Behind the Bastards
Part Two: In Honor Of Our New Monarchy, Let's Talk About Versailles
Thu, 06 Mar 2025
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 for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the origins of Versailles' culture?
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.
It's mostly what my mother calls me when I've done something. Edward? Like... Edward Benjamin Zitron. That's when I know I'm in real trouble.
Edward Benjamin Zitron.
Wow. Yeah, that's when I'm about to really get yelled at.
Yeah, I feel like I need to punish you for something just hearing that. Yeah, that's exactly it. It's the punishment phrase. So, Ed... Of 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. We're talking about this weird subculture that Louis XIV created to govern France.
During that break between recording episodes, neither of you peed, right? Because I'm not okay with that.
I pissed on a plant. What are the French going to do to me?
Behead you. Behead you. It's done.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did gambling shape the lives at Versailles?
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?
Well, poison them to death, I thought we were talking about transporting.
I'm going to guess. No, no, no. I'm going to guess that it is like they sneak it into the food.
OK, you're going to guess food. And you get a guess for the most common way to poison someone at Versailles. Something to do with clothing, some sort of like some sort of accessory, perhaps they can have a poison on it. That is actually one of them. But that's not the most common method. So I'm going to give you a partial. Sophie, you're wrong.
The most common way to poison people at Versailles is to put poison in their enemas. So...
Wow, what a horrible way to go.
What a pain in the ass. 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. You have to eat, but don't shit. You have to eat a lot.
But don't shit in his presence.
Unless you use the shitting, the enema thing. Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What were the social dynamics of the royal court?
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 in the morning, being present as he used the bathroom, 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 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 intendants to feel their subordination, their distance from the court. That's a good system of government.
It feels like you just live in this constant state of paranoia. It reminds me of the death of Stalin as well. Just apologizing to people or not apologizing because that admits guilt.
Whenever you have an absolute monarchy, right? And again, Stalinist Russia isn't technically a monarchy, but 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. Sounds good. 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 they have no real contact with the world and no one ever argues 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. Yeah. Yeah. Of course it does.
I mean, what I like is that we also don't have like CEOs of public companies like this. No, no. Or just like venture capitalists. No one's like this.
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