All language subtitles for BBC.Versailles.2of3.The.Palace.of.Pleasure

The world's most magnificent palace

is about to become its most
notorious.

Home to decadence on a truly royal
scale.

Prostitution and gluttony.

Gambling and torture.

And enough sex to scandalised
even the French.

This is the story of a king
who took Versailles,

turned it into his
palace of pleasure,

and brought the monarchy
to the brink of collapse.

The waking ceremony
of the Duke of Anjou,

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

and just an 11-year-old boy.

Louis will reign for 58 years,

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

his predecessor, Louis XIV.

Louis XIV was an incredibly
tough act to follow.

He is seen as The Great.

He is the Conqueror of Europe.

He adds to France.

He is the greatest monarch

of the 17th century.

He was the first act on the
stage of Versailles.

He was the sun,

he was Apollo the sun god.

Everything orbited around him.

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

the extraordinary life lived
entirely in the public gaze.

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

in his personal conduct,

in the way he dressed,

the way he ate, the way he looked,

the way he walked...

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

he had established
a form of etiquette

with the sole view of making
the whole country of France

entirely focused upon his person

and his power.

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

and grandfather died before
they could reach the throne.

Louis XV loses his parents
and his grandparents

when he's two years old.

He's an orphan brought up by people

that he doesn't know very well,

some of whom are probably fairly

terrifying as courtiers.

He is a sickly child very early on.

Wherever he went,

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

the man who first built the
extraordinary palace

that was his home.

Certainly, one would imagine
Louis XV has been traumatised

by the death of all his near family,

and is a lonely and probably

slightly disturbed child
in his youth,

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

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

but others ran the country
in his name.

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

and his place on the world stage.

The coronation of Louis XV
was a moment of great hope

and expectation for
the French people.

They'd had long years of war,

and now the country was at peace,

and it had a young king,

in whom it was possible to invest
every conceivable hope.

So, they could project
their ambitions

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

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

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

Despite all his success
in war and diplomacy,

Louis XIV never managed
to balance the books,

or even pay for the building
of his enormous palace.

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

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

something like, 20 years revenue in
debt,

2 billion livres in debt, at least.

And this was going to be an
absolutely massive problem.

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

But, before he could start
work on that problem,

there was one other thing
that demanded

the new King's immediate attention,

marriage.

Louis XV was more than ready
to get married.

When he was 15, his original fiance,

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

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

he was rather embarrassed to have
her around the place.

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

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

and a new wife had to be found.

They cast about for princesses,

and they eventually settled on
Marie Leszczynska,

who wasn't the most obvious choice,

since her father was the
deposed king of Poland,

and she really had no money.

She was 22, quite pretty,

although, as the female courtiers
disparagingly remarked,

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

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

and Louis fell madly in love
with her at once.

Royal sex lives were public
property,

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

if not always believed.

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

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

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

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

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

which would have been a much better
solution for him,

because he could have
then had someone

picked and appointed for the job.

He's got this sense of,

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

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

Louis was living just like
his great-grandfather,

ruling as an absolute monarch,

enjoying the hunting in the
forests around Versailles,

and soon fulfilling the first
and most important

of all his Royal roles,

fathering an heir.

The relationship between
Louis XV and his wife,

Marie Leszczynska, started very well,
really.

They managed to put together
a relationship,

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

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

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

More children followed,
at regular intervals,

over the next ten happy years.

Eight girls and two boys.

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

after a decade of non-stop
pregnancies,

was fed up with it all.

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

or being brought to bed.

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

The Queen had really had enough.

So, she began to tell the king

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

because she was a very pious woman.

Gradually the saints days got
more frequent,

and the saints, themselves, became
increasingly obscure until,

finally, Louis lost his temper
and asked Lebel,

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

Louis only had to ask,

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

The King gradually got into the habit
of first having dalliances

with the court ladies and then
full-blown affairs.

Louis began a life of carnal
adventures

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

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

French kings were expected to
be womanisers.

This was seen as a sign that they
were virile,

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

acting in an aristocratic
and masculine way.

Indeed, within the aristocratic
society

that the King had been raised,

the idea of marriage or fidelity
was seen as laughable.

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

a beautiful young aristocrat

and the eldest of five equally
attractive sisters.

What was interesting was that he
proceeded

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

And, although it's slightly doubtful

that he had an affair with the
fourth,

it's probable that he did.

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

would ask her other sister
to come along

and give matters a helping hand,
occasionally.

In some senses, it was a scandal,

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

Both Louis XIV and Louis XV had huge
sexual appetites

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

Louis's affairs with his favourite
sisters,

and his simultaneous flings with
many other women,

produced the inevitable
consequences.

In the course of his reign,

the King would father a whole brood
of illegitimate children.

We're not actually sure how many,

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

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

the King's mind moved to
affairs of state.

He decided to copy his illustrious
predecessor in another way,

by taking France to war.

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

This was what the King of France
should do.

He should be seen at the head of his
armies,

fighting and leading his troops.

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

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

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

of course, by two of
the de Nesle sisters.

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

While he was at Metz,

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

Certainly the doctors had given up
hope,

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

absolutely frozen with fear that they
would lose their king.

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

he had to confess.

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

and renounce her.

Louis didn't think much of his
marriage vows,

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

And he knew which one he wanted to
avoid.

The King,

like the least of his subjects,

was afraid of dying

without absolution,

and was afraid for the state of his
immortal soul.

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

and give an account of himself,

and then he would just be a man
before God,

like any other man.

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

They hung around in the town of Metz,

until the bishops were obliged to
send a message

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

"and would they please get out."

So, the de Nesle sisters were
dispatched,

the King promised that if he were
saved,

he would dedicate the rest of his
life

to the well-being of religion and his
subjects.

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

And, it's from this period
that his name

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

because the people were so pleased
that their young king

had recovered from his illness.

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

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

And, within a few months,

Madame de Chateauroux was back in
his bed.

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

He was present on the battlefield
as the French army crushed

the Austrians and the British
at the Battle of Fontenoy.

France was the dominant power in
Europe, once again,

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

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

He's out hunting in the forests
outside Versailles,

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

very striking young woman.

Everyone knows he's taken by her.

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

She was called
Jeanne Antoinette Poisson,

the future Marquise de Pompadour,

and she was much more
than a piece of game.

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

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

who formed part of a big financial
clique.

What everyone says,
she's strikingly beautiful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, she and her family were
absolutely convinced

that this was her destiny.

SPEAKS FRENCH

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

she was very well read, marvellous
conversationist,

extremely charming woman.

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

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

their relationship was sexually
passionate.

He found her very desirable.

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

as the de Nesle sisters had been,

but because she
understood him very well.

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

and to divert him.

She was a very emotionally
intelligent woman,

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

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

She didn't really derive any
pleasure from lovemaking.

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

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

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

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

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

pointed out that

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

and so she gave it up.

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

but most other inhabitants of
Versailles

were not impressed with her.

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

They could not forgive
her for being middle class.

It was just about acceptable for a
king to have liaisons

with lower class prostitutes,

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

Ignoring the snobs at court,
Pompadour used all her charm

and intelligence

to advance the interests of her
small group of friends,

and do down her rivals.

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

who were constantly trying to promote
the interests

of such and such a general.

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

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

and the same was true at Versailles.

Especially when Louis's many
children

saw him spending a fortune on her.

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

demeaned their father.

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

..mummy whore.

Louis's children may have
loathed her,

but their mother, the Queen,
was rather impressed.

She was particularly nice
to the Queen,

which poor old Marie Leszczynska was
very grateful for,

because until Madame de Pompadour
arrived,

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

In fact, the first time she was ever
sent flowers

was at Madame de Pompadour's
instigation.

And, although, obviously, the
difference in their positions

meant that they could never be
anything like friends,

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

better that it is this one.

Louis was victorious in war
and lucky in love.

And it made him grow over confident.

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

One that handed back most of the
territory

his generals had just won for him.

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

The peace is not a very good
peace for France,

because France gets absolutely
nothing for it,

except enormous debts from its
participation in the war.

The French public, having dispensed
millions of livres,

and lost countless men dead,

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

As a result, schoolchildren and
fishwives

were said to be running
around in Paris

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

Just as Louis's popularity
began to wane,

his love affair with
Madame Pompadour

was also drawing to a close.

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

known as the Deer Park.

When Louis XV and Madame de
Pompadour

ceased to have a sexual relationship,

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

they got onto well for that,

and from now on,

his sexual appetite was catered for

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

Teenage nymphets, uneducated,

often they had no idea who their
powerful lover was.

Young, virginal,

beautiful girls are brought in for
his sexual gratification.

But, this is developed into something

altogether more salacious by the
press at this time.

When things had been going well,
Louis was forgiven,

even praised, for indulging his
royal lust.

But after his hated peace treaty,

people saw their king's behaviour
very differently.

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

which just amplifies this,

makes him an absolute sexual
debauchee

of the worst imaginable kind.

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

It was, according to them,

the scene of these terrible orgies,

in which underage girls would be
shipped in droves from Paris

for wicked Louis XV to enjoy.

And one of the worst things that was
said,

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

that she would find the girls for
Louis

and entice them to the Deer Park.

It couldn't have been less true.

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

Faced with a deluge of criticism,

Louis turned to the one person
he could trust completely.

Ironically, the influence of Madame
de Pompadour actually increases

as she stops sharing the King's bed.

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

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

that he could actually trust at
court.

You have to remember that the court

is a place of intrigue and masks and
pretence,

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

He needed her in his life
as his friend.

As the top powerbroker in
Versailles,

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

Madame de Pompadour's excursion into
politics

is not something that would make a
feminist proud.

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

Louis, very foolishly,

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

and Madame de Pompadour was so proud
of herself,

being given this important role,

she took it terribly seriously, and
was very excited,

and she was completely manipulated by
the ambassador.

Louis's peace with Austria was
unpopular,

but his decision to allow Madame
Pompadour to secure an actual

alliance with the old enemy
was downright detested.

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

So, it's an absolute shock to
courtiers,

many of whom have long-term
loyalties,

and, no doubt, family connections,

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

Criticism of Louis and Pompadour
became even more lurid,

and it reached every
corner of Versailles.

They would accuse her

of sexual diseases.

They would accuse her of procuring

young girls for the King,

they would say anything they wanted.

There were secret pamphlets, secret
poems,

extremely rude poems about her
physique and her body.

Poems would be left in Versailles by
court officials,

perhaps even members of his family.

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

One of the most famous of these
contained the phrase,

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

which was a direct reference to
the man

who had assassinated Henry IV in
1610,

and so, for the first time,

we start to see references in these
pamphlets

to calls for the killing of the
King.

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

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

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

by bathing in the blood of these
kidnapped Parisian children.

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

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

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

in a war against Britain and
Prussia.

It started well,

but messengers were soon arriving at
Versailles

with bad news from the front.

As the tide of war changed against
the French,

the Parisian public actually got into
the habit

of dancing in the streets to
celebrate their defeats,

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

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

and public frustration with the King
took a dangerous turn.

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

going down the steps,

and a certain individual called
Damiens rushes up.

And then he feels blood and he says,

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

Damiens is immediately arrested,
tortured on his feet

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

to see whether he had any
accomplices,

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

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

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

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

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

connected to some quite important
"somebodies".

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

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

wave of hostility towards Louis XV.

Louis took this amateurish
attempt on his life very badly.

Although his doctors promised
a full recovery,

he was convinced that this was
the end of him.

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

but it has a disproportionate effect
on Louis XV.

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

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

he's become the Well-Hated.

Rather amusingly, an
old marshal comes along

and asks him to cough,
spit, and piss,

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

"There's nothing important
been touched."

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

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

this situation is the culmination

of his lack of virtue,

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

he's bound to feel guilty,

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

Hearing the grim details of the
punishment

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

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

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

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

devised by judicial cruelty.

He's executed in the most
extraordinarily gory way

on the Place de Greve, in Paris.

Strapped down to the wheel,

and the executioner goes round

breaking most bones in his body
with an iron bar.

He is burnt with tongs

and his flesh is knowingly pulled
away from his body.

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

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

to gallop off in
different directions,

pulling his body to pieces.

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

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

so, effectively, he can be pulled to
pieces.

Damiens stays alive and conscious for
much of this operation.

He finally dies after four
hours of absolute torment,

which is going to disgust
people by its reports.

Louis had had nothing to do
with the grisly execution,

but accounts of it stained his
reputation right across Europe.

It gives the reign of Louis XV
this incredibly ghastly,

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

Although his physical suffering
was nothing

compared to that meted out to
Damiens,

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

His closest aides described him
as troubled and depressed.

For a monarch who takes being a king
extremely seriously,

this is a big thing,

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

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

To make matters worse,

the conflict with Britain was
proving to be disastrous.

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

the French were driven out of
Canada, India,

and much of the Caribbean.

The British, largely because of their
Navy,

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

France has really lost all her
pretensions

to becoming a global superpower,

and she has lost that to England,
basically.

If the world is speaking
English today,

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

in the 18th century.

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

For a king

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

this was almost too much to bear.

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

which is sometimes forgotten,
le metier du roi,

was the conduct of foreign policy.

Now, he wasn't really supposed
to mess around

with things like the Parlement,
internal politics.

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

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

Badly shaken by the
assassination attempt,

and widely blamed for a each
fresh military disaster,

Louis hid himself away at
Versailles.

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

He withdrew into himself,

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

of getting to the front
and leading his troops,

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

he was with the girls in the
Deer Park.

Louis may have lost a war,

but he was still the absolute ruler
of France.

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

he came up with a suitably
absolutist response.

Even the first Encyclopaedia
in the French language,

one of the great intellectual
achievements of the age,

went on to the bonfire.

Unfortunately, Louis XV was,
by nature,

suspicious of anything
he saw as unorthodox,

and as a consequence,

he just didn't associate himself

with this great outpouring of
French culture and knowledge.

Louis was still close
to Madame Pompadour,

who tried to change his mind.

At a dinner party one evening
in Versailles,

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

And Madame de Pompadour
seized the moment, and said,

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

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

"you've banned the encyclopaedia,

"otherwise we could have looked
in the encyclopaedia

"and found out what gunpowder is
constituted from."

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

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

and they spent the rest of the
evening reading articles

from the encyclopaedia,

and of course, he was intrigued
by this,

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

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

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

In 1764 she contracted tuberculosis.

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

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

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

He stood on the balcony and he cried,

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

and he felt very alone without her.

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

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

the death of his Queen,
Marie Leszczynska,

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

The deaths of these people who are
close to him,

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

The death of his closest confidant
began the worst

period of Louis's life.

He spent days lost in introspection,

or deep in discussion with
philosophers and astronomers.

You can see that he did have
a clear tendency

towards some sort of depression.

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

and obsessed with death.

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

he recovered his lust for life.

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

I'm rather fond of Madame du Barry.

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

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

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

but I think she was the one
who truly was.

She was fabulously sexy.

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

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

He could think of nothing else
but her.

She was extremely beautiful.

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

Not too bright, but very good fun.

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

a bit of a perk up, really.

Madame du Barry has an enormous
effect upon Louis XV.

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

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

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

that she spent with a certain
number of particular individuals.

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

that she's learned to keep him young,

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

Madame du Barry may have perked up
the ageing Louis,

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

She was absolutely loathed.
Everyone hated her.

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

The aristocrats hated her

because she was really little better
than a streetwalker.

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

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

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

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

increasingly dissolute, even
degenerate,

and who was just failing

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

Whatever people said about him,
the new relationship

gave Louis the confidence to embark
on a grand project,

to give his new heir,
the future Louis XVI,

the greatest wedding of the century.

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

and Louis wanted the ceremony to
take place

in a brand-new theatre inside
Versailles,

a project abandoned years before by
Louis XIV.

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

from different sections of society.

It had suffered the defeats of the
Seven Years War,

therefore, he wanted a spectacular
royal wedding

to assert the splendour and power of
the monarchy.

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

but Louis just kept on spending.

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

Sometimes the King is
conciliatory towards them,

at other times he's very
repressive against them.

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

He basically tries to abolish
the Parlement.

Louis's decision to remove the one
organisation in France

that could challenge him for
authority

was a flagrant abuse of
royal power.

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

one of the things that
is absolutely key

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

absolute monarchy that rules
according to the laws,

so to abolish the law courts,
themselves,

is a very powerful signal,

and a very blatant act
of royal despotism.

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

whose outdated legal system stood
in the way of progress.

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

Also the judges, themselves,

were now to be appointed by the Crown
for life.

And they would no longer buy their
position as judge,

as had been the case before.

So, for many, including Voltaire,

this was seen as an enlightened
reform.

Unfortunately for Louis XV, by
silencing the Parlement,

the King unleashed opposition on a
scale

that had not been seen for
generations.

It was too late for Louis to
play the reformer.

Years of erotic self-indulgence,
along with failed wars

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

a bad king and a bad man.

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

and the people of Paris and
the courtiers

are all very well aware that he has,
somehow,

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

His reforms are falling flat,

he's got a mistress who is, frankly,

not of courtly rank,

and he's simply not kingly.

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

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

makes this devastating sermon.

This is really scandalous.

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

that's never been witnessed at court.

Louis XV, himself, must be intensely
mortified

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

and for the fact that he is so
isolated

within his own courtly environment.

If the Abbe intended to wound Louis,

he could not have expected what
happened next.

Weeks after this humiliating
dressing down

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

Nobody knows what's wrong with him.

And it takes the doctors,
gathered around him,

several days to work out
what's going on.

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

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

and they realise that he has
smallpox.

It is a complete bolt out of the
blue.

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

He had a particularly unpleasant form
of it,

which was the black variety,

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

And so, he was completely disfigured.

Even as he approached death,

Louis's enemies spread
stories about his sex life.

It was suggested that he may have
caught his smallpox

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

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

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

It riddles his body and it produces a
horrible stench

as his inner organs start decaying.

Underneath it all, he is very devout.

And he goes into ultra-devout mode.

He sends away Madame du Barry
from the court

in the same way that he sent away

the Duchesse de Chateauroux in 1744
at Metz.

Once she had left, it was possible

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

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

Messieurs.

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

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

dying, in fact, like Louis XIV.

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

When he actually dies, you can hear a
stampede,

almost a thunder of running feet,

as everybody abandons the antechamber
where he's lying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Louis the Well-Beloved, had gone.

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

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

they'd fallen out of love with their
king.

It has been argued that the monarchy
could never recover

from the harm engendered by Louis XV.

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

The abiding memory of Louis XV

is a man who is morally corrupt

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

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

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