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

Robert tells Ed about the Sun King's very sad death from butt rot and how his great grandson grew up raised by the insane party house of death that now controlled all of French politics. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Robert Evans?

  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.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  It's mostly what my mother calls me when I've done something.

• 0:19Robert Evans?

  Edward?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Edward Benjamin Zitron. That's when I know I'm in real trouble.

• 0:25Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Edward Benjamin Zitron. Wow.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's when the, that's, that's, yeah, that's, that's when I'm about to really get yelled at.

• 0:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I feel like I need to punish you for something just hearing that.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly it. It's the punishment phrase.

• 0:39Robert Evans?

  So Ed, a better offline, 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 XIV created to govern France.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  During that, during that break between recording episodes, neither of you peed, right? Cause I'm not okay with that.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  Uh, I pissed on a plant.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  What, what are the French gonna do to me?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Behead you. Behead you. It's done.

• 1:06Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  But don't pee.

• 1:15Robert Evans?

  As long as it's like a nice fortress.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  I drink so many Diet Cokes, I would be beheaded.

• 1:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, you would not have lasted a minute in Versailles. Me, I'm great at holding my pee. I'd, I'd have been the fucking king's best friend. We'd have gotten wasted together.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  Fort knocks of piss.

• 1:31Robert Evans?

  We'd have been gambling. It is funny to me that like, all of these royals.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Gambling as well.

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  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 Duke de Orleans gambled away 700,000 livres. Like, just burnt it for nothing? Kind of pissed about that.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or not, as the case may be.

• 2:21Robert Evans?

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

• 2:26Speaker 03

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• 2:31Robert Evans?

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• 3:02Speaker 04

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• 3:35Robert Evans?

  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.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  And they have their own weird culture.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  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.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, he lacks the atrocity gene. True, like, I'm sure he would love to do one, but like, he lacks the killer instinct of these perverts.

• 4:22Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, he did not have to literally fight a series of wars and over to get where order to get where he is, which again, consistently the best thing we have going for us. You know, it's the same as like, well, at least this generation of fascists didn't all spend four years fighting in close quarters and trenches, you know?

• 4:41Robert Evans?

  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?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  It's like Portland.

• 5:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like Portland. Completely my bad.

• 5:23Speaker 01

  You should be. You should apologize.

• 5:28Robert Evans?

  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,

• 6:10Robert Evans?

  you know, gambling irresponsibly, being drunk, sleeping around 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?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Right, and because the peasantry would get morally offended.

• 6:26Robert Evans?

  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 That situation, but the byproduct of this is that the the peasantry and the the like 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.

• 7:11Robert Evans?

  This is a process that occurs over like a century, but this the sheer weight of all these stories changes completely how regular people think about their rulers, right? 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.

• 7:53Robert Evans?

  So like, you don't really care who she fucks, as long as you're able to fuck who you like, right? 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 you get all the tax money from this specific industry. You get something from the king, stuping your wife. Exactly. 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 if like, yeah, my wife is stuping 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?

• 8:37Robert Evans?

  So his uncle is a high ranking member of the Catholic clergy. This guy's pissed that the king is fucking his wife.

• 8:44Robert Evans?

  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 like 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 this same carriage.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  There's a very funny moment where they're all like traveling to the front together one day after they work out their differences and get along. And the, some of like the soldiers they pass are like, I just saw the king and the three queens of France.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  Damn.

• 9:42Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 9:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  The fact they're alive, well, were allowed to live.

• 9:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  I don't know, the, the rest of their 31 year old life.

• 9:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Well into their twenties.

• 9:56Robert Evans?

  And now, 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."

• 10:30Speaker 02

  And they all have UTIs.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  They're eating a ton and they can't shit.

• 10:35Robert Evans?

  No, they can't do anything.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  They're just freezing. It's like cold and you need the poo.

• 10:41Robert Evans?

  If by any chance they were taken ill, fainted, or felt sick, they could expect no sympathy. On the contrary, disfavor set in.

• 10:50Robert Evans?

  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's like, 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 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?

• 11:30Speaker 01

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

• 11:34Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 11:36Robert Evans?

  That's basically Louis XIV's life. Yeah.

• 11:40Speaker 01

  Oh, got another kid. That's crazy.

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  Got another kid. Okay.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  Send me some money.

• 11:44Robert Evans?

  Pay some random lady to take care of it.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I don't want to hear about it, though.

• 11:48Robert Evans?

  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.

• 12:09Robert Evans?

  He is. He's a weird man.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's nothing like Elon Musk then.

• 12:11Robert Evans?

  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.

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  Cool dude to hang out with.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  Hey, come join me at my, my economy ruining house. It will be miserable.

• 12:49Robert Evans?

  It's built on bones and costs half of France to run.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Isn't there a Twilight Zone episode about this with like a child that everyone needs to?

• 12:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, kind of.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  Sounds horrifying. This sounds great for him.

• 13:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's great. He's a happy man. Yeah.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  How many children did he have?

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, I don't know that we have a full idea, but a bunch, a bunch of bastards and some legit kids.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Nice. Okay.

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  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 20 miles or so from Versailles, and the old man who lived there took them in and fed them, right? During a conversation while they're having dinner that night, they found out that he had been a fronture, that is, a member of the rebellion in Louis XIV's 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's just, he lives right next to Versailles, very nice guy, you know? And they thought the king would find it amusing. The king was livid, and he had the man trapped down and executed immediately.

• 13:58Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  So the guy, well, the guy's.

• 14:38Robert Evans?

  The guy.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  The guy, the guy, okay, cool. Why does anyone joke with Louis?

• 14:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  Is it, is it, is there a reward for being funny, I suppose?

• 14:47Robert Evans?

  Yes, if, because a big, big part of why he likes the mistresses he likes is they can make him laugh. If you can make him laugh, you 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?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Comedy is both legal and illegal again.

• 15:06Robert Evans?

  Yes, yeah, it really depends on how the Sun King feels in any given moment. So very dangerous place to take make jokes.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  This is, this is truly insane.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  It's a crazy, crazy culture.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  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?

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, in a way that you would never have been able to guess, like a day earlier.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  And you'll never find out because you're dead.

• 15:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, you're dead, or, and usually just locked away. But if you're, if you're noble, usually you just get locked away.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:39Robert Evans?

  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?

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  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, from these witches, right?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  From the witch.

• 16:38Robert Evans?

  But they also offer, they offer what are called inheritance powders, which is literally poison to kill the guy you will inherit his, like the money of, 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?

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Well, poison them to death. I thought we were talking about transporting.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I I'm gonna guess. No, no, no. I'm gonna guess that it is like they sneak it into the food.

• 17:25Robert Evans?

  Hmm. Okay, you're gonna guess food. Um, and you get a guess for the most common way to poison someone at Versailles.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  Something to do with clothing, some sort of like, some sort of accessory perhaps that can have a poison on it.

• 17:37Robert Evans?

  That is actually one of them. Um, but that's not the most common method. Um, so you 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.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  What a horri- wow, wow, what a horrible way to go.

• 17:56Speaker 01

  What a pain in the ass.

• 17:57Robert Evans?

  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.

• 18:11Speaker 02

  You have to eat, but don't shit. But don't shit in his presence.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Unless you use the shitting, the enema thing.

• 18:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Then that's fine.

• 18:21Robert Evans?

  Then as now, didn't wanna get fat, right? Like, there's a degree of stigma around that, uh, especially for like, women at the court. And more to the point.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, body sh- body shaming has been around forever.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Do better, sun king.

• 18:38Robert Evans?

  The kind of food, the kind of foods people are eating, these very rich foods, a lot of cheese. People don't poop very well after eating feast.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Sure, sure.

• 18:49Robert Evans?

  Enemas, everyone is taking enemas regularly because it's the only way to relieve yourself. After the king forces you to eat 6,000 calories of fine cheese and meat.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  What year was this as well?

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  This is like the 1670s, 1680s.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  How many people died from these fucking things? Like, there must have been a lot of infections and some such.

• 19:09Robert Evans?

  We'll never know, cuz like, number one, arsenic looks like a couple of other things, and somebody has a feast and then has a heart attack or gets sick. People get sick and die for all sorts of reasons, and we're bad at diagnosing, right?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 19:22Robert Evans?

  We do know. There's there. 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 3,000 people.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  People like pissing and pooping.

• 19:38Robert Evans?

  Disease.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  In weird places.

• 19:40Robert Evans?

  That's probably, that's not much of the problem. It's more just that, you know, flu season comes around and everyone is in the same big room together. Right? You know, it's just easy to get sick.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Again, again, the thought that you had in part one, the smell of this place.

• 19:57Robert Evans?

  The smell of this place.

• 19:58Speaker 01

  You know, it smell crazy in there.

• 19:59Robert Evans?

  Because people are also, yeah, I mean, they're they're using, 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 and get sick.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:15Robert Evans?

  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 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 the poison can get in. Right? And the symptoms of arsenic are being 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 your rival,

• 20:55Robert Evans?

  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. 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,

• 21:37Robert Evans?

  doctors are constantly pushed to innovate and create anecdotes. 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 anecdotes 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, right?

• 22:16Speaker 01

  I honestly would believe that they were just sent back to prison.

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  No, they're not. There's a reward. People usually don't survive, right?

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Was all of this testing created specifically because of Versailles?

• 22:31Robert Evans?

  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-

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Because of the big sex house.

• 22:49Robert Evans?

  Shit like this existed under the Roman Empire and further back. People have always provided poisons and stuff. But this specific industry, like, version of the industry crops up as a result of Versailles, right?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  You've got the witch economy, you've got the poison economy, and of course, the devil economy.

• 23:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, basically, 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, 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?

• 23:30Speaker 01

  I thought it was gonna be an ad break.

• 23:32Robert Evans?

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• 23:38Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 23:39Robert Evans?

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• 24:58Robert Evans?

  We're back. Ed, I can't believe you didn't accept the Novichok ads for Better Offline. It really seems like a natural move for you.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  You know, I'm just saving my first, like, ad read for, like, Hanwha, I think.

• 25:11Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 25:12Speaker 01

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• 25:17Robert Evans?

  I mean, we're working on a Raytheon sponsorship for you.

• 25:20Speaker 01

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• 25:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  You get the best.

• 25:24Robert Evans?

  Largely sponsored by Raytheon.

• 25:28Robert Evans?

  Now, get, or a fucking, uh, who is it? The Sikorsky? Like, get Ed doing Blackhawk ads?

• 25:36Speaker 01

  We're called Academy now, and that's in the past.

• 25:41Robert Evans?

  That's in the past.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 25:45Robert Evans?

  Back to the poisoning economy. Periodically, poisoners would be caught and brought to justice. This happened in 1676 with the Marquise de Brignvilleire, 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 like 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 like poisoning her family.

• 26:29Robert Evans?

  And before, 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.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  It's the baseball sticky stuff conversation all over again. It's a little bit of substance.

• 26:45Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And she's not lying, right? Like, 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 like get closer to him and curry favor with him. He orders the Paris Chief of Police, Gabriel de Lorraine, to investigate. And 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 Wilks,

• 27:28Robert Evans?

  "One of the most popular potion peddlers was La Voisin, 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."

• 27:43Robert Evans?

  I want some sword pills.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  And there's no other way to protect from a sword.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, only drugs.

• 27:52Robert Evans?

  And it's funny because swords at like, 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, they'll loan you a sword at the door.

• 28:06Speaker 01

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

• 28:08Robert Evans?

  You don't want to use the loner sword. No, no, no.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Everyone's gonna be like, check out dickhead over there with the loner sword.

• 28:16Robert Evans?

  Didn't bring his own sword. He's rented. That's, that fucker's a rental.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  That's a rental sword. Hasn't even got a sword amulet either.

• 28:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And no sword amulet. What a dick. So with D'La Raini 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. More than 400 people were accused, dozens exiled, and 36 put to death, including La Voisin. And this is partly because, part of why this gets so bad is they, they, or at least D'La Raini says, there was a plot to poison the king to death, right?

• 28:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:57Robert Evans?

  That like, and maybe there was because people don't enjoy living this way.

• 29:01Speaker 01

  I was gonna say, like, it feels like there would have been more attempts on the king.

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  I feel like there's probably was a plot to poison the king.

• 29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:11Robert Evans?

  Seems like a natural thing to want to do in this situation.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  To, to leave like the, the frat house we work, CES thing, like.

• 29:20Robert Evans?

  It's an understandable evolution of I'm poisoning all of my friends to get close to the king. Why don't we just poison the king?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. We could go home.

• 29:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we could go home. I could sleep.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  I can piss.

• 29:33Robert Evans?

  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 filling, sperm and menstrual 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 truffaire revealed something dark and rotting at the heart of Louis' Versailles utopia." And

• 30:07Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  And that's the thing.

• 30:10Robert Evans?

  That escalated, huh?

• 30:11Speaker 02

  That, that was not subtle. Wow. Okay.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Also, this is the thing that's weird.

• 30:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, have a priest do a spell so the king likes me too. Like, I'm putting sperm and menstrual blood in his food.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  Alright, I got the menstrual blood. Fuck, I forgot the cum.

• 30:26Robert Evans?

  Where do we get the cum?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  God damn it. Someone get me some cum.

• 30:30Robert Evans?

  You over there in the quarter.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  Jack off right now.

• 30:34Robert Evans?

  You wanna make a dollar?

• 30:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, man, it's so funny. I don't know that an infant was sacrificed.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, this sounds.

• 30:46Robert Evans?

  Every satanic panic, they talk about sacrificing babies. I feel like it's pretty uncommon to sacrifice babies, but maybe, like, these people are

• 30:56Speaker 01

  Not in that economy, though.

• 30:57Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't, and they could get a baby, right? It's not hard to get a baby in this period.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Tax cuts.

• 31:04Robert Evans?

  Right. Right, of course, you do need, that baby might make you immune to taxes.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Unless it's like the 11th baby, in which case.

• 31:12Robert Evans?

  But most of the babies are dying, so like, I can see off like, some rich lady's like, hey, man, you know, that kid of yours isn't looking great. I need a baby.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  You got any cum while I'm here as well?

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  Also, do you have any cum?

• 31:27Robert Evans?

  Trying to do one-stop shopping here?

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 31:35Robert Evans?

  What a, what a great culture. I love, I love the magic of the court in Versailles.

• 31:43Robert Evans?

  The cum and dead baby trade.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  This house is like half of the economy.

• 31:49Robert Evans?

  This is half of the rich economy. Yes. I mean, that's how it costs that much. I don't know if they're spending that much each year, because it doesn't make money by this point. But yes, it, this, this house that cost half of the GDP to build. Yeah.

• 32:02Speaker 01

  That's ruining the lives of every noble.

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  It's destroying the country now.

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Driving them insane, creating like a gossip industry.

• 32:10Robert Evans?

  He has created like the cultural equivalent of a Death Star, but it's aimed at his own country? Like, it's very weird.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Random as well.

• 32:20Robert Evans?

  Now, all of this, this, like, this story. People can't stop talking about this in Paris.

• 32:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I can't stop thinking about it.

• 32:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  This is wild.

• 32:32Robert Evans?

  This, and this massively accelerates the news, the growth of a news ecosystem in Paris, right?

• 32:38Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 32:38Robert Evans?

  And, 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 and, you know, 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 had existed before Louis XIV.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 33:07Robert Evans?

  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 of a 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?

• 33:48Robert Evans?

  And so that's, 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 news mongers, right? As in, someone who like just tells you the news, right? These are like the newscasters of their day.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:25Robert Evans?

  It's not TV, there's, but there is, there's a large chestnut tree in the center of Paris called the Tree of Krakow. And so in the early- Mornings, these oral newsmongers will gather up all the newspapers they can, all the gossip, you know, 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 know, 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

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  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, right?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  It's like a podcast, really.

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  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. That's 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.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  It's so crazy how many different systems grew out of this necessity

• 35:45Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 35:56Robert Evans?

  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 much not maybe 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, you know, send out with an aide or whatnot. They'll write it down. They'll send it to somebody that they know, you know, passes stuff on to the people making these papers that are being smuggled into France, or they'll pass it on to oral newsmongers 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

• 36:40Robert Evans?

  from doing something that's bad for me for whatever reason, right?

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And honestly, no one to this group because it was fucking insane. And if this was going on right now, this would be all I cared about.

• 36:49Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. This is the only thing you'd want to talk about. It's the crazy house.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Why would you just be like, what's going on? Someone poisoned?

• 36:55Robert Evans?

  What's happening at the crazy house? Yeah.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  He pissed.

• 36:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So it was said that if you during, you know, when these oral news mongers would get up and give the news under that chestnut tree, that if you heard a branch crack, that meant that the news monger had gotten something wrong. And so C R A Q U E, crack became slang for fake news. That's the first like fake news term in the West. From here, people in attendance would again, take notes on the best bits in the camp 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, is still in its infancy during the reign of the sun king, but it starts to really grow during the reign of the sun

• 37:40Robert Evans?

  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, the king and queen.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  They just sound insane.

• 38:01Robert Evans?

  They sounded insane and awful. And it's, it's kind of fucked up as we'll talk about eventually, the, the, the king and queen will ultimately pay the price. Um, you know, which includes the queen being Marie Antoinette, uh, and her husband Louis the 16th 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?

• 38:36Speaker 01

  Can I ask a quick question? How long has this been going on so far? Like, how long has Versailles been around at this point?

• 38:40Robert Evans?

  I mean, by the time we're into the 1680s, uh, like 20 years, something like that.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Oh my God.

• 38:47Robert Evans?

  15, 20, I think so. I, I don't.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Decades of insanity.

• 38:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. We're in this like 1680s now.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  Growing up in it, their children growing up?

• 38:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Well, yes, yes. Cause again, the sun king reigns 72 years.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:00Robert Evans?

  So, 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, though, 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.

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  As Robert D'Arton 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 powerbrokers 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 to understanding in order to not embarrass themselves at Versailles.

• 40:17Robert Evans?

  That becomes like a cottage industry. And yeah, like a big part of what fuels this is, you know, 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?

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Because it was.

• 40:52Robert Evans?

  Which is partially, largely accurate, right?

• 40:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't sound like they were unreasonable in believing that.

• 40:58Robert Evans?

  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 this, because the royalty have this reputation by their time, they get that reputation too, right?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:21Robert Evans?

  Like, because everyone, for a hundred years, all that, everyone's been writing about how fucked up Versailles. They're not gonna stop now, just because these people are like forty percent 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.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:39Robert Evans?

  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, him 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 an access to the king's bedchamber, although they were not to cross the railing to get near the bed during, during the ceremonial rising. And only the most senior in the room had the honor of helping Louis into his shirt.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Ah, did the same thing at CES.

• 42:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, same thing. Yeah, that's exactly how we handle CES.

• 42:25Robert Evans?

  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.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 42:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they, the king.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  They had to borrow from the king to go to the king's party?

• 42:47Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. And this is again, part of how he maintains control. When the sun, and, and part of why it's so expensive is like, 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.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, my bum hurts too, mate.

• 43:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, my ass is also crazy fucked up, man.

• 43:17Speaker 02

  It's like when we saw those guys wearing the ear bandage at the RNC this year.

• 43:21Robert Evans?

  It is exactly like that, Sophie!

• 43:24Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ!

• 43:25Speaker 01

  This is like cargo cult shit.

• 43:27Robert Evans?

  It's just like that, yes!

• 43:29Speaker 02

  On hand.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  This is, this is so insane. They were, they were right. Even if, even if this was just people partying, it would be strange. But the fact that this is the, like, the economy.

• 43:39Robert Evans?

  I mean, by the, by this point, the 1680s, a decent number of the people here have been, like, raised in this, you know? They don't know another world exists.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ!

• 43:55Robert Evans?

  In 1683, the Queen died and Louis married his current mistress, Madame de Maitenon. 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, 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.

• 44:38Robert Evans?

  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 history, human history. Now, there's some argument about this with people for whom our documentation is less good because datekeeping was just in a very different state, but... I mean, I can't, it's very hard for someone to be king for longer than 72 years, you know?

• 45:20Speaker 01

  And it was likely sustained by the complete insane other world he made.

• 45:24Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  That was also the government.

• 45:26Robert Evans?

  That's the other thing, yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  What if Congress was just Vegas?

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  My house.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. What if the House of Representatives was a place they lived?

• 45:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  And fucked.

• 45:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. That said, you know, by the time he's getting laid in his reign, kings are like anyone else. As they age, the shit that used to work don't work.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  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, uh, one of my relatives should be in there, you know? And then maybe France, you know, can effectively, uh, 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.

• 46:24Robert Evans?

  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.

• 47:09Robert Evans?

  And he was absolutely unwilling to sell those diamonds.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  And that's unreasonable to expect of him.

• 47:13Robert Evans?

  Of course, of course, exactly. And look, if you don't want to sell your royal diamonds, uh, you know?

• 47:22Robert Evans?

  I wouldn't sell mine. Buy some diamonds from our sponsors.

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• 48:28Speaker 02

  You okay?

• 48:28Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yeah, I'm good.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  Just emotional that he couldn't have this. That he can't turn Cool Zone Media into the party house.

• 48:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  This is what CES is gonna become for me, though. This has inspired me.

• 48:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I have always wanted to create a giant house and make all of the podcasters live there. Podcasting Versailles?

• 48:47Speaker 02

  It's called a content house.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  It's called a content house.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  And don't look up the suicide rate.

• 48:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, that does sound like a nightmare.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 48:58Robert Evans?

  The Pod Save guys are gonna be poisoning each other to get closer to me. Actually, that part sounds rad.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that sounds great.

• 49:07Robert Evans?

  So, uh, we're, yeah, I mean, we've been back, but Versailles had to downsize in its last years, right? Louis XIV is not doing as well at the end of his reign as he had at the beginning. France is broke, and it will, 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 1,500 fountains at Versailles.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:42Robert Evans?

  By the time of Marie Antoinette, there are only 300. You know? Tragic, it's tragic. You hate to see it.

• 49:50Speaker 01

  I only have 200. I mean, that's.

• 49:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I mean, it really is, you know, and Ed, I've been telling you, you could, you'd need another 1300 fountains.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  And I agree. And just.

• 50:02Robert Evans?

  Fountain technology has advanced so much. It is crazy to be like. Versus this one palace for the king had more fountains by a long shot than Las Vegas, Nevada.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:14Robert Evans?

  Like, like way more fountains.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  How big were they, though?

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  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.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:26Robert Evans?

  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. Right?

• 50:47Speaker 01

  There's a decent chance he had no idea that any of this is happening. That just like.

• 50:51Robert Evans?

  I don't know.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  Reality to him must be complete, must have been completely insane.

• 50:56Robert Evans?

  That's, that's what's hard.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Like, life fucking rocks. I walk around, there's always fountains.

• 51:00Robert Evans?

  There's always fountains. Or he took a lot of joy in the fact that everyone was like constantly working and he, there was an extent to which he did want everyone always obsessed with keeping him happy.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:13Robert Evans?

  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? Uh, like, I, it's, I cannot over emphasize how bad this is for you and how much this affects his judgment making, right?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:47Robert Evans?

  He's also older, right? Which means that he's not thinking as clearly as he used to be. Maybe there's some dementia here too. He's sicker. Um, but he makes a lot of bad decisions, right? And he. 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."

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Everything else I did was great.

• 52:20Robert Evans?

  "We are broke now. I had to melt down my furniture."

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait, but also, the furniture was made of fucking silver?

• 52:31Robert Evans?

  A lot of it, yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  What the fuck? It's just a bunch of fucking full metal?

• 52:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of it's plated.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 52:38Robert Evans?

  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?

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Pure silver chair.

• 52:46Robert Evans?

  He's the king, yeah.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  What the fuck? So good.

• 52:51Robert Evans?

  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 unjust here is that the last king in his line, Louis XVI, 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 war monger 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

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  the price for all of the war mongering 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?

• 53:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:55Robert Evans?

  They got poisoned, or they got the fucking-

• 53:57Speaker 01

  And he hasn't been having more of them.

• 53:59Robert Evans?

  Syphilis or whatever, yeah. Well, he's had a lot of. He's had a lot.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  They probably trickled out as his will he stopped working?

• 54:05Robert Evans?

  Right, right. And so it's going to be his successor who becomes Louis the 15th. 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 the 15th, and Louis the 16th. And Louis the 14th had reigned so long that Louis the 15th 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 Dauphin.

• 54:46Robert Evans?

  And Dauphin is the French word for the prince that's going to inherit being the king, right? That's the Dauphin. 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 Petit Dauphins, which are the first and second in line for the throne, both die of smallpox and measles respectively. Louis the 15th's brother, who was also ahead of him, becomes Dauphin, but then he gets measles. And also Louis the 15th gets measles too, right? They both get measles at the same time. His older brother dies, he survives.

• 55:28Robert Evans?

  And 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, right?

• 55:47Speaker 01

  And a place where people probably hide their symptoms as well because they don't want the king to think.

• 55:51Robert Evans?

  Because the king gets angry if you're sick.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  Because it's your fault.

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. So Louis the 15th ultimately becomes king because every 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 gonna be five, right? And he also knows that-

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the reason?

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Well, the bigger reason is that a five-year-old can't be king. Yeah, he has to wait till he's 13. But-

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  The kid's great uncle, Philippe II, the Duke of Orleans, 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 Orleans, because he's an atheist and a war monger, right?

• 56:46Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 56:47Robert Evans?

  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 gonna 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?

• 57:32Robert Evans?

  Philippe wants to be the regent, he doesn't want this other guy to be the regent, you know?

• 57:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:37Robert Evans?

  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 Controller 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-

• 58:21Robert Evans?

  You know, this didn't work out for the French, right? You know, New Orleans is pretty nice, but like overall, they don't, 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?

• 58:46Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 58:47Robert Evans?

  Like, 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. You have to create like new ones, which means the recovery of these fortunes by the nobles is going to be borne largely by the poor and the bourgeoisie, right?

• 59:17Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 59:18Robert Evans?

  Louis XV gets married to one of his cousins, Mariana Victoria of Spain. This is a very normal. There's a, there's a six year age gap. She's three and he's nine.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Problematic.

• 59:33Robert Evans?

  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, a three year old.

• 59:45Robert Evans?

  The bride is sent to the Louvre to live with her husband. But after about four years of this, Philippe dies.

• 59:51Speaker 01

  The child bride to the child husband.

• 59:52Robert Evans?

  The child bride to the child king.

• 59:54Speaker 01

  Got it.

• 59:54Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:00:05Speaker 01

  But you know, it's fucking France. They were like thinking about it.

• 1:00:08Robert Evans?

  They, they thought about it, right?

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  Against you.

• 1:00:10Robert Evans?

  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 have to do it, 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 most like insidiously fucked up and mentally dominating cult that has ever existed.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Built for someone else.

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  Built for someone else. Good luck.

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:01:03Robert Evans?

  This cult designed by like a, a, a once in a several generations political genius.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  A 24 year old.

• 1:01:12Robert Evans?

  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 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 the 15th is as much a prisoner of the system as he is the guy at its head. For an idea of how cloying in total it could be, a treatise from 1729 on napkin etiquette stated,

• 1:01:53Robert Evans?

  "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."

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  The same.

• 1:02:01Robert Evans?

  What the fuck do you do with it? What the fuck do you do with it? You just, it's, 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 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."

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  For this useless napkin?

• 1:02:30Robert Evans?

  For a napkin? There's books written on napkins.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  Sick. So good.

• 1:02:35Robert Evans?

  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?

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:02:58Robert Evans?

  Everyone else has to stand. The king is the only one who gets a chair with armrests. Um, I think is why, 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?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:03:12Robert Evans?

  Although this is complicated because of all of this etiquette. Like you can, if you were in a room with a bunch of people,

• 1:03:21Robert Evans?

  only 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?

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Right. But who decides who the social hierarchy or is this arbitrary?

• 1:04:09Robert Evans?

  It's been decided over the course of years. So, I mean, 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.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  This would drive everyone insane. Every single person there is just experiencing psychosis at all times.

• 1:04:29Robert Evans?

  People are, people are constantly like, it's this, it's this maddening thing. Like if you are, 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 was 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 a, that's 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, like, by this point, if

• 1:05:13Robert Evans?

  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 like upset this very intricate social system that everyone is reliant upon.

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  And the fear was that if you break any of these protocol, everything kind of shatters?

• 1:05:32Robert Evans?

  Everything collapses. Right, that's exactly it, right?

• 1:05:36Speaker 01

  It's like the most expensive cult of all time.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  It's such a stupid system.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  It's so fucking funny.

• 1:05:41Robert Evans?

  Really, 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, like staff can open doors, basically, right? No one else can open, so you're not, you're not opening any doors. If you want to get in, you have to scratch the door with your left little finger.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  No, you're right.

• 1:06:13Robert Evans?

  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 Louis is in, is reigning's attention at the time.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Just like a little, like a talon.

• 1:06:31Robert Evans?

  Like a towel. You got a little towel. You got a coke nail for getting the king's attention.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Muscischen talon.

• 1:06:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 1:06:38Robert Evans?

  Etiquette enthusiast and etiquetteopedia editor Mara Graber lays out how absolutely claustrophobic this system was by Louis XV's reign. Quote, "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

• 1:07:23Robert Evans?

  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 rules, 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."

• 1:08:05Robert Evans?

  That's a good system of government.

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds, it feels like you just live in this constant state of paranoia. It reminds me of like the death of Stalin as well.

• 1:08:14Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  Just like apologizing to people, or like not apologizing because that admits guilt.

• 1:08:20Robert Evans?

  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. They're all more similar than they all are different. And anytime 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. Uh, 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

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  they have no real contact with the world and no one ever argues them 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.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. Of course it does. I mean, what I like is that we also don't have like CEOs of public companies like this.

• 1:09:27Robert Evans?

  No.

• 1:09:28Speaker 01

  Or just like venture capitalists.

• 1:09:29Robert Evans?

  This doesn't happen to every rich guy, right? Every rich guy doesn't have his own Versailles, you know? That would be crazy.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  They would. They wish. You don't ask wishes.

• 1:09:38Robert Evans?

  They'd all be insane. Anyway, let's read about the town in Texas he owns now, anyway.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. With the school.

• 1:09:46Robert Evans?

  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 gordianate palace etiquette was to get a story, true or libelous, to go viral among the popular media.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Nah.

• 1:10:01Robert Evans?

  Right. I talked earlier.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  Posters.

• 1:10:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're posters, yeah. As time went on, it went more noble, certain nobles start hosting, some of them host printing presses, others host basically bookstores for these libels, these books that are like unauthorized biographies of the king or his minister or his mistress, right? And these are full-sized books, but they're usually take, they're cobbled together from days' worth of notes, like taken at the tree of Krakow, um, and from reports sent on the sly by Versailles regulars, right? People will compile these all into books that are like, you know that guy, what's his name? The dude who's written like a couple of books about the inside of the Trump administration? Michael Wolff.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:46Robert Evans?

  That's, he's, he's doing libels, right? Where some of what's in them's true, some of what's in them bullshit, nobody ever really knows, but they're these books that are meant to be slanderous and popular among, among the masses by giving you like the gory details from inside in the lives of these like 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. Right. Because that's the duke's house or whatever, effectively.

• 1:11:23Robert Evans?

  So 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 where we will take their notes from, you know, the morning news monger speeches, that's like Twitter and Facebook. The Tik Tok of the day, the songs, popular songs. Ah. Couple, 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 seeing it, they'll go viral among the whole city and a lot of gossip and news gets out this way.

• 1:12:08Robert Evans?

  This is again, effectively like the Tik Tok 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 nobleman 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.'"

• 1:12:47Robert Evans?

  That's so cool. This is not just song, but a lot of it does come in the, 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 when you dis- it's generally accepted, you dismiss your mistress, then you're good with God again. You can go to heaven if you die.

• 1:13:31Robert Evans?

  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,

• 1:14:13Robert Evans?

  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 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 a hu- 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,

• 1:14:57Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:15:09Robert Evans?

  Can you think of how that might protect the king from the mob? Right?

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Regardless of whether they're actually healed of their scrofula, whatever.

• 1:15:18Robert Evans?

  Like, that matters less than everyone sees. The king is a part of our public health system.

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:15:24Robert Evans?

  And also, he is coming out and he helps me directly. I'm not gonna 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, you know, Louis XIV already had reduced significantly by moving out of Paris. The king's contact with regular people.

• 1:16:08Robert Evans?

  Louis XV cuts off one of the last vestiges of that because he won't stop fucking his mistresses. And he gets cancelled 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? So you don't have to pay, you don't have to, it's like a big deal. Right? And the king, 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? Like, this isn't just them being judgmental.

• 1:16:53Robert Evans?

  They are seeing significant public health costs. That's how they do this, right? They might, people are gonna go to hell over you, man? What the fuck? And the popular media goes nuts about this rumor. As Robert Darden 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."

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:17:34Robert Evans?

  Um, this is one of those songs, right? It sounds better in the original French, but not when I say it. Yeah.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  No, but you don't have the French.

• 1:17:42Robert Evans?

  I don't have the French gene.

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:44Robert Evans?

  But yeah, this is like popular songs. Honestly, like, yeah, I could describe it as TikTok. You might even describe it as like punk rock in the eighties, right? These like songs people are singing about criticizing power. It is very cool.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  This is actually very cool that there's like this weird like cottage journalism industry and this weird like this diss traction.

• 1:18:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is, it is interesting that 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?

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  All caused by.

• 1:18:17Robert Evans?

  Fucking the king in Versailles not being able to keep his dick in his pants. Yeah.

• 1:18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Robert Evans?

  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 like 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 Chamfort said, France is, quote, "an absolute monarchy tempered by songs."

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  That kind of, that is actually, that is actually very fucking cool. I love that.

• 1:19:10Robert Evans?

  Fucking awesome. Yeah.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  And the only thing controlling Animal House over here.

• 1:19:15Robert Evans?

  Is people making up mean songs about him.

• 1:19:19Speaker 01

  Like that's what, and the fact that he was too horny. Well, I guess he was all right. He stayed at the same level of horny.

• 1:19:25Robert Evans?

  Kendrick's like obliquely shit talking Trump through his presentation at the Superbowl, right? Like, it's, 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.

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  And why Steven Seagal is fine as well.

• 1:19:54Robert Evans?

  Is right, is right, is very safe, uh, everywhere.

• 1:19:57Speaker 01

  Greatest musician.

• 1:19:58Robert Evans?

  His great music. When he went to war, uh, Louis XV in 1740 alongside the Austrians against an alliance of British people, Hessians, Hynovarians, and the hated Dutch, there was a vicious battle near the village of Laufeld. 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,

• 1:20:41Robert Evans?

  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, like, the police aren't good at making songs people wanna sing, you know?

• 1:21:14Speaker 01

  I, I wonder what the police songs were like.

• 1:21:17Robert Evans?

  I thought they must have sucked ass.

• 1:21:19Speaker 01

  They, they did not slap.

• 1:21:20Robert Evans?

  It was literally the police. This is, this is.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  Not great.

• 1:21:25Robert Evans?

  This is where Sting gets his start.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Very horny guy as well, so.

• 1:21:31Robert Evans?

  Very horny man as well. He would have fit in.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  tantric sex.

• 1:21:35Robert Evans?

  So now by this point, again, this 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. Right? 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

• 1:22:20Robert Evans?

  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. And 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

• 1:23:02Robert Evans?

  on the fighting nearby in the low countries, where Marshal de Saxe 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 Medras, 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

• 1:23:45Robert Evans?

  goods, and higher prices. The Dixie, a special tax levied since 1741 to support the war, fell on virtually all revenue, although the clergy negotiated an exemption. The salaries were exempt, so laborers did not suffer directly, but the Dixie was a bitter blow to rentiers, merchants, artisans, and shopkeepers.

• 1:24:05Robert Evans?

  So there's both this, this thing that in an earlier era, the king would have been able to spin as we've got a peace, we forced a peace 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 peace because the Dutch have a vested interest in that information getting out to the people of France because it, you know, it provokes unrest.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  And it's being printed over there too.

• 1:24:30Robert Evans?

  Yes, and it's being printed over there too. And so people, 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?

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  It's two very different ecosystem, media ecosystems as well because you've got the internal palace intrigue, quite literally.

• 1:24:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Which is controlling the nobles with this weird system of rules that change on the day.

• 1:24:57Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:05Robert Evans?

  No, because like the king is, he's monitoring everyone's mail, right? 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, a very free media environment, even though this is all technically illegal, everything is getting out.

• 1:25:28Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:25:32Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, and they don't, they're not really as aware because they have no connection to Paris, really.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:38Robert Evans?

  The, the most of the nobility and certainly not the king. So the Dixaine is, pisses off a lot of people in the bourgeoisie. There's another tax that just everyone has to pay, um, which is kind of Louis the 15th. 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.

• 1:26:12Robert Evans?

  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 like his victory march, people don't, during this massive party where they're all getting free food and booze, no one shouts vive la roy. Nobody shouts like long with the king, right?

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:51Robert Evans?

  Like, like it's like commoners refuse to do this. And popular gossip notes that women in the market start arguing, like making fun of each other by saying you are as stupid as the piece. Right? Like it's become this.

• 1:27:05Speaker 01

  That's brutal.

• 1:27:06Robert Evans?

  It's a calamity for the, for the crown.

• 1:27:11Robert Evans?

  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 the 15th 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.

• 1:27:54Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Robert Evans?

  In mid seventeen, yeah.

• 1:28:24Speaker 01

  They just lost control of everything. They didn't really, yeah.

• 1:28:28Robert Evans?

  They're starting to. Again, they get another 40 years before this all falls apart. But these are important.

• 1:28:34Speaker 01

  The idea of this marinating isn't brilliant.

• 1:28:36Robert Evans?

  Yes, it takes a while for this to to marinate and this is part of like what leads things to collapse. In mid 1749, a major government minister is brought down by a song. The victim is Comte de Moripas, who was the king's most powerful minister. He's a close friend to the king and he is like his, basically his number one advisor, right? And one day, the king retires, you know, he doesn't always like to be surrounded by the crowd. So he goes to his royal bed chambers with his mistress, Madame de Pompadour, and her cousin, Madame de Strade, and the Comte de Moripas. And I think they're all kind of fucking, right?

• 1:29:16Speaker 01

  I assume so.

• 1:29:17Robert Evans?

  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, right?

• 1:30:00Robert Evans?

  She got, that's what the white flowers are like, white vaginal discharge, right? It's like she had an STD and she spread it to the king and Moripas, right? That's kind of what the song is alleging. I don't know. I don't think that's actually what happened. Because that's what the song is.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Like, who cares? Like, it got through.

• 1:30:19Robert Evans?

  Well, and here's the big thing. There are four people in the room when this happens.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Right. And that was what I was thinking. It's like, who leaked this?

• 1:30:27Robert Evans?

  Well, it's, it's Moripas, right? It's the Comte de Moripas, because obviously, the king's mistress isn't gonna leak this. Her cousin's unlikely to. Sure as shit not the king, right? Um, and what makes this even more obvious is that Moripas is a famous and beloved popular songwriter, and he had for years used music to launder gossip and attacks on his enemies at Versailles and Paris. And in fact, a lot of the, a lot of what we have from this period, from this aspect of culture, these like, popular political like, like slander songs are ones that Moripas wrote. Forty-five volumes of his lyrics survive to this day.

• 1:31:08Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:31:09Robert Evans?

  So this guy was prolific, right? Again, yeah. Um, 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? Um, Moripas, he had tried to spread this verse to damage the king's mistress, because he was closer to the queen, right? His whole thing had been, I wanna 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 his rival, one of his rivals. But Richelieu figures out what's going on and tells the king. As D'Arton writes, "This version of Moripas's fall owed a great deal to the rumor mill of the court and the baroque character of politics in Versailles.

• 1:31:52Robert Evans?

  Parisians who had little contact with that alien world could not be certain about what lay behind Moripas's fall, but they knew that songs precipitated it, and that the result was a realignment of power."

• 1:32:04Robert Evans?

  And so, kind of by this period, you know, 1749, you've got, the king has gotten scared out of Paris by the mob. Uh, 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? Um, in addition to this, you've, 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's attempts a return to Paris, he goes to a mass at Notre Dame. And as he rides in, the crowd around him maintains near total silence. An experience so upsetting that Louis the 15th has a road built.

• 1:32:49Robert Evans?

  So he can avoid Paris in the future when traveling to his various properties. And by this point, 1751, the wrath that's going to lead to the revolution is probably terminal. Right? There's almost certainly no, because this system that the next king is going to come up in. That is going 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.

• 1:33:31Robert Evans?

  Right? All of this, all of this has happened by 1751.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  And people know everything about it. And they know everything.

• 1:33:38Robert Evans?

  And people constantly, yes.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  And what they know about it is just told in the most scandalous, ridiculous way.

• 1:33:44Robert Evans?

  And a lot of it's, yeah, yeah, a lot of it's lies.

• 1:33:48Speaker 01

  Also told in catchy songs.

• 1:33:50Robert Evans?

  It's called in catchy songs. They're gonna 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 pissed 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?

• 1:34:18Speaker 01

  Good.

• 1:34:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Well, probably good for this one, but not good for now, when similar things happen.

• 1:34:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you know, it's, it's, we'll see. Again, this all moved, the media moved pretty fast in Paris at this day, but not as fast as it works today.

• 1:34:36Robert Evans?

  And I guess if I have a hopeful thing in terms of, you know, because we are, are modern day people attempting to make an aristocracy or, you know, 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.

• 1:35:20Robert Evans?

  I don't think that they can.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:35:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  And in fact, the very dynamics discussed in this, these episodes is kind of suggesting why they can't because people will just eventually go, what the fuck?

• 1:35:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's, there's more to talk about. We may do, you know, soon episodes on, you know, 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 XV and XIV are, right?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:35:50Robert Evans?

  Like, they, they make a lot of mistakes and they do do some like, they do do bad things, right? Like 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 hap, 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.

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Seems like it ended well for everyone involved.

• 1:36:30Robert Evans?

  It doesn't, it ends great for everyone.

• 1:36:32Speaker 01

  Louis XIV, how do you cop it? Just his ass?

• 1:36:37Robert Evans?

  Uh, oh, Louis, no, he gets, um, he gets a smallpox.

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:36:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he gets smallpox. He has to send away his mistress.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  But he's like in his seventies, no?

• 1:36:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he, he, he also reigns a crazy long time. He's, he reigns for decades. Again, this whole period like 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.

• 1:37:05Robert Evans?

  You know, by, I think, by probably like 1749 to 1751, somewhere around then, I think the revolution was inevitable. There was, 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.

• 1:37:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:37:29Robert Evans?

  You had no time to reform things. You're spending all your time worrying about who's holding your shirt as the king. You have very little time to fix the way the government works. Yeah. Yeah. The napkin situation is really bogging you down by this point.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:49Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 1:37:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:37:52Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:37:53Robert Evans?

  Yep. It's great stuff.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ. Every, I've 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.

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  That's, that's the podcast.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  That's the show.

• 1:38:05Robert Evans?

  That's the podcast.

• 1:38:07Speaker 01

  God damn.

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  And Ed, you have a podcast.

• 1:38:10Speaker 01

  I do. It's called Better Offline. Go to betteroffline.com. Email me, [email protected], 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/betteroffline. We're already working on a Versailles-like system there.

• 1:38:30Robert Evans?

  Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So check that out, you know, when, finally, when he, when he lives, when Ed lives completely surrounded by the nobility of France, that's when podcasting will finally reach its apex.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  Hilarious.

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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