Episode 7 Inside Versailles

Bonjour, and welcome to Inside Versailles.

I think we've seen Fabien Marchal not having the best of time

at the ballet, he's not really enjoying it very much.

But someone who did really enjoy his ballet was King Louis XIV.

Kate, he's a brilliant dancer, is that fair?

He was an amazing dancer, we'd put him on the stage now.

And here's a portrait of him when he was much younger, about 14,

playing the role of the sun.

You've got the sun on his stomach and all the suns all over,

even on his knees. And he's playing the sun in a court ballet

and the whole point of it is not just to be beautiful,

but it's also to show off his power and his greatness.

So it might be strange to imagine a political summit now -

two world leaders doing ballet together,

but that was how they did it in the 17th century.

I'd love to see Angela Merkel doing ballet, that would be great.

-With Berlusconi.

-Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Weird but kind of hot.

With Louis you have here a king who is clearly, as you say,

he's training every day for 20 years so he can really dance.

But it's not ballet as we know it now,

it's a 17th-century version which is more theatrical.

It's much more set pieces, less of the fluidity we'd

expect from ballet, so set tableau, moving between them.

That's how we'd expect to see...

Louis was the Sun King in this ballet in 1653,

introduced by his brother,

so it's sort of a movement between these sort of masques.

It's slightly different to the way we see ballet as well -

they never do the fifth position, so they never did that...

That's not very good, but they never did that, because that was

the whole point of ballet, holding your arms was to show off

all your fabulous drapery as we've got here.

So you never put your arms by your side because you've got

so much great flappy stuff on there.

Flappy stuff - that's the technical language.

So obviously here in 1653, this is a performance

when he's just come to his majority.

He's now officially King and this is his way of saying,

"I am the Sun King, I'm going to bring warmth and light to France.

"I'm going to shine upon you all."

And it's an image that he perpetuates throughout

his whole reign really, the idea of being the Sun King,

Apollo, god of the sun.

The Sun King, the power, and also the sun brings everything -

without the sun, we all die.

So we all need the sun, we all need him.

He creates flowers, he creates fertility, he creates happiness.

It's an incredibly arrogant image, it's almost shocking

in its arrogance, and yet it's so successful.

So he obviously, as a great dancer, we think he's probably involved

in some of the choreography, but he's also working with others.

He's a patron of the ballet academy that he sets up,

so he's established ballet as an art form really from very early on,

he's one of the great architects of it.

And ballet of course is not just something Louis does,

it's something everyone at court does.

Men have to be great dancers in order to impress at the court.

Women don't join in to the dancing until a little later on.

That's true. So we don't see women on the stage until much later on.

But you're right, if you're a man and you want to succeed

in court life and any elite life, you have to be able to dance.

So every young man learns to hunt, he learns to ride,

he learns to shoot, and he learns to dance.

And if you can't dance, you're nothing.

It's true. I did ballet as a kid, I'm rubbish and I'm nothing.

Greg, it's been a fabulous episode, full of murder and mayhem.

So join us next week to see how Fabien gets on.

BOTH: Bonsoir.