The Palace of Pleasure Versailles


The Palace of Pleasure

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The world's most magnificent palace

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is about to become its most notorious.

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Home to decadence on a truly royal scale.

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Prostitution and gluttony.

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Gambling and torture.

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And enough sex to scandalised even the French.

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This is the story of a king who took Versailles,

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turned it into his palace of pleasure,

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and brought the monarchy to the brink of collapse.

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The waking ceremony of the Duke of Anjou,

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by grace of God, King Louis XV, Monarch of France and Navarre,

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and just an 11-year-old boy.

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Louis will reign for 58 years,

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but his whole life will be lived in the shadow of another man's glory,

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his predecessor, Louis XIV.

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Louis XIV was an incredibly tough act to follow.

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He is seen as The Great.

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He is the Conqueror of Europe.

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He adds to France.

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He is the greatest monarch

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of the 17th century.

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He was the first act on the stage of Versailles.

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He was the sun,

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he was Apollo the sun god.

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Everything orbited around him.

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The etiquette of the court, the day of the court,

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the extraordinary life lived entirely in the public gaze.

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In his patronage of the arts, in his building projects,

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in his personal conduct,

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in the way he dressed,

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the way he ate, the way he looked,

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the way he walked...

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From the fountains in his gardens to the silver by his bed,

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he had established a form of etiquette

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with the sole view of making the whole country of France

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entirely focused upon his person

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and his power.

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Louis XV never expected to be king, but both his father

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and grandfather died before they could reach the throne.

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Louis XV loses his parents and his grandparents

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when he's two years old.

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He's an orphan brought up by people

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that he doesn't know very well,

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some of whom are probably fairly

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terrifying as courtiers.

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He is a sickly child very early on.

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Wherever he went,

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Louis was surrounded by the legacy of his great-grandfather,

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the man who first built the extraordinary palace

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that was his home.

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Certainly, one would imagine Louis XV has been traumatised

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by the death of all his near family,

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and is a lonely and probably

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slightly disturbed child in his youth,

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and I think this carries through the rest of his life.

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Louis had been called the King of France since he was five,

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but others ran the country in his name.

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On his 12th birthday, it was time for him to take his crown,

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and his place on the world stage.

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The coronation of Louis XV was a moment of great hope

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and expectation for the French people.

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They'd had long years of war,

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and now the country was at peace,

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and it had a young king,

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in whom it was possible to invest every conceivable hope.

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So, they could project their ambitions

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and expectations for the new reign on this young, as yet, untested king.

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But, there was a shadow over Louis's inheritance,

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cast not by an eclipse, but by a mountain of debt.

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Despite all his success in war and diplomacy,

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Louis XIV never managed to balance the books,

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or even pay for the building of his enormous palace.

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Louis XIV, when he died, left France in absolutely dire straits.

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After a long war he, of course, left France,

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something like, 20 years revenue in debt,

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2 billion livres in debt, at least.

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And this was going to be an absolutely massive problem.

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2 billion livres. That's £160 billion in today's money.

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But, before he could start work on that problem,

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there was one other thing that demanded

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the new King's immediate attention,

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marriage.

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Louis XV was more than ready to get married.

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When he was 15, his original fiance,

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who was the little Infanta of Spain, was still only five years old.

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And, since 15-year-old boys loathe sweet, little girls,

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he was rather embarrassed to have her around the place.

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Also, the ministers were terribly keen to get him breeding,

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so the little Infanta and her dolls were packed off back to Madrid,

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and a new wife had to be found.

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They cast about for princesses,

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and they eventually settled on Marie Leszczynska,

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who wasn't the most obvious choice,

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since her father was the deposed king of Poland,

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and she really had no money.

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She was 22, quite pretty,

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although, as the female courtiers disparagingly remarked,

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"Her complexion had never known any other cosmetic than snow."

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Nonetheless, 15-year-old boys aren't really very choosy,

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and Louis fell madly in love with her at once.

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Royal sex lives were public property,

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and Louis's was much discussed in the corridors of Versailles,

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if not always believed.

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Louis was now a husband, but he had yet to truly become a ruler.

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So, he set out to copy his great-grandfather.

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Louis XIV had begun his reign by becoming his own Prime Minister.

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So, now, number 15 decided to do exactly the same.

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It would have been very simple for Louis XV to choose a prime minister,

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which would have been a much better solution for him,

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because he could have then had someone

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picked and appointed for the job.

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He's got this sense of,

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he has to follow in the footsteps of his great grandfather,

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Louis XIV, and to be a real king, he has to be a new Louis XIV.

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Louis was living just like his great-grandfather,

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ruling as an absolute monarch,

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enjoying the hunting in the forests around Versailles,

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and soon fulfilling the first and most important

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of all his Royal roles,

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fathering an heir.

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The relationship between Louis XV and his wife,

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Marie Leszczynska, started very well, really.

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They managed to put together a relationship,

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which, over a period of ten years, certainly, was quite a happy one.

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They had a string of children and they seemed to have found a certain,

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you know, sort of, emotional support in each other's company.

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More children followed, at regular intervals,

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over the next ten happy years.

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Eight girls and two boys.

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Louis may have enjoyed being a father, but the Queen,

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after a decade of non-stop pregnancies,

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was fed up with it all.

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The Queen began to complain that she was either pregnant, in bed,

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or being brought to bed.

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Eventually, they had ten children by the time Louis, himself, was 27.

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The Queen had really had enough.

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So, she began to tell the king

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that he wasn't allowed to come into her bedroom on certain saints days,

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because she was a very pious woman.

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Gradually the saints days got more frequent,

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and the saints, themselves, became increasingly obscure until,

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finally, Louis lost his temper and asked Lebel,

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who was the concierge of Versailles, to bring him a woman, any woman.

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Louis only had to ask,

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and just about anything and anyone could be provided, and was.

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The King gradually got into the habit of first having dalliances

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with the court ladies and then full-blown affairs.

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Louis began a life of carnal adventures

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that would turn him into one of history's greatest libertines.

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He was a great womaniser, but there was nothing unusual about that.

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French kings were expected to be womanisers.

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This was seen as a sign that they were virile,

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and we're going to produce an heir, and were, in fact,

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acting in an aristocratic and masculine way.

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Indeed, within the aristocratic society

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that the King had been raised,

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the idea of marriage or fidelity was seen as laughable.

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Louis's first illicit amour was Louise Julie de Nesle,

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a beautiful young aristocrat

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and the eldest of five equally attractive sisters.

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What was interesting was that he proceeded

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to take all the other sisters in her family as his mistresses, too.

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And, although it's slightly doubtful

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that he had an affair with the fourth,

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it's probable that he did.

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It was rumoured that one of the sisters, the Duchesse de Chateauroux,

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would ask her other sister to come along

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and give matters a helping hand, occasionally.

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In some senses, it was a scandal,

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but I think people thought it was funny, rather than disgraceful.

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Both Louis XIV and Louis XV had huge sexual appetites

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and perhaps four women were really what the Bourbon blood needed.

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Louis's affairs with his favourite sisters,

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and his simultaneous flings with many other women,

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produced the inevitable consequences.

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In the course of his reign,

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the King would father a whole brood of illegitimate children.

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We're not actually sure how many,

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but certainly in the region of 30, I think, would be a decent guess.

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But as the rooms of Versailles filled up with Louis's offspring,

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the King's mind moved to affairs of state.

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He decided to copy his illustrious predecessor in another way,

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by taking France to war.

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The decision of Louis XV to go to war in 1744 was hugely popular.

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This was what the King of France should do.

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He should be seen at the head of his armies,

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fighting and leading his troops.

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Louis's declaration of war against France's traditional enemies,

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of Britain, and Austria, made him a hero on the streets.

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And so did his decision to lead his armies in person, accompanied,

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of course, by two of the de Nesle sisters.

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But war was to bring Louis his first brush with death.

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While he was at Metz,

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he fell terribly ill, and it was considered that he was going to die.

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Certainly the doctors had given up hope,

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and back in France, the population were shocked, genuinely,

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absolutely frozen with fear that they would lose their king.

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In order, as a Catholic, to receive the last sacraments,

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he had to confess.

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And, in order to confess, he had to send away his mistress

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and renounce her.

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Louis didn't think much of his marriage vows,

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but like most people of his age, he did believe in heaven and hell.

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And he knew which one he wanted to avoid.

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The King,

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like the least of his subjects,

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was afraid of dying

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without absolution,

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and was afraid for the state of his immortal soul.

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He knew that one day he would have to face God,

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and give an account of himself,

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and then he would just be a man before God,

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like any other man.

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The mistresses were sent away, but they refused to go completely.

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They hung around in the town of Metz,

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until the bishops were obliged to send a message

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saying that, "Our Lord wasn't really going to wait upon their pleasure,

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"and would they please get out."

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So, the de Nesle sisters were dispatched,

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the King promised that if he were saved,

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he would dedicate the rest of his life

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to the well-being of religion and his subjects.

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The King received the last rites, but then, miraculously recovered.

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And, it's from this period that his name

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"Bien-Aime", the Well-Beloved, dates,

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because the people were so pleased that their young king

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had recovered from his illness.

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But Louis's new-found piety didn't last long.

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As soon as he possibly could, he went back to his old ways.

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And, within a few months,

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Madame de Chateauroux was back in his bed.

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Louis, the beloved, became even more popular in 1745.

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He was present on the battlefield as the French army crushed

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the Austrians and the British at the Battle of Fontenoy.

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France was the dominant power in Europe, once again,

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just as she had been in the time of Louis XIV.

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It was the perfect moment for Louis to meet the love of his life.

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He's out hunting in the forests outside Versailles,

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and he comes across, in her carriage, this very beautiful,

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very striking young woman.

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Everyone knows he's taken by her.

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People referred to her as Louis XV's latest piece of game.

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She was called Jeanne Antoinette Poisson,

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the future Marquise de Pompadour,

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and she was much more than a piece of game.

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In fact, Madame de Pompadour is a rather well-connected woman,

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with one of the key factions at the heart of power,

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who formed part of a big financial clique.

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What everyone says, she's strikingly beautiful.

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And her beauty is really the key to her initial success.

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She uses her beauty. She uses her very considerable political acumen

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to establish herself at the heart of the King's power.

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She was nicknamed Reinette, the little queen, as a child,

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because when she was eight she had gone to see a fortune teller,

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who had told her that the King of France would fall in love with her.

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So, she and her family were absolutely convinced

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that this was her destiny.

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SPEAKS FRENCH

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She sang, she danced, she had a beautiful voice,

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she was very well read, marvellous conversationist,

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extremely charming woman.

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Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour were really very much in love,

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and, at first, in fact, for some years,

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their relationship was sexually passionate.

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He found her very desirable.

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Not so much, I think, because she was as sexy

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as the de Nesle sisters had been,

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but because she understood him very well.

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She knew how to amuse him, to captivate him, to charm him,

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and to divert him.

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She was a very emotionally intelligent woman,

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Madame de Pompadour, and I think it was this that Louis loved in her.

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Unfortunately, she herself said that she was physically a cold woman.

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She didn't really derive any pleasure from lovemaking.

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She didn't have the temperament for it. But, she tried very hard.

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She put herself on all these sorts of ridiculous diets of, you know,

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egg yolks, and red wine with gold flakes sprinkled on it

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to try and build herself up and increase the heat of her temperament,

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in order to satisfy Louis in bed, but her maid, Madame du Hausset,

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pointed out that

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she would kill herself rather than please Louis by doing this,

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and so she gave it up.

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Madame Pompadour may have been a favourite with her lover, the King,

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but most other inhabitants of Versailles

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were not impressed with her.

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The courtiers loathed Madame de Pompadour, because she was bourgeois.

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They could not forgive her for being middle class.

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It was just about acceptable for a king to have liaisons

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with lower class prostitutes,

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but a maitresses en titres had always been an aristocratic woman.

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Ignoring the snobs at court, Pompadour used all her charm

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and intelligence

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to advance the interests of her small group of friends,

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and do down her rivals.

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She was associated with a cabal, a cabal at court,

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who were constantly trying to promote the interests

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of such and such a general.

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So, she had a kind of political baggage that she carried.

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Children are rarely keen on their father's new girlfriend,

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and the same was true at Versailles.

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Especially when Louis's many children

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saw him spending a fortune on her.

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They felt, rightly or wrongly, that her presence, somehow,

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demeaned their father.

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As a consequence, of course, they famously dubbed her...

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..mummy whore.

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Louis's children may have loathed her,

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but their mother, the Queen, was rather impressed.

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She was particularly nice to the Queen,

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which poor old Marie Leszczynska was very grateful for,

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because until Madame de Pompadour arrived,

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nobody had ever taken any notice of her, at all.

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In fact, the first time she was ever sent flowers

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was at Madame de Pompadour's instigation.

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And, although, obviously, the difference in their positions

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meant that they could never be anything like friends,

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the Queen was heard to say, if there must be a mistress,

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better that it is this one.

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Louis was victorious in war and lucky in love.

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And it made him grow over confident.

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In a grand personal gesture, he agreed to a peace deal with Austria.

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One that handed back most of the territory

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his generals had just won for him.

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His ministers thought it was a terrible idea, and told him so.

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The peace is not a very good peace for France,

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because France gets absolutely nothing for it,

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except enormous debts from its participation in the war.

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The French public, having dispensed millions of livres,

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and lost countless men dead,

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could not understand why their king was giving up his conquests.

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As a result, schoolchildren and fishwives

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were said to be running around in Paris

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with a line, "You're as stupid as the peace."

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Just as Louis's popularity began to wane,

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his love affair with Madame Pompadour

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was also drawing to a close.

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His solution was a private harem in the town of Versailles,

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known as the Deer Park.

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When Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour

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ceased to have a sexual relationship,

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Louis XV didn't really want to replace her with another mistress,

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they got onto well for that,

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and from now on,

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his sexual appetite was catered for

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by a series of young women who were brought out from Paris.

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Teenage nymphets, uneducated,

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often they had no idea who their powerful lover was.

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Young, virginal,

0:25:180:25:20

beautiful girls are brought in for his sexual gratification.

0:25:200:25:23

But, this is developed into something

0:25:230:25:26

altogether more salacious by the press at this time.

0:25:260:25:30

When things had been going well, Louis was forgiven,

0:25:320:25:34

even praised, for indulging his royal lust.

0:25:340:25:36

But after his hated peace treaty,

0:25:360:25:39

people saw their king's behaviour very differently.

0:25:390:25:43

There's a, sort of, gutter press, effectively,

0:25:440:25:47

which just amplifies this,

0:25:470:25:49

makes him an absolute sexual debauchee

0:25:490:25:51

of the worst imaginable kind.

0:25:510:25:53

The Deer Park, obviously, did create rumours, at the time.

0:25:550:25:59

It was, according to them,

0:25:590:26:01

the scene of these terrible orgies,

0:26:010:26:02

in which underage girls would be shipped in droves from Paris

0:26:020:26:06

for wicked Louis XV to enjoy.

0:26:060:26:08

And one of the worst things that was said,

0:26:100:26:12

was that Madame de Pompadour acted as a sort of procuress,

0:26:120:26:16

that she would find the girls for Louis

0:26:160:26:19

and entice them to the Deer Park.

0:26:190:26:22

It couldn't have been less true.

0:26:220:26:24

Madame de Pompadour knew about it, and she accepted it as a necessity.

0:26:240:26:28

Faced with a deluge of criticism,

0:26:330:26:36

Louis turned to the one person he could trust completely.

0:26:360:26:39

Ironically, the influence of Madame de Pompadour actually increases

0:26:540:26:58

as she stops sharing the King's bed.

0:26:580:27:01

She grew more important to him, because she was his friend.

0:27:040:27:07

She was one of the few people, almost the only person,

0:27:070:27:11

that he could actually trust at court.

0:27:110:27:13

You have to remember that the court

0:27:130:27:16

is a place of intrigue and masks and pretence,

0:27:160:27:18

and nobody tells the truth to the King, so he really needed her.

0:27:180:27:22

He needed her in his life as his friend.

0:27:220:27:24

As the top powerbroker in Versailles,

0:27:280:27:31

Pompadour was drawn more and more into the business of government.

0:27:310:27:35

Madame de Pompadour's excursion into politics

0:27:350:27:38

is not something that would make a feminist proud.

0:27:380:27:42

She was a clever woman, but she really didn't understand politics.

0:27:420:27:45

Louis, very foolishly,

0:27:510:27:53

entrusted her as a go-between with the Austrian ambassador,

0:27:530:27:58

and Madame de Pompadour was so proud of herself,

0:27:580:28:00

being given this important role,

0:28:000:28:02

she took it terribly seriously, and was very excited,

0:28:020:28:05

and she was completely manipulated by the ambassador.

0:28:050:28:08

Louis's peace with Austria was unpopular,

0:28:220:28:24

but his decision to allow Madame Pompadour to secure an actual

0:28:240:28:27

alliance with the old enemy was downright detested.

0:28:270:28:30

Madame de Pompadour certainly is in favour of an alliance with Austria.

0:28:300:28:36

So, it's an absolute shock to courtiers,

0:28:360:28:38

many of whom have long-term loyalties,

0:28:380:28:41

and, no doubt, family connections,

0:28:410:28:43

to find that France is now allied with a traditional enemy.

0:28:430:28:46

Criticism of Louis and Pompadour became even more lurid,

0:28:500:28:53

and it reached every corner of Versailles.

0:28:530:28:56

They would accuse her

0:28:560:28:57

of sexual diseases.

0:28:570:28:58

They would accuse her of procuring

0:28:580:29:00

young girls for the King,

0:29:000:29:02

they would say anything they wanted.

0:29:020:29:04

There were secret pamphlets, secret poems,

0:29:040:29:09

extremely rude poems about her physique and her body.

0:29:090:29:13

Poems would be left in Versailles by court officials,

0:29:130:29:16

perhaps even members of his family.

0:29:160:29:19

Some of the secret notes even threatened the King with death.

0:29:340:29:38

One of the most famous of these contained the phrase,

0:29:410:29:44

"Wake-up," or, "Stir yourselves, the sons of Ravaillac!"

0:29:440:29:47

which was a direct reference to the man

0:29:470:29:50

who had assassinated Henry IV in 1610,

0:29:500:29:55

and so, for the first time,

0:29:550:29:57

we start to see references in these pamphlets

0:29:570:29:59

to calls for the killing of the King.

0:29:590:30:02

In 1750, there is the extraordinary episode where there is a rumour,

0:30:420:30:47

and there are riots, that Louis XV is having his police force

0:30:470:30:50

kidnap children so that he can cure himself of some horrible illness

0:30:500:30:54

by bathing in the blood of these kidnapped Parisian children.

0:30:540:30:57

So, this is a very serious, and very shocking state of affairs.

0:30:570:31:01

Louis's one-man diplomacy was supposed to bring peace to Europe,

0:31:190:31:24

but instead, in 1756, he joined his new ally, Austria,

0:31:240:31:29

in a war against Britain and Prussia.

0:31:290:31:31

It started well,

0:31:310:31:32

but messengers were soon arriving at Versailles

0:31:320:31:35

with bad news from the front.

0:31:350:31:37

As the tide of war changed against the French,

0:31:400:31:44

the Parisian public actually got into the habit

0:31:440:31:47

of dancing in the streets to celebrate their defeats,

0:31:470:31:51

and by doing so, showing how much they detested that Austrian alliance.

0:31:510:31:55

The war was not going well for Louis or for France,

0:32:000:32:04

and public frustration with the King took a dangerous turn.

0:32:040:32:07

In January, 1757, Louis XV is going to his carriage,

0:32:140:32:18

going down the steps,

0:32:180:32:20

and a certain individual called Damiens rushes up.

0:32:200:32:24

And then he feels blood and he says,

0:32:330:32:35

"I've been hit. That's the man that did it."

0:32:350:32:39

Damiens is immediately arrested, tortured on his feet

0:32:490:32:54

by the Chancellor, although Louis XV did not want him to be tortured,

0:32:540:32:59

to see whether he had any accomplices,

0:32:590:33:00

and whether the knife was, in fact, a poison knife,

0:33:000:33:03

which is the great fear that they have at the time.

0:33:030:33:06

As far as we can see, he seems to be a nobody.

0:33:160:33:19

He's a Lee Harvey Oswald figure, if you like,

0:33:190:33:22

but what makes people suspicious is that he's a "nobody"

0:33:220:33:27

connected to some quite important "somebodies".

0:33:270:33:29

He's worked as a servant for a number of members of the Paris Parlement.

0:33:290:33:33

People are never quite certain whether he's not part of a, sort of,

0:33:330:33:37

wave of hostility towards Louis XV.

0:33:370:33:40

Louis took this amateurish attempt on his life very badly.

0:33:400:33:44

Although his doctors promised a full recovery,

0:33:440:33:46

he was convinced that this was the end of him.

0:33:460:33:49

It's a flesh wound, the mildest of cuts, effectively,

0:34:000:34:03

but it has a disproportionate effect on Louis XV.

0:34:030:34:06

He goes into a very deep depression after this because he feels that,

0:34:060:34:10

you know, he has become, instead of the Well-Beloved,

0:34:100:34:12

he's become the Well-Hated.

0:34:120:34:13

Rather amusingly, an old marshal comes along

0:34:330:34:36

and asks him to cough, spit, and piss,

0:34:360:34:38

and he says, "Well, you're OK, my lad.

0:34:380:34:41

"There's nothing important been touched."

0:34:410:34:44

But that's not, of course, the way Louis XV sees it.

0:34:440:34:47

The psychological shock of one of his own subjects attacking him,

0:34:570:35:00

this situation is the culmination

0:35:000:35:03

of his lack of virtue,

0:35:030:35:06

so he's bound to feel that it's his own fault,

0:35:060:35:09

he's bound to feel guilty,

0:35:090:35:10

and it's bound to give rise to a great deal of self-questioning.

0:35:100:35:15

Hearing the grim details of the punishment

0:35:150:35:19

planned for his would-be assassin did nothing to improve Louis's mood.

0:35:190:35:23

He's going to pay for this very, very dearly,

0:35:320:35:35

in that he's not merely going to be executed.

0:35:350:35:37

He's going to be put to death in the most horrible way that can be

0:35:370:35:41

devised by judicial cruelty.

0:35:410:35:43

He's executed in the most extraordinarily gory way

0:35:480:35:51

on the Place de Greve, in Paris.

0:35:510:35:54

Strapped down to the wheel,

0:35:540:35:56

and the executioner goes round

0:35:560:35:58

breaking most bones in his body with an iron bar.

0:35:580:36:01

He is burnt with tongs

0:36:010:36:04

and his flesh is knowingly pulled away from his body.

0:36:040:36:08

And it goes on and on and on, but at the end of it,

0:36:080:36:11

four horses are attached to each of his limbs, and they're encouraged

0:36:110:36:15

to gallop off in different directions,

0:36:150:36:18

pulling his body to pieces.

0:36:180:36:20

Well, they do that and it's not working,

0:36:200:36:22

so the executioner goes back and he starts hacking at various pieces,

0:36:220:36:24

so, effectively, he can be pulled to pieces.

0:36:240:36:27

Damiens stays alive and conscious for much of this operation.

0:36:270:36:31

He finally dies after four hours of absolute torment,

0:36:310:36:35

which is going to disgust people by its reports.

0:36:350:36:40

Louis had had nothing to do with the grisly execution,

0:36:440:36:48

but accounts of it stained his reputation right across Europe.

0:36:480:36:52

It gives the reign of Louis XV this incredibly ghastly,

0:36:550:36:59

sort of, backward, sort of, feeling to it.

0:36:590:37:05

Although his physical suffering was nothing

0:37:050:37:09

compared to that meted out to Damiens,

0:37:090:37:11

Louis's mental stability was badly shaken by the affair.

0:37:110:37:15

His closest aides described him as troubled and depressed.

0:37:150:37:20

For a monarch who takes being a king extremely seriously,

0:37:220:37:25

this is a big thing,

0:37:250:37:27

and all the court talk about, over the next couple of years,

0:37:270:37:29

is this depression, this, sort of, melancholic vein to Louis XV.

0:37:290:37:35

To make matters worse,

0:37:460:37:49

the conflict with Britain was proving to be disastrous.

0:37:490:37:52

By the end of what's called the Seven Years War,

0:37:520:37:55

the French were driven out of Canada, India,

0:37:550:37:58

and much of the Caribbean.

0:37:580:38:00

The British, largely because of their Navy,

0:38:000:38:03

were able, completely, to turn the tables on France.

0:38:030:38:08

France has really lost all her pretensions

0:38:080:38:11

to becoming a global superpower,

0:38:110:38:15

and she has lost that to England, basically.

0:38:150:38:17

If the world is speaking English today,

0:38:170:38:19

it is partly because of the outcome of the Seven Years War

0:38:190:38:23

in the 18th century.

0:38:230:38:24

It was a disaster for France, it was a disaster for the French monarchy.

0:38:240:38:29

For a king

0:38:330:38:35

whose greatest hope was to live up to the glory of his predecessor,

0:38:350:38:39

this was almost too much to bear.

0:38:390:38:41

The main thing that a King of France was supposed to do,

0:39:010:39:04

which is sometimes forgotten, le metier du roi,

0:39:040:39:07

was the conduct of foreign policy.

0:39:070:39:10

Now, he wasn't really supposed to mess around

0:39:100:39:13

with things like the Parlement, internal politics.

0:39:130:39:16

That wasn't his job. It was foreign policy.

0:39:160:39:19

And, if you can't even get that right, you're going to be hated.

0:39:190:39:22

Badly shaken by the assassination attempt,

0:39:280:39:32

and widely blamed for a each fresh military disaster,

0:39:320:39:36

Louis hid himself away at Versailles.

0:39:360:39:40

The Seven Years War was, undoubtedly, the nadir for Louis XV.

0:39:400:39:45

He withdrew into himself,

0:39:450:39:48

and instead of doing what he had done during the Austrian War,

0:39:480:39:52

of getting to the front and leading his troops,

0:39:520:39:55

instead he spent his time hunting, and if he wasn't hunting,

0:39:550:39:59

he was with the girls in the Deer Park.

0:39:590:40:03

Louis may have lost a war,

0:40:070:40:09

but he was still the absolute ruler of France.

0:40:090:40:14

And when the criticism of him became too much to bear,

0:40:140:40:17

he came up with a suitably absolutist response.

0:40:170:40:21

Even the first Encyclopaedia in the French language,

0:40:210:40:23

one of the great intellectual achievements of the age,

0:40:230:40:26

went on to the bonfire.

0:40:260:40:29

Unfortunately, Louis XV was, by nature,

0:40:310:40:34

suspicious of anything he saw as unorthodox,

0:40:340:40:37

and as a consequence,

0:40:370:40:39

he just didn't associate himself

0:40:390:40:41

with this great outpouring of French culture and knowledge.

0:40:410:40:44

Louis was still close to Madame Pompadour,

0:40:440:40:48

who tried to change his mind.

0:40:480:40:51

At a dinner party one evening in Versailles,

0:40:510:40:53

a Duke said, "What is gunpowder made of?"

0:40:530:40:58

And Madame de Pompadour seized the moment, and said,

0:40:580:41:01

"It's true, we don't know what gunpowder is.

0:41:010:41:03

"What a pity it is that your Majesty, in his wisdom,

0:41:030:41:07

"you've banned the encyclopaedia,

0:41:070:41:09

"otherwise we could have looked in the encyclopaedia

0:41:090:41:12

"and found out what gunpowder is constituted from."

0:41:120:41:16

So, they sent for a copy of the banned encyclopaedia,

0:41:160:41:18

which, of course, the King had in his private library,

0:41:180:41:20

and they spent the rest of the evening reading articles

0:41:200:41:22

from the encyclopaedia,

0:41:220:41:24

and of course, he was intrigued by this,

0:41:240:41:26

and this was supposed to be one of the reasons why he had it reinstated.

0:41:260:41:30

Getting Louis to rescind the ban on the encyclopaedia was to be

0:41:320:41:36

one of Madame Pompadour's last contributions to his life.

0:41:360:41:39

In 1764 she contracted tuberculosis.

0:41:390:41:42

She's shifted out of Versailles, and courtiers record that,

0:42:010:42:06

I think, as he's seeing the carriage taking her out of Versailles,

0:42:060:42:09

he weeps a tear. So, he is upset, undoubtedly, by it.

0:42:090:42:14

He stood on the balcony and he cried,

0:42:220:42:24

because he had lost the person he had trusted the most in the world,

0:42:240:42:28

and he felt very alone without her.

0:42:280:42:30

Her death in 1764 is followed by the death of his son, the Dauphin,

0:42:350:42:40

in 1765, and a couple of years later in 1768,

0:42:400:42:43

the death of his Queen, Marie Leszczynska,

0:42:430:42:47

so, this is the removal of some very important people in his life.

0:42:470:42:51

The deaths of these people who are close to him,

0:42:550:42:59

in the mid-1760s, undoubtedly has a very big impact on him emotionally.

0:42:590:43:02

The death of his closest confidant began the worst

0:43:040:43:07

period of Louis's life.

0:43:070:43:10

He spent days lost in introspection,

0:43:100:43:12

or deep in discussion with philosophers and astronomers.

0:43:120:43:17

You can see that he did have a clear tendency

0:43:400:43:45

towards some sort of depression.

0:43:450:43:47

For the rest of his life, he remains withdrawn, somewhat depressive,

0:43:470:43:51

and obsessed with death.

0:43:510:43:54

Just as his courtiers were almost giving up hope for Louis,

0:44:160:44:20

he recovered his lust for life.

0:44:200:44:22

The reason was a new mistress, nearly 40 years younger than him.

0:44:220:44:26

I'm rather fond of Madame du Barry.

0:44:260:44:28

She was as beautiful as an angel, and as stupid as a basket,

0:44:280:44:33

but she made Louis very happy. She was utterly, utterly gorgeous.

0:44:330:44:36

I mean, all the King's mistresses were always described as ravishing,

0:44:360:44:39

but I think she was the one who truly was.

0:44:390:44:42

She was fabulously sexy.

0:44:420:44:44

She was, I suppose, the 18th-century version of the tart with a heart.

0:44:480:44:54

Madame du Barry had an instant effect on the ageing King.

0:44:560:45:01

He could think of nothing else but her.

0:45:010:45:03

She was extremely beautiful.

0:45:030:45:05

She was supposed to have looked like a kind of debauched angel.

0:45:050:45:08

Not too bright, but very good fun.

0:45:120:45:15

Madame du Barry sort of gives him a bit of a,

0:45:190:45:23

a bit of a perk up, really.

0:45:230:45:25

Madame du Barry has an enormous effect upon Louis XV.

0:45:300:45:34

He's a man of 60 at this point, and she has been a kept woman.

0:45:340:45:38

I wouldn't necessarily say she's been a prostitute,

0:45:380:45:40

but she suddenly learnt a thing or two in the long periods

0:45:400:45:43

that she spent with a certain number of particular individuals.

0:45:430:45:47

And, I think, Louis XV is delighted with the various tricks

0:45:500:45:53

that she's learned to keep him young,

0:45:530:45:57

and so, it is very good for his mental health, we might say.

0:45:570:46:00

Madame du Barry may have perked up the ageing Louis,

0:46:000:46:04

but that did not make her, or him, any more popular.

0:46:040:46:08

She was absolutely loathed. Everyone hated her.

0:46:090:46:12

The Parisians hated her because she wasn't an aristocrat.

0:46:120:46:14

The aristocrats hated her

0:46:140:46:16

because she was really little better than a streetwalker.

0:46:160:46:18

But, the King adored her, and he made her very happy.

0:46:180:46:22

Louis XV went far too far, and he was seen, really, as slumming it.

0:46:270:46:31

It was beneath the dignity of the king to have these sorts of liaisons.

0:46:320:46:37

There is no doubt that Louis XV was somebody who was seen as becoming

0:46:370:46:41

increasingly dissolute, even degenerate,

0:46:410:46:44

and who was just failing

0:46:440:46:45

to live up to the standards expected of a man who was king.

0:46:450:46:49

Whatever people said about him, the new relationship

0:46:520:46:56

gave Louis the confidence to embark on a grand project,

0:46:560:47:00

to give his new heir, the future Louis XVI,

0:47:000:47:03

the greatest wedding of the century.

0:47:030:47:07

The young Louis was due to marry Marie Antoinette of Austria,

0:47:070:47:10

and Louis wanted the ceremony to take place

0:47:100:47:12

in a brand-new theatre inside Versailles,

0:47:120:47:15

a project abandoned years before by Louis XIV.

0:47:150:47:19

Louis XV felt the Crown was under threat from the Parlement,

0:47:380:47:40

from different sections of society.

0:47:400:47:43

It had suffered the defeats of the Seven Years War,

0:47:430:47:46

therefore, he wanted a spectacular royal wedding

0:47:460:47:50

to assert the splendour and power of the monarchy.

0:47:500:47:53

The politicians grumbled about the crippling cost of the Royal wedding,

0:48:030:48:06

but Louis just kept on spending.

0:48:060:48:08

Parlement becomes an endless thorn in the side of the Crown.

0:48:250:48:29

Sometimes the King is conciliatory towards them,

0:48:290:48:32

at other times he's very repressive against them.

0:48:320:48:35

But in 1770 he decides to tackle the problem in a different way.

0:48:350:48:41

He basically tries to abolish the Parlement.

0:48:410:48:44

Louis's decision to remove the one organisation in France

0:48:440:48:48

that could challenge him for authority

0:48:480:48:51

was a flagrant abuse of royal power.

0:48:510:48:54

So, this is coups d'etat in the sense that

0:49:190:49:21

one of the things that is absolutely key

0:49:210:49:24

for the self-image of the French monarchy is that it is a legitimate,

0:49:240:49:27

absolute monarchy that rules according to the laws,

0:49:270:49:31

so to abolish the law courts, themselves,

0:49:310:49:33

is a very powerful signal,

0:49:330:49:37

and a very blatant act of royal despotism.

0:49:370:49:40

Louis believed he was acting in the best interests of France,

0:49:500:49:54

whose outdated legal system stood in the way of progress.

0:49:540:49:58

So, he introduced wholesale reforms, for example, free justice.

0:50:060:50:11

Also the judges, themselves,

0:50:110:50:12

were now to be appointed by the Crown for life.

0:50:120:50:15

And they would no longer buy their position as judge,

0:50:150:50:18

as had been the case before.

0:50:180:50:20

So, for many, including Voltaire,

0:50:210:50:24

this was seen as an enlightened reform.

0:50:240:50:27

Unfortunately for Louis XV, by silencing the Parlement,

0:50:280:50:32

the King unleashed opposition on a scale

0:50:320:50:35

that had not been seen for generations.

0:50:350:50:38

It was too late for Louis to play the reformer.

0:50:460:50:50

Years of erotic self-indulgence, along with failed wars

0:50:500:50:55

and bungled diplomacy, had cemented his subjects' opinion of him,

0:50:550:51:00

a bad king and a bad man.

0:51:000:51:03

Louis XV, towards the end of his reign, is sunk in vice,

0:51:070:51:10

and the people of Paris and the courtiers

0:51:100:51:13

are all very well aware that he has, somehow,

0:51:130:51:15

taken the path of personal pleasure and not been a very successful king.

0:51:150:51:19

His reforms are falling flat,

0:51:190:51:21

he's got a mistress who is, frankly,

0:51:210:51:24

not of courtly rank,

0:51:240:51:27

and he's simply not kingly.

0:51:270:51:29

On top of it all, on Easter Sunday, 1774,

0:51:290:51:35

The Abbe Beauvais, the most eloquent sermoniser at the court of Louis XV,

0:51:350:51:40

makes this devastating sermon.

0:51:400:51:42

This is really scandalous.

0:51:560:51:58

It is such a direct attack on the morality of the King

0:51:580:52:01

that's never been witnessed at court.

0:52:010:52:05

Louis XV, himself, must be intensely mortified

0:52:260:52:29

by the fact that he is not loved, that he faces opposition at court,

0:52:290:52:34

and for the fact that he is so isolated

0:52:340:52:37

within his own courtly environment.

0:52:370:52:40

If the Abbe intended to wound Louis,

0:52:400:52:42

he could not have expected what happened next.

0:52:420:52:45

Weeks after this humiliating dressing down

0:52:530:52:56

by the Abbe Beauvais at Easter, Louis XV falls ill.

0:52:560:53:00

Nobody knows what's wrong with him.

0:53:090:53:13

And it takes the doctors, gathered around him,

0:53:130:53:16

several days to work out what's going on.

0:53:160:53:19

They bleed him, which can only weaken him, to my mind,

0:53:190:53:23

and then, suddenly, one of the doctor sees familiar blotches,

0:53:230:53:26

and they realise that he has smallpox.

0:53:260:53:28

It is a complete bolt out of the blue.

0:53:310:53:35

Smallpox, in the 18th-century, is still an absolute killer disease.

0:53:350:53:39

He had a particularly unpleasant form of it,

0:53:420:53:46

which was the black variety,

0:53:460:53:48

that changed the entire colour of the face to a sort of dark copper mask.

0:53:480:53:53

And so, he was completely disfigured.

0:53:570:54:00

Even as he approached death,

0:54:000:54:01

Louis's enemies spread stories about his sex life.

0:54:010:54:05

It was suggested that he may have caught his smallpox

0:54:050:54:11

from a prostitute, but the whole idea of a corrupt body of a corrupt king

0:54:110:54:14

were very resonant, and it is thought that this was a fitting punishment.

0:54:140:54:19

The outward and visible sign of an inward, invisible damnation.

0:54:190:54:25

It riddles his body and it produces a horrible stench

0:54:270:54:30

as his inner organs start decaying.

0:54:300:54:32

Underneath it all, he is very devout.

0:54:520:54:55

And he goes into ultra-devout mode.

0:54:550:54:57

He sends away Madame du Barry from the court

0:54:570:55:00

in the same way that he sent away

0:55:000:55:01

the Duchesse de Chateauroux in 1744 at Metz.

0:55:010:55:04

Once she had left, it was possible

0:55:140:55:15

for him to receive the last rites of the church, and, in his final hours,

0:55:150:55:21

he made a great effort, I think, to die as a Christian.

0:55:210:55:25

Messieurs.

0:55:250:55:27

In fact, he did face it, the last few days, with considerable courage.

0:55:530:55:58

He goes about dying like a good Christian, like a good king,

0:55:580:56:03

dying, in fact, like Louis XIV.

0:56:030:56:05

When the announcement came, no-one seemed to care.

0:56:280:56:32

When he actually dies, you can hear a stampede,

0:56:400:56:43

almost a thunder of running feet,

0:56:430:56:45

as everybody abandons the antechamber where he's lying.

0:56:450:56:48

The death of every king, you had to have an autopsy,

0:56:510:56:53

and the King's physician offers this to the ceremonial offices,

0:56:530:56:56

and they don't want to know, at all.

0:56:560:56:57

They turned their back and run rather fast, clutching their noses,

0:56:570:57:02

as they do so, and the King is sealed into an iron coffin.

0:57:020:57:06

Once the news of his death was known, there was great celebration.

0:57:090:57:15

There was a general sense of relief that the man who had once been

0:57:150:57:18

Louis the Well-Beloved, had gone.

0:57:180:57:21

The population had just lost any hope or confidence in their king,

0:57:210:57:25

and indeed, I think it's fair to say,

0:57:250:57:27

they'd fallen out of love with their king.

0:57:270:57:28

It has been argued that the monarchy could never recover

0:57:330:57:37

from the harm engendered by Louis XV.

0:57:370:57:41

He had dragged it into such disrepute that there was no recovery.

0:57:410:57:46

The abiding memory of Louis XV

0:57:490:57:52

is a man who is morally corrupt

0:57:520:57:54

and is unable to rise above his melancholy into any kind of grandeur.

0:57:540:57:58

He is the least grand of the French monarchs, surely.

0:57:580:58:01

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