente, Burning Chamber.
least Dilaraini says there was a plot to poison the king to death, right? Right. And maybe there was because people don't enjoy living this way.
I was going to say, it feels like there would have been more attempts on the king. I feel like there probably was a plot to poison the king.
Yeah. Seems like a natural thing to want to do in this situation.
To leave the frat house, we work, CES thing. It's an understandable evolution of I'm poisoning all of my friends to get close to the king.
What if we just poison the king? Yeah. We could go home.
Yeah, we could go home. I could sleep.
I can piss. Quote, fear spread among a court already riddled with suspicion and the deaths continued.
But Louis put an end to things after he heard a name of someone implicated that alarmed him,

the Madame de Montespan, his mistress.

Fearing the king may tire of her,

she is said to have sprinkled love potions

into his food,

potions made from Spanish fly,

iron fillings,

sperm, and minstrel blood.

It was even claimed she had a priest

perform a sacrilegious mass

over her naked body,

which involved the sacrifice of an infant.

Montespan was never tried, but the fair revealed something dark and rotting at the heart of Louis' Versailles utopia. Jesus Christ.
And that's the thing. That escalated, huh? That was not subtle.
Wow. Okay.
So this is the thing that's weird? Yeah, have a priest do a spell so the king likes me to. Like, I'm putting spermal blood in his food all right i got the menstrual blood fuck i forgot the cum when we get to come god damn it so get me some cum you over there in the corner you want to make a dollar oh man it's so funny i don't know that an infant was sacrificed.
I feel like every satanic panic, they talk about sacrificing babies. I feel like it's pretty uncommon to sacrifice babies.
But maybe these people are out of their minds. I wouldn't.
And they could get a baby, right? It's not hard to get a baby in this period get a baby is important for the tax cuts right right of course you do need that baby might make you immune to taxes unless it's like the 11th baby in which case but most of the babies are dying so like i can see if like some rich lady's like hey man yeah that kid of yours isn't looking great i need a baby also do you have any cump trying to do one-stop shopping here oh man oh boy what what a great culture i love i love the magic of the court in Versailles.

The common

dead baby trade.

This house is like half of the economy.

This is half of the rich

economy.

I mean, that's how it costs that much.

I don't know if they're spending that much each year

because it does make money by this point. But yes,

this house that cost half

of the GDP to build. That's ruining the lives of every noble it's destroying the country now driving them insane like a gossip industry he has created like the cultural equivalent of a death star but it's aimed at his own country like and it's very random as well all of this, like this story, people can't stop talking about this in Paris.
I mean, I can't stop thinking about it. Yeah, of course.
This is wild. And this massively accelerates the growth of a news ecosystem in Paris, right? And the news, this kind of, I'm going to lay out how this works.
This whole news ecosystem in Paris sprouts, it had existed before Louis, some aspects of it. There had been these things called libelles for years, which were like books about different people in government and politics, including some of the king's mistresses that were like books attacking them, right? Which are usually illegal, but they're sold quite often.
Those that existed before Louis XIV, obviously there had been some kinds of papers in other countries that would get into France. But what really accelerates the birth of a massive and honestly very modern feeling news ecosystem in Paris is Versailles.
Because now that all of power is centralized at Versailles and all of the people in power, including the king, are no longer having much contact at all with regular people, right? They're not governing out of the same city that French people live in. They're increasingly locked in their own world.
So if you're a normal French person, the media becomes

your way to keep in touch with the government, right? This alien world of Versailles, you know?

And so that is a lot of the fuel by which creates something very similar to our current social media

ecosystem in Paris. Part of why this is able to work is that literacy is actually very common

in Paris, even among the poor. Like a significant amount of people do know how to read, even people who do not come from money.
But even if you don't know how to read, there's like an equivalent to TV news, which are called – I'm not going to use the French term for it, but they're called oral newsmongers, right? As in someone who just tells you the news,

right? These are like the newscasters of their day. It's not TV, but there's a large chestnut

tree in the center of Paris called the tree of Krakow. And so in the early mornings, these oral

news mongers will gather up all the newspapers they can, all the gossip they collected the night before and they'll go out and they'll like read the best bits out to the crowd right and you have

you gather up all the newspapers they can, all the gossip they collected the night before, and they'll go out and they'll read the best bits out to the crowd, right? And people will throw them some money for that. And the people who stand around, another chunk of people will stand around listening to these oral newsmongers.
Some of them are just doing that to get the news in the morning. Some of them are taking notes on what these people say.
And then these notes sometimes get turned into

pamphlets, but usually they'll just bring them to the cafes and the bars later in the day and read

them out to everyone there. And as a result, news disseminates in a very modern way.
This is almost like having 24-hour TV news. It's like a podcast, really.
Yeah, or a podcast, right? And that then turns in, in some cases, it turns into like print news, but it also turns into direct gossip. It's closer to like, if you think of the tree of Krakow as like TV news, and then these cafes and bars are like Twitter and Facebook, right? So it is, in a lot of ways, it's an extremely modern-seeming system that develops here.
It's so crazy how many different systems grew out of this necessity to create this insane alien world where the people that run the government. I was just thinking like these are the people running the government.
They're not just like fucking around. They're also running France.
They are running. And that's why, again, pieces of this, aspects of what becomes this news economy existed before Versailles.
Versailles supercharges it and it also fuels it because most, if not most, well, actually, honestly, usually most of what is being talked about at the tree of Krakow and in these cafes starts as gossip. people at the courts smuggle out, send out with an aid or whatnot.
They'll write it down. They'll

send it to somebody that they know, pass this stuff on to the people making these papers that are being smuggled in the France, or they'll pass it on to oral news mongers because I want to get this piece of gossip out because it's bad for arrival. I want to get this piece of gossip out because it will hurt this person close to the king, or it'll embarrass the king and stop him from doing something that's bad for me for whatever reason.
Right. And honestly, no wonder this grew because it was fucking insane.
And if this was going on right now, this would be all I cared about. Yes.
Yes. This is the only thing you'd want to talk about.
It's the crazy house. I would just be like, what's going on? Someone poisoned the house.
They poisoned this kind of crazy house. Yeah.
I hear he pissed. Yeah.
So it was said that if you during, you know, when these oral newsmongers would get up and give the news under that chestnut tree, that if you heard a branch crack, that meant that the newsmonger had gotten something wrong. And so CRAQUE crack became slang for fake news.
That's the first like fake news term in the West. From here, people in Attendants would, again, take notes on the best bits in the decamp for cafes, wine shops, and salons.
Police would sometimes confiscate these notes when they could, but this was all simply too common to stop. The system is still in its infancy during the reign of the Sun King, but it starts to really grow during the reign of the Sun King, and it will evolve over the next two reigns.
And ultimately, this is a huge part of why there's a

revolution, right? The fact that there's these papers, there's these revolutionary presses and

tracts, and the fact that all of this gossip about royalty is really bad PR for the nobility

and for the king and queen. They just sound insane.

They sound insane and awful. And it's kind of fucked up as we'll talk about eventually.
The king and queen who ultimately pay the price, which includes the queen being Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, are not nearly as bad as the sun king. And in fact, my opinion of them is they were kind of trying to do the best they knew how to, but they were raised, number one, in this insane place and a deranged culture that has gotten even crazier by the time they come in.
There's just no chance of them ever fixing things, right? Can I ask a quick question? How long has this been going on so far? How long has Versailles been around at this point? I mean, by the time we're into the 1680s, like 20 years, something like that.

Oh, my God.

15, 20, I think so.

There's like decades of insanity.

Yeah.

We're in this like 1680s now.

People growing up in it, their children growing up.

Yeah.

Well, yes, yes.

Because, again, the Sun King reigns 72 years.

Right.

And, you know, Versailles, he starts building when he's like 24, right? So he is around with it for a long time. People are born and die with Versailles being the center of the French world during his lifetime, you know, and his time as the king.
Now, again, it's important to note that the main reason why this very modern information

ecosystem gets off the ground is there's this desire of what are called the little people to understand what the big people are doing at Versailles. As Robert Darnton writes in The Revolutionary Temper, which is a great book about the way the media worked in Paris leading up to the revolution, for most Parisians, especially the little people, Versailles was an alien world and politics was the king's business, transacted in his name by ministers, courtiers, and power brokers among les grands.
That's the big people. Yet word about the power plays leaked from Versailles and it converged with all sorts of other news in the information system of Paris.
Les grands, at the top of society, had access. And these are not just nobles, right?

Wealthy merchants are also at Versailles.

And in fact, there's a whole cottage industry in books for rich people who are not nobles,

who need to understand the stuff that nobles are raised understanding in order to not embarrass

themselves at Versailles.

That becomes like a cottage industry.

And yeah, a big part of what fuels this is these people doling out rumors and lies often for social cachet. If someone makes a crude joke at the king's expense or flirts with one of his mistresses, they can upset dynamics at the palace in ways that are beneficial to them.
Now, the downside of this constant churn is that people outside of Versailles get this feeling that everything going on there is like illegal, immoral sex, gambling, and wasting all of the country's money, right? Which is partially, largely accurate, right? Yeah, it doesn't sound like they were unreasonable in believing that. What's kind of fucked up is that Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI are like, compared to Louis XIV,

fairly moral people.

They do not engage in at least nearly the same level of adultery. They are less wasteful than the kings before them.
But because the royalty have this reputation by their time, they get that reputation too, right? Right. Because everyone for a hundred 100 years, all that everyone's been writing about how fucked up Versailles is, they're not going to stop now just because these people are like 40% less shitty, right? Which is not to say that Antoinette and Louis XVI weren't shitty or wasteful, they just weren't as bad as their predecessors.
Yeah. Right.
So as he aged, the Sun King did grow less promiscuous and more focused on maintaining control. As Johnny Wilkes writes, Louis turned his life, movements, and even ablutions, which is like, you know, his toilet, his cleaning himself, into a daily performance governed by a seemingly endless list of detailed rituals and strict rules of etiquette, all in order to keep the nobles busy.
All revolved around the Sun King, starting when he first awoke. A select group would be granted access to the king's bedchamber, although they were not to cross the railing to get near the bed during the ceremonial rising.
And only the most senior in the room had the honor of helping Louis into his shirt. Did the same thing at CES.
Yeah, that's exactly how we handle CES. Now, the fact that life there was a constant series of balls and parties necessitated constant grand state expenses for fireworks, which sometimes kill people, and food and the like.
But it also kept the courtiers there in constant debt. Many had to borrow from the crown to afford the accoutrement of life at Versailles.
Wait, what? Yeah, the king- They had to borrow from the king to go to the king's party. Yes, yes.
And this is, again, part of how he maintains control. And part of why it's so expensive is what's acceptable fashion changes on a whim.
So when the king starts to go bald, wigs become fashionable, right? And suddenly everyone should have a wig because the king does. And when the king has ass surgery for an anal fistula, people start wearing like bandages around their crotches.
Like it's... Yeah, my bum hurts too, mate.
Yeah, my ass is also crazy fucked up, man. It's like when we saw those guys wearing the ear bandage at the RNC this year It is exactly like that Sophie Jesus Christ This is like cargo cult shit It's just like that yes Unhinged This is so insane They were right Even if this was just people partying It would be strange But the fact that this is the economy By this point the 16 the 1680s, a decent number of the people here have been raised in this.
They don't know another world exists. Jesus Christ.
In 1683, the queen died and Louis married his current mistress, Madame de Maintenon. He was less of a rake by this point, in part for the sake of his immortal soul.
A king who was known as an adulterer couldn't take communion while he lived in sin. This was a power that the church had, and even the king really couldn't force them to do this.
Once he was no longer in the prime of health, Louis worried about this more and more because if you die not taking

communion, you go to hell, even a king, right?

So that's the understanding that like if the king is committing adultery and doesn't stop

in time to get forgiven and, you know, given his communion and last rites and whatnot,

then he goes to hell.

Even the king will go to hell.

And as he gets sicker and older, Louis worries about this more. Now, as I said, the king, Sun King's reign is impossibly long.
By the standard, like 30 years is a long reign for a modern dictator with access to modern medicine. If you make it to 30 years as a dictator, you are doing very well, right? The Sun King reigns for 72 years.
He is the longest recorded reigning monarch in human history. Now, there's some argument about this with people for whom our documentation is less good because date keeping was just in a very different state.
But it's very hard for someone to be king for longer than 72 years, you know? And it was likely sustained by the complete insane other world he made well yeah that was also the government thing yeah what if congress was just vegas my house yeah what if the house of representatives was a place they lived yeah and fucked yeah that said you know by the time he's getting late in his reign kings are like anyone else else. As they age, the shit that used to work don't work.
And Louis had been, for most of his life, a very successful war leader. But in the last decades of his reign, he makes increasingly poor decisions.
And some of these lead him to participate in the War of Spanish Succession in the early 1700s. A lot of the wars in this period are wars of succession.
A king will die without an heir. Everyone will feel like, well, I feel like one of my relatives should be in there, you know, and then maybe France, you know, can effectively be helping to govern Spain or whatever.
This does not work, or at least what Louis wants out of the War of Spanish succession he doesn't get. The war is kind of a mixed bag for France.
Her ambitions in Spain are stymied, but she does close the war out after years with some strong wins against Austria, right? So it's not a total calamity, but it's hideously unpopular.

And by the end, the country is like bankrupt.

And in fact, the economy shits the bed so bad that Louis has to melt down 10 million livres worth of silver furniture at Versailles to pay the crown's debts. This is not a good deal because it only results in 3 million livres worth of metal.
Newsmongers whisper that the king might have made more headway on the crown's debts if he had sold the crown diamonds. But Louis couldn't stand the idea.
He loved seeing his female relatives,

his nieces and granddaughters and the like, wearing diamonds, and he was absolutely unwilling

to sell those diamonds. And that's unreasonable to expect of him.
Of course, of course, exactly.

And look, if you don't want to sell your royal diamonds, uh, you know.

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You okay? Yep. Yeah, I'm good.
Just emotional that he couldn't have this. He can't turn Cool Zone Media into the party house.
Yeah. This is what CES is going to become for me, though.
This has inspired me. Yeah, I have always wanted to create a giant house and make all of the podcasters live there.
Podcasting Versailles? It's called a content house. It's called a content house.
And don't look up the suicide rate. Yeah, no, that does sound like a nightmare.
Oh my God. The pod save guys are going to be poisoning each other to get closer to me.
Like I said. Actually, that part sounds rad.
Yeah, that sounds great. So, yeah, I mean, we've been back, but Versailles had to downsize in its last years, right? Louis the 14th is not doing as well at the end of his reign as he had at the beginning.
France is broke and it will be in a kind of semi-constant state of being broke until, you know, Marie Antoinette and her husband get forced out. Right.
For an idea of how fucked up things get at Versailles, at the height of the Sun King's power, there had been 1500 fountains at Versailles. Right.
By the time of Marie Antoinette, there are only 300. Tragic.
It's tragic. You hate to see have 200 i mean that's yeah i mean it really is you know and ed i i've been telling you you could you'd need another 1300 fountains and i agree and just i'll say oh fountain technology has advanced so much it is crazy it'll ever be verse this one palace for the king had more fountains by a long shot than Las Vegas, Nevada.
Yeah. Like way more fountains.
How big were they though? Some of them were pretty big. They're pretty big and they have to because the technology is not as good and there's like getting enough water is harder.
they're having to constantly turn them on and off as the king approaches different areas so he doesn't know that they're not on and also just because like you can't have them all functioning at once there's too many so there's this whole network of like people running back and forth the king's going here now you gotta like turn this one off get the flow going to that one so right there's a decent chance he had no idea that any of this is happening. That just like reality to him must be complete, must have been completely insane.
That's what's hard. Like life fucking rocks.
I walk around, there's always fountains. There's always fountains.
Or he took a lot of joy in the fact that everyone was like constantly working. And there was an extent to which he did want everyone always obsessed with keeping him happy right um but it is that also that's kind of that causes brain damage right having being this separated from reality and this insulated from everyone else and living in a situation like this like you would be hurting your head less by just standing next

to 155 millimeter howitzer while it fires all day. Right.
Like I it's I cannot overemphasize

how bad this is for you and how much this affects his judgment making. Right.
Right.

He's also older. Right.
Which means that he's not thinking as clearly as he used to be.

Maybe they're going to be. Maybe there's some dementia here too.
He's sicker. But he makes a lot of bad decisions, right? And he's aware of this to some extent.
His last words are generally reported as being, I have loved war too much, right? Like he really seems to regret. And that's what he passes on to his successor.
Don't do as many wars as I did. It ended badly, right? I got way too into war.
Everything else I did was great. We are broke now.
I had to melt down my furniture. Wait, wait, wait, wait.
But also, the furniture was made of fucking silver. A of it yeah what the fuck it's just a bunch of fucking full metal yeah yeah I think a lot of it's plated oh okay I'm sure a decent amount of it's silver plated but also not all of it right he does have the money for pure silver chairs and stuff you know pure silver chair he's the And he's the king.
Yeah. What the fuck? So good.
And again, this is one of kind of like the, I don't know if tragedy is the right word, but one of the things that is like unjust here is that the last king in his line, Louis the 16th, you know, Marie Antoinette's husband, is going to be murdered in part as a result of this horrible system of debt that gets started in the end of the Sun King's reign. Louis XVI hates war.
He's like the only one of these guys who is not at all interested in starting wars. He does get involved in the war that the US has, right? Like our war of independence.
But he's not like a warmonger in the same way that his relatives had been, in part because he sees where it takes the kingdom, but he's ultimately going to pay with his head the price for all of the warmongering that his grandpa and great-grandpa and whatnot do, or his great-grandpa and I guess great-great-grandpa. It gets a little confusing because since Louis XIV had reigned for 72 years, he didn't have any kids that are alive right like those fuckers all died a while ago you know yeah um they got poisoned or they got the fucking and he hasn't been having more syphilis or whatever yeah well he's had a lot of he's he's got a lot but he's probably probably trickled out as his willy stopped working right right and and so it's it's going to be his successor who becomes Louis XV, which if you've seen the Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette movie, this is the guy Rip Torn plays.
Okay. Yeah.
The second Louis in the Versailles line, there are only three kings during the period of Versailles being the center of France, right? The Sun King, Louis XV and Louis XVI. And Louis XIV had reigned so long that Louis XV is his great grandson.
He was five years old when he was crowned the king. And this came as a surprise.
It was not expected up until kind of the last moment that he would be the Delphine. And Delphine is the French word for the prince that's going to inherit being the king, right?

That's the Delphine.

So this comes as a surprise.

Other people are in line to be the king before him up until the last minute, right?

In the last five years of the Sun King's reign, the Grand and Petite Delphines, which are the first and second in line for the throne, both die of smallpox and measles respectively. Louis XV's brother, who was also ahead of him, becomes Dauphine, but then he gets measles.
And also Louis XV gets measles too, right? They both get measles at the same time. His older brother dies, he again stories like this are very common at versailles in particular that's not the only obviously it's a lot more common to die of sicknesses like this and for them to sweep through families even noble families all throughout europe but everyone you've got 3 000 people living in one big house disease spreads more readily? And a place where people probably hide their symptoms as well,

because they don't want the king to think they've done something wrong.

Because the king gets angry if you're sick.

Because it's your form.

Yes, yes.

So Louis XV ultimately becomes king because three other guys die in quick succession

over the course of a couple of years.

And the treatment for measles that he and his brother both undergo is bloodletting, and that kills his brother, but he survives. Now, in the Sun King's last days, he rewrote his will to limit the next king's power and establish a regency council because he knows that the next king is going to be five, right? And he also knows that- Oh, that's the reason.
Well, the bigger reason is that a five-year-old can't be king. He has to wait until he's 13.
But- Of course. The kid's great uncle, Philip II, the Duke of Orleone, he's the guy who's supposed to be regent, so ruling in the king's stead.
The Sun King doesn't like the Duke of Orleone because he's an atheist and a warmonger, right? Oh, okay. That's how the Sun King sees him, right? And instead, the Sun King wants his bastard son, the Duke of Maine, to be the regent until Louis XV is old enough to take up the job.
So he rewrites his will. But as soon as the Sun King dies, Philippe leads a coup in the wake of the Sun King's death, and he goes to the Parliament of Paris, which is, again, a legal body, and he convinces them to annul parts of the king's will.
In exchange, he reaffirms what is going to be called the right of remonstrance, which is Parliament's power to challenge the king, to say no if the king says, I want a new tax or something, right? And the fact that the Parliament gets this power back is going to lead to a number of conflicts that become contributing factors to the revolution, right? And it's as a result of these kind of court politics, right? Philippe wants to be the regent. He doesn't want this other guy to be the regent, you know? After this, you know, this whole mess with the will is sorted out.
The child king, Louis XV, has a normal childhood, you know, by which I mean at age seven, he's given to a 73-year-old general and taught military etiquette and court etiquette. He learns how to ride and hunt, while Philippe proved that the Sun King had been right not to trust him.
One of Philippe's first big moves is to make a Scottish economist named John Law the Comptroller General of Finances. Law opens a private bank that becomes one of the first banks in the world to issue paper money, right?

Massive innovation.

Unfortunately, the primary purpose of this bank is to take investments for the Mississippi Company, which meant to colonize Louisiana.

And if you've been there recently, you know this didn't work out for the French, right?

You know, New Orleans is pretty nice.

But, like, overall, Louisiana doesn't become a great functional colony. And this is kind of like a Ponzi scheme of its day, because it collapses.
The plan collapses, which kills the National Bank and bankrupts a huge chunk of the nobility who had invested into it, right? Oh God., this is like a massive financial disaster of its day. So more of these guys go in debt to the crown, and the crown knows primarily how to help these guys.
If you want to help these nobles who are close to the king rebuild their fortunes, your main way of doing that is to give them the right to tax certain areas. And there's only a limited number of these taxes.
So you have to create new ones, which means the recovery of these fortunes by the nobles is going to be born largely by the poor and the bourgeoisie, right? Uh-huh. Louis XV gets married to one of his cousins, Mariana Victoria of Spain.
This is a very normal- There's a six-year age gap. She's three and he's nine.
Problematic. Problematic, but not for either of them.
They're not really in charge of this at this point. They're getting a six-year-old and a three-year-old, or a nine-year-old and a three-year-old.
The bride is sent to the Louvre to live with her husband. But after about four years of this, the child bride to the child husband, the child bride to the child king.
Got it. Then Philippe dies and she gets sent back home because she's not old enough to have kids.
Thank God. There's that understanding.
This seven year old's a little young to have children. But you know, it's fucking France.
They were like thinking about it. They thought about

it, right?

Louis XV takes over ruling

duties at age 13 in

June of 1722.

And again, when we talk about

the degree of complicity by this point,

Louis XIV

totally responsible for

his actions. Louis XV

partially, but you do have to take into account this man becomes king at age 13. And again, Marie Antoinette married at 13, right? These are children being thrown into these roles and to the head of this insane, you are taking a 13-year-old and saying, hey, you are now the head of the like insidiously fucked up and mentally dominating cult that has ever existed built for someone else built for someone else good by someone else when they were more sane than they are now which they were not very sane before but now they're really insane this cult designed by like a a once in a several generations political genius a 24 year old mature adult yes good luck good luck so this thing that had versailles had initially been a way for him to exert control by the time his successor takes over the system is it controlling the king as much as it's controlling the nobles, right? They are no longer running things because this increasingly arcane system of etiquette has taken on a life of its own.
And so from the beginning, Louis XV is as much a prisoner of the system as he is the guy at its head. For an idea of how cloying and total it could be, a treatise from 1729 on napkin etiquette

stated, it is ungentlemanly to use a napkin for wiping the face or scraping the teeth

and a vulgar error to wipe one's nose with it.

What the fuck do you do with it?

What the fuck do you do with it?

It's a looking napkin.

You just keep it there for looks.

Yeah.

The same treatise went on to insist, the person of highest rank in the Thank you. It's a looking napkin.
You can just keep it there for looks.

Yeah.

The same treatise went on to insist,

the person of highest rank in the company should unfold his napkin first,

all others waiting until he has done so before they unfold theirs. When all of those present are social equals,

all unfold together with no ceremony.

For this useless napkin? For a napkin! There's books written on napkins! Sick. So good.
Every night includes a grand dinner, which is a public event. Anyone who is at Versailles can show up and watch the dinner, but it's only public in the sense that the public can watch.
Only the royal family gets to sit and eat, right? And based on your rank, if you're a duchess or a princess or someone similarly high ranking, you might get to sit at a stool, right? Okay. Everyone else has to stand.
The king is the only one who gets a chair with armrests. I think the king and queen both get armrests in their chairs.
And if another king is visiting, he gets a chair with armrests, right? Nice. Although this is complicated because of all of this etiquette.
You can, if you were in a room with a bunch of people, people can only start conversations with someone who is of an equal or lower rank to them. So talking about anything is really fucked up.
And generally when kings visit, when kings and queens visit, they visit incognito, which is they pretend to not be the king of Russia or Prussia or wherever. They pretend to be just another random nobleman with a fake name because then they don't have to deal with all of this etiquette.
Because usually if you're a king who's heading there, you're heading there to handle some very serious state business, and you don't have the time to deal with all this bullshit. So you just lie and say you're someone else, and everyone knows, but then we don't have to do as much of the bullshit, right? Right.
But who decides who the social hierarchy or is this arbitrary?

It's been decided over the course of years. So again, a lot of this comes out of the earlier feudal system, right? But you have princes and princesses of the blood, which are above, you know, these kind of lower ranking nobles.
And you've got this whole- This would drive everyone insane. Every single person there is just experiencing psychosis at all times.

People are constantly like,

it's this maddening thing. Like if you are handing, and this happens, if you're handing the king or the queen, if you're the highest ranking guy in the room when they wake up and you're handing them their shirt and someone else walks in who is of an equal or higher rank, you have to stop and give the shirt to them.
There's a, at one point when Marie Antoinette is like new to the palace, this happens like four or five times in a row and she's just standing there naked in the freezing cold. Like for the love of God, somebody please give me clothes, you know, like that is an actual thing that happens.
Oh no, another guy walked in. Another lady walked in.
No, no, no. She gets the shirt now.
Look, we literally, you are not allowed as the king. By this point, if you're the king and the queen, you are an absolute monarch and you are literally not allowed to touch your own shirt because that would be this hideous violation of etiquette that would upset this very intricate social system that everyone is reliant upon.
And the fear was that if you break any of these protocol, everything kind of shatters. Everything collapses.
Right. Fucking hell.
That's exactly it, right? It's like the most expensive cult of all time. It's such a stupid system.
It's so fucking funny. It's really funny and dumb.
So doors could not be knocked on, right? You can't knock on a door because the Sun King was annoyed by knocking. And so again, another intricate etiquette revolves around how you let someone know you're at the door because you also can't open doors.
Only courtiers can open, only like staff can open doors basically, right? No one else can open doors. So you're not opening any doors.
If you want want to get in you have to scratch the door with your left little finger and you're right not you're right courtiers start growing this left fingernail out like the left lower little fingernail out like a coke nail so that they can more effectively scratch the door to get whatever lewis is in is raining's attention at the time just like a little like a little like a talon. Like a talon.
You got a little talon. You got a coke nail for getting the king's attention.
Muscration talon. Lovely.
Etiquette enthusiast and etiquetopedia editor Mara Graber lays out how absolutely claustrophobic the system was by Louis XV's reign. At the palace, the courtiers lived under the despotic surveillance of the king, and upon their good behavior, their deference, and their observance of etiquette, their whole careers depended.
If you displeased a Louis, he would simply not see you the following day. His gaze would pass over you as he surveyed the people before him, and not being seen by the king was tantamount to ceasing to count at Versailles.
A whole timetable of ceremonies followed, much of it revolving around the king's own person. Intimacy with Louis meant power, and power was symbolically expressed in attending to certain of the king's most private and physical needs.
Handing him his stockings to put on in the morning, being present as he used, like, the bathroom, right? Rushing when the signal sounded to be present as he got ready for bed. It mattered desperately what closeness to the king allowed you, whether he spoke to you, in front of whom, and for how long.
The point about Versailles was that there was no escape. The courtiers had to make it where they were.
The stage was the louis, and the roles that could be played were designed by him. It was up to each courtier to fit him or herself into one of the slots provided.
The leaders of all the other towns and villages of France were made, largely through the use of etiquette, and more specifically through rudeness and judicious sliding by the tax-collecting attendants to feel their subordination, their distance from the court. That's a good system of government.
Yeah, it feels like you just live in this constant state of paranoia it reminds me like the death of stalin as well yes just like apologizing to people or like not apologizing because that admits guilt whenever you have an absolute monarchy right and again you know stalin stalinist russia isn't technically a monarchy but it's you've got it's an absolute dictatorship that they're all more similar than they all are different. And any time you have one that's this absolute, it is a cult at the top.
Right. Yeah.
Because everything surrounding the ruler has to be both an altered reality because there's certain things he refuses to see and does not want to be aware of. Right.
Yeah. It's pretty good.
Sounds good. I'm glad that doesn't happen now to people like, for example, the president or billionaires.
I'm glad billionaires don't also live in their own functionally isolated realities where they have no real contact with the world and no one ever argues with them or tells them their ideas are bad, and every moment of their lives is them getting exactly what they want at any given moment, that obviously does not cause them the kind of brain damage that all of the kings of France got before the revolution of 1789. Yeah.
Of course it does. I mean, what I like is that we also don't have like CEOs of public companies like this or just like venture capitalists.
This doesn't happen to every rich guy, right? Every rich guy doesn't have his own Versailles. You know, that would be crazy.
They wish. Elon Musk wishes.
They'd all be insane. Anyway, let's read about the town in Texas he owns now.
Anyway. Yeah.
The school. Or the school.
Now, the one method that out of favor or distant nobles and wealthy business owners had of getting the king's attention outside of cutting through this gordian not a palace etiquette was to get a story true or libelous to go viral among the popular media no i talk right i talked posters yeah they're posters yeah as time went on went more noble. Certain nobles start hosting.
Some of them host printing presses. Others host basically bookstores for these libells, these books that are like unauthorized biographies of the king or his minister or his mistress, right? And these are full-size books, but they're usually cobbled together from days worth of notes like taken at the tree of Krakow and from reports sent on the sly by Versailles regulars,

right? Where some of what's in him is true, some of what's in him bullshit, nobody ever really knows. But there are these books that are meant to be slanderous and popular among the masses by giving you the gory details from inside and the lives of these people who have all the power, right? And these are illegal to be sold in France, but certain nobles who have big properties in France will let people sell books or newsletters there, and then the police can't raid them because that's the Duke's house or whatever, effectively.
The other major thing that I haven't talked about yet that is honestly maybe the number one way in which a lot of gossip gets out. And this is, again, it's effectively like we've talked about how like the salons and stuff, these cafes, we will take their notes from, you know, the morning newsmonger speeches.
That's like Twitter and Facebook. The tick tock of the day, the songs, popular songs, There's a dozen or more different melodies that people regularly just rewrite new lyrics for.
And so everybody knows all these melodies. And on a daily basis, new versions of the song, you'll hear someone singing it at the market.
You'll start singing it. They'll go viral among the whole city, and a lot of gossip and news gets out this way.

This is, again, effectively like the TikTok of its day.

One explanation at the time, this is a contemporary writer

talking about this kind of weird musical culture in Paris,

described it this way.

A dastardly courtier puts them, slanderous rumors,

into rhyming couplets and, by means of lowly servants,

has them planted in market stalls and street stands.

From the markets, they are passed on to artisans,

who in turn relay them back to the noblemen who had composed them

and who will be and by means of lowly servants has them planted in market stalls and street stands. From the markets, they are passed on to artisans who in turn relay them back to the noblemen

who would compose them

and who without losing a moment

take off for a meeting place in the palace of Versailles

and whisper to one another

in a tone of consummate hypocrisy.

Have you read them?

Here they are.

They're circulating among the common people of Paris.

That's so cool.

This is not just song, but a lot of it does come in the form of like these rhyming little couplets, right? Now, in Louis XV's reign, the most popular of these songs, gossip songs, were about his mistresses. Because he was the kind of king who was seen by his wife as little as possible.
And by the mid-1700s, this had reached a fever pitch of unpopularity. Again, a known adulterer couldn't receive the sacrament.
And when the king got seriously ill, which happened with some regularity, given how disease spread at Versailles, he would have to dismiss his mistress in order to take communion, right? This happened in 1744, and it's generally accepted. You dismiss your mistress, then you're good with God again.
You can go to heaven if you die. But if you dismiss her and you get better, you're not supposed to take her back.
Right. At most, you're supposed to find a new mistress.
but Louis XV got really attached to his mistresses and so he takes this lady back and that

scandalizes the people and it pisses off the church and the big part of why people are pissed

about this is that they see this as having a major impact on public health because it's this very fun belief at the time. It was widely believed that when he was made the king, the king gained the magical power that was known as the royal touch, right?

And so a king, by touching you, could cure what was called the king's disease, which was scrofula. Now, scrofula is a kind of tuberculosis, right? And it's the kind of thing that spreads a lot in a society where people don't wash their fucking hands.
And the understanding is that when the king ascends, he gets the power to cure scrofula by touching people, but he loses it if God's not happy with him, right? And the practical issue here is that once a year at Easter mass, the king would go to Paris and all of everyone with scrofula would line up and he would touch them all, right? And obviously this presents there's some danger of the king getting sick from this, right? But this also provides him with a degree of safety because every year a huge number of like the poor people in Paris make direct contact with the king in a way where they see him as saving them. Can you think of how that might protect a king from the mob, right? Regardless of whether they're actually healed of their scrofula, dragula, whatever.
That matters less than everyone sees the king as a part of our public health system. Right.
And also, he is coming out and he helps me directly. I'm not going to murder the king.
You know, why would I do that? Right. But Louis XV loses this power.
And so he stops going to these Easter masses and touching people. And it cuts off a very important connection between the crowned line and the masses in Paris, right?

This is going to contribute to revolutionary conditions. Again, all these are just like pieces of why this happens.
But the fact that the king is under Louis XV, what contact the king, Louis XIV already had reduced significantly by moving out of Paris, the king's contact with regular people. Louis XV cuts off one of the last vestiges of that because he won't stop fucking his mistresses and he gets canceled by the church.
Another issue is that the church threatens to take away because he won't stop fucking his mistresses. The church threatens to take away the Jubilee in 1750.
Every 25 years, the church would forgive everyone in France's sins, right? Oh, God. You don't have to pay.
You don't have to. It's like a big deal, right? And they don't ultimately go through with this, the church.
The king is able to lean on them. But for a long time, everyone thinks that the king has cost them the Jubilee because he can't keep his dick in his pants.
And that makes them very angry, right? Right. Like, this isn't just them being judgmental.
They are seeing significant public health costs. That's how they do this, right? Well, they're going to hell.
People are going to go to hell over you, man. What the fuck? And the popular media goes nuts about this rumor.
As Robert Darton writes, one novelist published a letter from a correspondent who vilified Louis for depriving his people of the Jubilee. It is monstrous that all of France should be deprived of it because the king, by his own fault, is not in a state to receive this grace.
The general resentment was expressed by some of the crudest poems. Louis the badly loved, make your Jubilee.
give up your whore, Madame le Pompadour, and give us bread. Oh.
This is one of those songs, right? It sounds better in the original French, but not when I say it. No, but you don't have the French noble.
I don't have the French gene. No.
But yeah, this is like popular songs. Honestly, like yeah, I could describe it as TikTokok you might even describe it as like punk rock in the 80s right these like songs people are singing about kind of criticizing power it is very cool it's actually very cool that there's like this weird like cottage journalism industry and this weird like this this track shit where this is it is interesting like you can you can almost look at this as like a common point of origin for like journalism, hip hop, punk rock, and TikTok, right? All caused by.
Fucking the king in Versailles, not being able to keep his dick in his pants. Yeah.
Yeah. So what we see throughout Louis XV's reign is a king whose decisions, and some of his decisions are good, constantly drive a wedge between him and everyone outside of Versailles because of the media ecosystem, which at this point has grown to be entirely predicated on critiquing the king and his nobles.
Right. And to everyone's surprise, what's happened here is without anyone meaning for this to evolve this way, this emergent media ecosystem has created a check on the king's absolute power.
As a Parisian comedian, Nicholas Chamfert said, France is, quote, an absolute monarchy tempered by songs. That kind of is really cool.
That is actually very fucking cool. I love that.
that's fucking awesome yeah and the only thing controlling animal house yeah over here is people making up mean songs about him like that's what and the fact that he was too horny yeah i guess he was already he stayed at the same level of horny kendrick's like obliquely shit talking Trump through his presentation at the Super Bowl, right? Yes. In some ways it hasn't changed.
It's just always been understood that if you are good enough at music, no dictator will be brave enough to kill you. Yeah.
Yeah. This is why Billy Joel was allowed to go to the USSR, you know? The power of the piano man.
And why Steven Seagal is fine as well. Is right.
Is right. Is very safe everywhere.
Greatest musician. His great music.
When he went to war, Louis XV in 1740 alongside the Austrians against an alliance of British people, Hessians, Hanoverians, and the hated Dutch, there was a vicious battle near the village of Laffield. In real terms, it was a tactical victory for France.
They take the village, but either a strategic defeat or at best a draw because they lose so many men taking this town, they can't continue the offensive that they had intended in support of the Austrians. That said, they do take the town.
So the king declares it a victory. But the newspapers, and again, all of the newspapers that get into France are printed in Amsterdam, who are fighting against the king.
The king sends back his messengers to declare victory in Paris. The newspapers that arrive at the same time all say France lost the battle, right? Police spies inform the government, hey, most of the media says we actually lost this and it's kind of generating unrest.
An effort gets made to distribute counter propaganda. But it's like when the government tries to make TikToks, right? Nobody, like, the police aren't good at making songs people want to sing, you know? I wonder what the police songs were like.
I thought they must have sucked ass. They did not slap.
It was literally the police. This is where Sting gets his start.
Very horny guy as well. Very horny man as well.
He would have fit in. Tantric sex.
So now by this point, again, this modern ecosystem had largely a lot of it had developed as a way to keep abreast with palace gossip. But at this point, it pivots.
you know and it pivots to this is almost the first time

where you see something like a modern ecosystem obsessing over a major world war in media res, right? In the same way people did about like the Gulf War or, you know, more recently the expanded And judging the government for it as well. And judging the government for it.
The government has – this is a very rare thing and it's really kind of – I don't know if it's the first time this has happened, but I don't know that it's ever happened before on this scale where the absolute monarchy completely loses control of the information coming out of a conflict on foreign soil. Right? Right.
That's a big deal. And this war, the War of Austrian Succession, it's one of a number of wars that some historians will argue should be counted as the first real world war.
I don't care to get into that argument, but this is a massive conflict, right? Right. And the fact that the government of France has completely lost control due to the independent media is incredibly noteworthy.
I want to quote again from that book. Reports of the overseas warfare appeared in the gazettes, and the café sophisticates discussed them.
But most Parisians, if they followed foreign affairs at all, concentrated on the fighting nearby in the low countries where Marshal de Sack scored his victories. They were appalled, therefore, as soon as they learned about the preliminaries to the peace to discover that Louis XV had agreed to return everything France had won at such expense and suffering.
In exchange, he received virtually nothing. He got back Louisbourg, a fortress on the Cape Breton island, while he surrendered Madras, a greater prize, to the British.
To ordinary Parisians with an uncertain grasp of geography, the global readjustment and the balance of power, insofar as they were aware of it, mattered less than the sacrifice of the fortresses in Flanders. Most Parisians, moreover, experienced the war as hardship inflicted on their daily lives in the form of increased taxes, scarcer goods, and higher prices.
The Dixime, a special tax levied since 1741 to support the war, fell on virtually all revenue, although the clergy negotiated an exemption. Salaries were exempt, so laborers did not suffer directly, but the Dixim was a bitter blow to rentiers, merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers.
So there's both this thing that in an earlier era, the king would have been able to spin

as we've got a piece.

We forced a piece on them after all these victories.

And that's kind of all that would have gotten out.

Instead, there's all this reporting on everything that France is giving up in the piece because

the Dutch have a vested interest in that information getting out to the people of France because

it's being printed over there too.

Yes.

And it's being printed over there too.

And so people gain a real understanding of the fact that, oh, no, no, we're being lied to about this war that has fucked up my life. You know, I'm paying a lot more in taxes because of this, and we just gave everything up? What? My son died, you know? It's two very different media ecosystems as well.
Because you've got the internal palace intrigue, quite literally. Yeah.
Which is controlling the nobles with this weird system of rules that change on day. Yeah.
And then, but they've shown no interest for actually controlling the real problem. Like the real, like, the independent media that's fucking their asses up.
No. Because, like, the king is, he's monitoring everyone's mail, right? When when they send out gossip they have to be very secret about it people get punished for this so inside the palace it's as close to a totalitarian state as it can be and then in paris it's like a very free media environment even though this is all technically illegal everything is getting out yeah it's probably because there's so much shit they're dealing with in Versailles that they can't control it at this point.
Well, yeah, and they're not really as aware because they have no connection to Paris, really. Right.
Most of the nobility and certainly not the king. So the Dixame pisses off a lot of people in the bourgeoisie.
There's another tax that just everyone has to pay, which is kind of Louis XV.

He was because the nobles were subject to it too. So you can see it as him trying to modernize and make things fairer, but it just creates more anger and unrest because it's just another tax.
He also puts through tariffs on consumer goods. Prices for the necessities of life start to surge to an unsustainable level.
There are bread riots. You know, people are starving.
In order to try and mitigate this, when the war finally ends, the king orders two days of celebration and the crown provides a feast like food and wine, all you can eat for two days for the little people of Paris, right? So there's a massive party and this is the kind of thing in the past that would have got everybody back to being fans of the king, right? But people know everything that went on behind the scenes. And so for the first time, when the king goes through Paris on his victory march, people don't...
During this massive party where they're all getting free food and booze, no one shouts, Vive le Roy. Nobody shouts like, long live the king, right? Right.
Commoners refuse to do this. And popular gossip notes that women in the market start arguing, making fun of each other by saying, you are as stupid as the piece, right? It's become this- That's brutal.
It's a calamity for the crown.

A dozen people are also crushed to death during a fireworks display due to a bottleneck in the streets. And this is reported on massively, right? People talk about this all that like constantly.
It is like a massive topic of discussion in the media, and every mistake, every attendant death and all of the suffering of the masses, every bad thing that happens adds to the crush of hostile papers, books, and songs attacking the regime. And rather than trying to deal with any of this or trying to directly engage with the people, Louis XV largely responds to a hostile public by drawing inwards and retreating to Versailles.
After the failed celebrations of 1748, the king avoids the capital in 1749 and 1750.

He doesn't go there at all.

Rumors spread through songs, through small papers and newsmongers that he fears sparking

a riot.

And so people really start talking for the first time.

Is the king scared of the mob?

Do we maybe, as a group of angry people in paris have power to threaten the monarchy this is when people really start talking about that you know this is an important step on the road to 1789 right yeah in mid 17 yeah they just lost control of everything they did they didn't really yeah oh they're starting to again they get another 40 years before this all falls apart but these are important the idea of this marinating isn't brilliant yes it takes a while for this to to marinate and this is part of like what leads things to collapse um in mid 1749 a major government minister is brought down by a song. The victim is Comte de Morapas, who was the king's most powerful minister.
He's a close friend to the king, and he is basically his number one advisor. And one day, the king retires.
He doesn't always like to be surrounded by the crowd, so he goes to his royal bedchambers with his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and her cousin, Madame de Estrade, and the Comte de Maurepas. And I think they're all kind of fucking, right? I assume so.
Yeah, or at least they're both fucking at the same time. Over the course of the night, Madame Pompadour hands out white hyacinths as gifts.
And this private moment hits the streets of Paris days later, set to the tune of a popular love song. By your noble and free manner, Iris, you enchant our hearts.
On our path you strew flowers, but they are white flowers. And that doesn't seem super scandalous, right? It is, though, because the word for flower is very similar to a colloquial term for vaginal discharge.
And what this song is saying is that the king's mistress spread VD in this private moment in the royal chambers. That's what the white flowers are like, white vaginal discharge.
It's like she had an STD and she spread it to the king in Moripas. That's kind of what the song is alleging.
I don't think that's actually what happened because that's what the song is. Who cares? It got through.
And here's the big thing. There are four people in the room when this happens.
Right. That was what I was thinking.
It's like, who leaked this? Well, it's Maripas, right? It's the Comte de Maripas because obviously the king's mistress isn't going to leak this. Her cousin's unlikely to.
Sure shit, not the king. Right.
And what makes this even more obvious is that Maripas is a famous and beloved popular songwriter. And he had for years used music to launder gossip and attacks on his enemies at Versailles into Paris.
And in fact, a lot of what we have from this period, from this aspect of culture, these popular political slander songs, are ones that Maurepas wrote. 45 volumes of his lyrics survive to this day.

Jesus Christ.

So this guy was prolific, right?

Again, yeah.

And so when this thing that four people are for

leaks out in song form,

everyone immediately knows,

like, this has to be you, right?

Maurepas, he had tried to spread this verse

to damage the king's mistress

because he was closer to the queen, right?

Right.

His whole thing had been, I want to like separate her from the king. But this blows up because he's very sloppy about how he does it.
And he tries to blame the whole debacle on Marshal Richelieu, who's one of his rivals. But Richelieu figures out what's going on and tells the king.
As Darnton writes, This version of Maripas's fall owed a great deal to the rumor mill of the court and the Baroque character of politics in Versailles.

Parisians were... what's going on and tells the king.
As Darden writes, this version of Maripas's fall owed a great deal to the rumor mill of the court

and the Baroque character of politics in Versailles.

Parisians who had little contact with that alien world

could not be certain about what lay behind Maripas's fall,

but they knew that songs precipitated it

and that the result was a realignment of power.

And so kind of by this period,

you know, 1749,

you've got the king has gotten scared out of Paris by the mob. And now people have realized that like these songs, these like popular, this popular media has the ability to uproot and force government ministers out of their office.
Right. In addition to this, you've created this permanent, because of how negative a lot of this media is, this really permanent breach between the crown and the people.
In 1751, the king attempts a return to Paris. He goes to a mass at Notre Dame, and as he rides in, the crowd that the next king is going to come up in, that is going to continue to continue governing is like it can't do anything but make this system worse.
By its nature, it feeds this media ecosystem that is so toxic to the crown. By its nature, it creates a ruling class who has no contact or understanding with regular people and who will constantly fuck them over in order to pay and afford keeping their fancy party house going.
Right. All of this, all of this has happened by 1751.
And people know everything about it. And they know everything.
Constantly. Yes.
And what they know about it is just told in the most scandalous, ridiculous way. A lot of it's.
Yeah. Yeah.
A lot of it's also in catchy songs. It's called in catchy songs.
They're going to be catchy songs about like Marie Antoinette being a spy for her home in Austria and she's not. There's a lot of valid critiques of Marie Antoinette but she like legitimately did not do any of the things her family wanted her to do in terms of like influencing France to be pro-Austria.
Like they were constantly at her, but it didn't matter in terms of her unpopularity because the mob was convinced and the popular media was convinced that she was effectively a spy, right? Good. Yeah.
Well, probably good for this one, but not good for now when similar things happen. Yeah.
We'll see. Again, this all moved.
The media moved pretty fast in Paris of this day, but not as fast as it works today. And I guess if I have a hopeful thing in terms of – because we are modern day people attempting to make an aristocracy or honestly trying to make a monarchy with themselves as the – that's what Curtis Yarvin and the like want.
They want to be nobles in this new hereditary order under CEO kings. And things move faster now.
And the same dynamics that caused everything to fall apart for the people running Versailles are human dynamics. And these people, I think, are convinced that they can force that out of us by taking control of social media, you know, by breeding it out of people or whatever.
I don't think that they can. Oh, yeah.
Yeah. And in fact, the very dynamics discussed in these episodes are kind of suggesting why they can't because people will just eventually go, what the fuck? Yeah.
Yeah. There's more to talk about.
We may do soon episodes on kind of the end of this process. And what happens with Marie Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI, is also interesting.
They're just not really bastards in the same way that Louis the 15th and

14th are, right? They make a lot of mistakes and they do do bad things, right? Every king and queen does, but these guys are why the system had pissed people off so much that those two needed to lose their heads, right? The terror is largely fueled by the shit that Louis XIV creates at Versailles and that Louis XV perpetuates, right? Like that's all of that anger gets built up as a result of that period of time. And, you know, that's cool.
Yeah. Seems like it ended well for everyone involved.
It ends great for everyone involved. Louis XIV, how'd he cop it? Just his ass? Oh, Louis XIV.
No, he gets smallpox. Oh, okay.
Yeah, he gets smallpox. He has to send away his mistress.
But he's like in his 70s, no? Yeah, he also reigns a crazy long time.

He lives so long.

He reigns for decades.

Again, this whole period is like, there's more than a century of Versailles, even though there's only like three kings, right? So it lasts a while. uh it just isn't you know by i think by by probably like 1749 to 1751, somewhere around then, I think the revolution was inevitable.
There was probably no way just functionally because I don't think Versailles – I think Versailles, among other things, the fact that it was so ossified by this point, it was incapable of changing.

Right.

You had no time to reform things.

You're spending all your time worrying about who's holding your shirt as the king.

Napkins.

You have very little time to fix the way the government works.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The napkin situation is really bogging you down by this point.

And again, all of this was around how the government was run, too.

Yeah. Very good.

Exactly. Jesus.

Yep. It's great stuff.

I'm three times on this show now, and

every time you find a new freak

or series of freaks, the freak collection,

the zoo of freaks,

that's the podcast. That's the show.

That's the podcast.

God damn. And Ed, you have a

podcast. I do.

It's called Better Offline. Got a Better Offline Thank you.
that's that's the that's the show that's the podcast oh damn uh ed you have a podcast

i do it's it's called better offline go to better offline.com email me at easy at better better offline.com if you hate me or love me ideally the latter and if you want to set up a bizarre series of rules that i will make you live by go to our reddit which is r slash better offline we're already working on a Versailles-like system there

yep

yeah

yeah you live by go to our reddit which is r slash better offline we're already working on a versailles like system there yep yeah yeah so check that out you know when finally when he uh when he lives when when ed lives completely surrounded uh by the nobility of france um that's when podcasting will finally reach its apex. No way.

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