Episode 3 Inside Versailles

Bonjour, and welcome to Inside Versailles,

where I think we spotted our villain, Duke of Cassel. Evil.

-Handsome.

-OK, weird, but fine.

-Just me?

And, also we've seen tragedy for the Parthenay family.

Another scene I want to talk about though...

It's a flashback, it's a quick scene, and we see Louis, a young

Louis, being initiated into the ways of love by a naked older lady.

What's going on there?

Well, you might think this is just a fictional device,

but that really did happen. Louis' mother, Anne of Austria,

she wanted to control everything about him

including his first sexual experience,

so she chose a lady-in-waiting, Madame de Beauvais,

chosen because she was loyal, and also because she was ugly.

Those were two very useful things for Anne of Austria.

But Louis was very grateful for her attentions.

They had a few rolls in the hay, and he gave her a pension,

he gave her a house.

But what Anne of Austria is doing there is making sure that he

learns about sexual initiations,

not from a glamorous lady-in-waiting who might exploit him,

not to fall in love with a girl of his own age,

she wants to make him marry for political reasons,

and take mistresses for sex, which is exactly what happened.

So, Anne was incredibly successful about controlling her son's emotional life.

OK, so we've got a quick insight into his childhood there,

and actually, it's an interesting time politically,

so we should probably start talking to our expert, Doctor Sara Barker

about the politics of this period in history which we call the "Fronde". What is the Fronde?

The Fronde is essentially a period of civil war that really

rocks France to the core in the middle of the 17th century.

It starts really as a revolt over taxes,

always a sore point for people,

but by that point, in the minority,

so many people are upset with Anne, and also with Louis'

chief minister, that it really spirals out of control.

Everybody seems to get involved at one point or another

and it really does shake France for five years, essentially.

So, this word, la Fronde, it comes from the French for catapult,

-doesn't it?

-Yes, we've got barricades in the streets of Paris.

-With catapults?

-With catapults.

We have princes getting involved, Louis' uncle gets involved,

the nobles get involved. Entire towns go into insurrection.

The town of Bordeaux essentially revolts up against everybody

-and sets themselves up as an entirely separate system.

-Oh, wow.

It's really... It doesn't get more serious.

It's the people versus the monarchy.

It's the people, it's the nobles, it's the "parlement".

It's absolutely everybody.

The critical thing is that nobody manages to sort of

ally with the different groups, so it all kind of flounders.

Because it seems like, when you look at it, an unwinnable possibility.

Everyone is against Anne and Mazarin,

so how can they possibly win? And yet they do.

And at the same time, you've got the civil war going on in England.

-You've got that ending badly.

-Yeah.

But there's no kind of focal point for everybody to really,

sort of, coalesce and agree on.

So, it's a mess, but it's a mess that's unwinnable.

So, the Fronde, it seems as if they're going to win

and yet it collapses into recriminations and divisions.

But what we've got here is this

picture of Louis crushing

the Fronde. So I think he's meant

-to be Jupiter here.

-Rather good publicity...

Yeah, as if it's all his amazing success rather than

the fact that they all just lost.

-So, Louis was a pre-adolescent at this point, wasn't he?

-Yeah.

Quite young, and yet here he's this God already,

so royal propaganda, crushing the Fronde,

-it's already working well for him.

-Absolutely.

And I think it's worth pointing out that the Fronde was

absolutely a formative experience for Louis.

At one point he has to flee Paris in the middle of the night

-because things are getting too dangerous.

-He's under house arrest as well.

He's under house arrest. It's an incredibly traumatic experience for him

and he really sees what happens when people really go against the monarchy.

And I think it's something that stays with him

-for the rest of his life.

-It's interesting that he writes in his memoirs, doesn't he,

"If you give power to the people, it poisons them."

So, he doesn't think you should give the people a single bit of power.

It completely infects his notion of democracy,

ie, You shouldn't have it.

Absolutely. It makes him very suspicious of what's going on in

Paris, it makes him very suspicious of what the nobles might get up to.

It really is something that stays with him.

So, the paranoid Louis we see in this series owes a lot

-to the fact of this Fronde rebellion.

-Absolutely.

So, he's had a pretty torrid time as a young man.

And Versailles... Is that his response to not enjoying himself in Paris

and seeing the threatened nobility, or is it just a pleasure palace?

I think it's a little bit of both, really.

It certainly is a place that he feels that he can control

and that he can use the nobles as he wants to.

I think one of the things that it's useful to remember is that he

didn't just go to Versailles straight away.

It was a hunting lodge, it had been used by his father,

but there were other royal palaces that he stayed in.

The move to Versailles as we think of Versailles is actually far

more gradual than is perhaps depicted.

And in this episode we've seen Louis demanding

proof of nobility from his dukes and his counts.

Did that happen? Is that true?

Is he actually wielding that kind of power and saying

"OK, prove to me that you deserve to be here."

Or is that more of a poetical imagination in the drama?

No, no, that did happen.

There was a big commission in the 1660s

and 1670s where people were expected to produce letters of nobility

to commissioners who'd been sent out.

It was something that his father had tried to do as well.

Actually, a lot of it comes down to tax.

-If you're a noble, you don't pay tax.

-Ah, that's worth having.

And there's quite a few people who'd like to be able to sidestep that.

But also, it's a nice thing to be a noble.

It conveys honour and grandeur.

So there is this attempt to try and control, survey the nobility.

It doesn't go very well. They soon realise that it's actually

a real headache to try and organise that.

With Cassel, we have here a very powerful man who is putting

up resistance. Is that happing as well? I mean we've seen,

obviously, the Parthenay family

being brutally murdered on the roads.

Is there a sense that there's conspiracies afoot here?

I don't think it's quite so pronounced as we're perhaps seeing in the drama.

So you don't see anyone stealing marble on the way to Versailles?

Not the kind of thing I've come across, no.

But there is a lot tension within the ranks of the nobility

themselves, they're not just one big, homogenous mass.

There are the great traditional nobles who've got lineages

going back as long as your arm.

And Louis remembers all of those, he has a great memory for the lineages.

There are the new up and coming nobles,

people who are making their way through service.

And the, sort of, tensions between these two groups.

So, we're not getting quite the sort of opposition to Louis.

And I think, particularly after the Fronde, you know,

Louis had essentially won the Fronde,

certainly portrayed himself as winning the Fronde

and I think the nobles learn a lot from that,

that it's not so clever to try and face him outright.

It's perhaps better to try and work within the system a little bit.

You're never going to win, Louis versus the nobles.

Well, thank you so much Sara, that's been completely fascinating.

So, what an episode.

Gripping stuff, there's been murder, there's been nobles versus

Louis and these things are so important

because that's pretty much the

backbone of the entire series. Who's going to win? The nobles or Louis?

-So, join us next week for more from Inside Versailles.

-Bonsoir.

Bonsoir.