Louis XIV: The Sun King
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. Louis XIV, the Sun King, the longest reigning monarch in European history, and the French king who commissioned the fabulous palace at Versailles.

But what actually went on inside? And what is the truth about the king's extravagant lifestyle and extraordinary vanity? In his lifetime, Louis was an immensely successful king. He was grand, he was serious, he was hard, and he had a huge vision and he was going to implement it. "I am the state," he said, "l'état, c'est moi."

He is one of those kings that is just a force of nature. His influence stretched across Europe. The fashions of France during his period, that all came from him, the monarch. The life that was led at Versailles was so decadent and so over the top and so lavish. The entertainments that went on, went on for days.

and a kind of loose morality that was like nothing that most ordinary people could even conceive of. This is excess, luxury and dictatorship to an extreme. He believed that the whole of France revolved around him, and that was his achievement.

In this episode, we're joined by Royal Historian Tracy Borman, who will take us behind the scenes to find out what really went on at Versailles and in the private life of King Louis XIV. King Louis XIV was born on September 5th, 1638, at Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

He spent much of his early life at the Palais Royal in the center of Paris. His father, King Louis XIII, died in 1643 and at the age of just four, young Louis succeeded to the throne of France to reign as Louis XIV. During his childhood, his mother, Anne of Austria, served as regent, with the formidable First Minister Cardinal Mazarin at her side.

But in 1661, at the age of 22, Louis took over. And from then on, he ruled alone. His ambition meant that when he achieved his majority and became ruler, he didn't want to have a chief minister. He was going to do it all himself. But it was too much for one man to do.

So in the process, he became at times vindictive, he became overly authoritarian, and he didn't really care about the nobles or the French people. His idea was a grandeur of France.

He had a real sense of the divine importance of monarchy and how he was God's representative on earth. And he was the center of everything. And this is why he took the sun as his emblem. He wanted to be the sun, the center of France so that everything else would revolve around him. And he really built on this idea of him being the divinely appointed king of France.

He was called "Dieu Donne," God-given. And his first advisor, Cardinal Mazarin, said, "You know, you rule by divine rights, divine intervention. You rule because God wants you to rule." And then he calls himself the Sun King. So he believes that he is this divine royal personage. I mean, it's completely bonkers. But everybody, of course, buys into it.

During the early years of his reign, the royal court changed locations from Paris to the Palace of Versailles. When it was inaugurated in 1682, there was enough room to house the entire court of the king. Life there revolved entirely around Louis, and the most important thing was to somehow gain the king's favor.

Versailles was like a giant gilded bubble. It looked great from the outside, but as soon as you opened the door, it was almost the opposite. It would have been a difficult, quite inorganic place to live. This was the center of the sun god's realm.

He was a very hard man and he was a very serious man. To do what he wanted to do, which is bring all the nobility into one place and control them, he had to be despotic in his character. And he was. I don't think he was a very likeable person.

He could have whatever he wanted in life. He could have any woman he wanted. He could have all of the material wealth, all of the clothing, all of the food. He could have beautiful palaces and carriages and gardens. And he went for it. One of the ways to get noticed by the king was to be fashionable. A well-dressed courtier stood a much better chance of gaining influence. Back then, just like now, none of it came cheap.

And the strict fashion rules at Versailles made sure the rich and powerful spent a lot of money. One of the prime features of Versailles was its focus on fashion and the way the nobles looked.

In Versailles, each noble was being watched in terms of how the king was looking at them. So the competition was fierce. And one way they tried to outshine each other was in clothes and in opulence and in wealth. And many of them bankrupted themselves in the process. It was vicious competition.

The women of court knew that they could exert some power and influence through their sexuality. And if they could capture the notice of the king or anybody in power, but the king was really the peach, that's who you were going for, then an enormous door opened and there were all sorts of possibilities in your life.

During this time, it was not uncommon for kings to have quite interesting love lives. After all, it was almost expected that a monarch should keep mistresses, and Louis was no different. In his lifetime, he fathered 12 illegitimate children, in addition to the six he had with his wife, Maria Teresa of Spain. But this was not the first time that the king's marriage had faced difficulties.

Rumors circulated at court that Queen Maria Theresa had an illegitimate daughter, Louise Marie-Thérèse, also known as the "Black Nun of Moray."

Louis said that kings should enjoy giving pleasure, and he lived by that maxim. He had about 20 mistresses. He was never faithful to his wife, Maria Teresa of Spain. And he'd often arrive late back to bed with her way past midnight and say that paperwork had kept him busy. But he was constantly in bed with his other mistresses. I mean, Athénaide de Montespan, he's supposed to have made love to her at least three times a day.

In Versailles, women were currency. Imagine you've got many thousands of people all swarming. It was like a giant beehive. They're all trying to catch the eye of the Sun King. Think of him, if you like, as the Queen Bee. And there's three ways they can do this. Firstly, through their natural looks, through their curves, through their natural proportions. Secondly, through the way that they're dressed. And thirdly, via their smell.

Obviously, there were many pros to catching the eye of the king. If you became the king's mistress, it would come with lots of other perks as well. You would have lovely new clothes, you would gain a position. Many of them bore him children, some even more children than his own wife, and he legitimized a lot of these children as well. So again, that's another perk. You could potentially be the mother of a future heir to the throne. There were many pros to catching the eye of Louis XIV.

Life in Versailles was run with military precision, with everything revolving around the king. Courtiers were expected to plan their days around his schedule. At 8:30 a.m. he rose. At 10:00 he attended Mass. At 11:00 he had council meetings, followed by a private lunch alone. At 2:00 p.m. he went on a hunt or had a walk.

Then at 6pm he read state papers and documents before eating a much larger meal in public around 10pm and then retiring at around 11:30pm. On top of all that, the king came up with another rather ingenious way to use his routine to his advantage. Nobles had the privilege of paying to watch him dress, eat, bathe or even sleep.

Louis' life was completely public and he wanted it to be public because it was a public display of his power and he was at the centre of everything and people would come to watch the king do the most mundane things because he was this force to behold.

In fact, what is so interesting is that if you look at the architecture of Versailles and his bedroom in particular, it has a sort of screen around the bed, which looks like a theatre. It's on a raised dais. The bed is part of a theatrical performance. MUSIC PLAYS

People thought of him as something of a god. And, you know, why not pay to go and see a god wake up or go to bed? It was all a kind of not-so-subtle way of him asserting and projecting his power. And it just kind of is testament to the godlike status

of the king and also the whole cult that Louis managed to engineer that was so successful that people actually wanted to watch him wake up bleary-eyed in the morning and get dressed. It makes the mind boggle today, but it was a big part of the culture of Versailles back then.

Louis' day revolved around him being the center of attention. His entire life was one Truman-Burbank public show. At Versailles, even the architecture demonstrates this, the centrality of his bedroom in the building. This was the Louis show. Of all the activities that were surrounded by ceremony and splendor at Versailles, nothing matched the extravagance of mealtimes.

While breakfast and lunch were private meals, the 10 pm dinner was a grand affair that was open to the whole court. It took 500 people to prepare and serve the meal, which was accompanied by musicians, and came with a set of strict rules. Conversation was forbidden in case it distracted the king. Louis preferred to eat with his fingers, even though forks were in common use by this time, and pointed knives were banned from the table.

So Versailles parties would go on for days and there would be a crowd that would be taken along to have a feast, first of all, and there'd be gold-sprinkled meals, soups with gold leaf and truffles, and then they'd go and watch a play by Molière or one of his pet playwrights, and then they'd go and they'd watch this massive fireworks display behind the palace illuminating all the statues and the fountains. And so the luxuriance, there was no expense spared by Louis for these kind of parties.

We read about these excesses and we think this is really extraordinary.

But it's not as shocking to us as it would have been to the people of the era, the ordinary common people of the era, for whom it was a struggle just to get bread. And here is a man who's basically eating his way through a flock of swans and, you know, 20 other courses and, you know, sitting on gilded chairs and washing his hands in wine and doing these types of things.

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When people had to go, they just did it in the halls or courtyards. Versailles ended up being known as the filthiest palace in the world. Versailles is just as glorious as it ever was. You know, sprawling palatial rooms, incredible decor, incredible furniture. Everybody dressed beautifully. But it smelled terribly. It smelled like drains.

What you used to have were these little, sort of like waiters, but they'd be carrying piss pots and you would sort of hail one of them and a little boy would come scuttling over. But sometimes you couldn't wait, you would just do it there in front of you or behind the curtain and with excrement as well. So this was all done out in the open, they didn't have the same ideas as privacy as we have today.

this kind of heady brew of sweat and human excrement and urine. This would have followed you around like a kind of hellish, miasmic concoction, and it would have taken you a long time to get used to that. Versailles stank to high heaven. You know, this was a hellhole as far as most aristocrats were concerned. They were dying to get back to their country estates, and so they were stuck in what frankly was a gilt-edged prison.

The place was smeared in filth, and these nobles had to be there. If they weren't seen at court, they were no one. So even if their estates were falling apart back where they came from, even if they couldn't afford the clothes to be there for the morning waking of the king, they had to. It was vermin-infested, it was unhygienic, it was foul, it was smelly. It's not remotely the place we see it as being, but that was the court that Louis built.

Another part of Louis' life that sparked a lot of debate was his personal hygiene. It's been said he only bathed three times in his whole life, though that's likely an exaggeration. Still, at the time, many believed that bathing was risky because it was thought to open the body's pores to diseases like the plague. So you have to imagine at the height of summer, you know, a warm Parisian evening,

that the smell in the palace must have been absolutely unbelievable. I mean, it starts with the king himself. He's said to have only had three baths in his life. He was petrified of waterborne illnesses. The only way he kept clean was to keep changing his undergarments. This is what most of the aristocracy did. So they changed their undergarments two, three times a day. But otherwise, they weren't washing. And in fact, it's even said that one of Louis' mistresses couldn't abide the smell of the king.

Pretty much had to pinch her nose while she was in the act. And then of course you had all the dogs, you had all the people leaving all their stuff all over the floors if they couldn't get to a piss bucket. So the whole effect is pretty horrible. It's this weird melange of perfume and excrement hanging all over the palace. With our modern sense of smell, most of us probably wouldn't have enjoyed being around Louis.

Along with body odor, he was said to have had terrible breath, so bad in fact, that it reportedly caused arguments with at least one of his mistresses. But the "Reeking King" image isn't entirely fair. Louis was actually a big fan of perfumers, whose main job was to keep him smelling pleasant. Emmanuel is the master perfumer at Candora Perfumes in Paris.

Tracy Borman is meeting with him to learn just how far people went to keep Louis happy, and how important their job was in making sure the air around the King always smelled sweet. So Emmanuel, the reason I've come here today is not just to talk about how bad it smelt, but what people did about it.

Well, perfume making was amazing at that time and there's a complete switch on this century between some scents that were used for medical purpose to scents that would be to really smell good.

And really, there were some people, very crafted people, who started knowing completely how to take good smells from nature. And Martial was the perfume maker for the king. He was the valet of the king's brother. And Martial was very good at making perfumes.

And was there one scent that was particularly favoured by Louis? Yes, orange blossom. In fact, Louis loved orange trees. He had some brought to Versailles and they were very, very keen on the smell of orange blossom. So, extracting the smell of orange blossom is very costly. You need something like one tonne of petals to make one kilo of extract. Then you use the extract into your formula.

This is one scent that, for example, he loved until the very end of his reign. When he couldn't stand all the perfumes at the end, he said that orange blossom was still possible to wear.

One of the things that men and women did to cover up this terrible smell was to use perfume. And now this was the heyday of the perfumer. This was when perfume was really coming into its own. So people would apply it to their skin. They'd spray perfume into their powdered wigs if they were wearing them. They would have...

they would carry perfume around in pouches with them around the palace. And this is how they tried to negate the stench from the usual human mess and animal mess that was around the palace. Well, Tracy, now I'd like to show you how

A perfume was made for Louis XIV. So one of the original perfumes that he would have worn. Yes, one of the perfumes that would be made. First, they would need some raw materials to be taken, and it could be rosemary like this, or it could be for him with orange blossom petals.

They would fill it into this part of the alambic and then have some water boiled under it to get what they call the essence and what we would nowadays call essential oil.

Then those would be blended and there could be a little blend that would be made then with some orange blossom, some rose and a little bit of musk because they were very fond of those animal, very, very strong animal scents. And this is really

the idea of the discussion they would have then with Martial, between Martial and Louis. They would not use sand strips but probably a piece of cloth and there would be then the reaction. That's lovely, it's quite spicy. It's spicy, it's very strong because of the musk that we are using and then you have the balance with the orange blossom that is behind it.

It wasn't as though the whole nobility wore Chanel No. 5 or some other brand. They all had their own distinctive scent, and that was meant to be a projection of your personality. These were very complicated, textured perfumes, and they didn't just kind of spray a bit on your neck and a bit on your wrists. They would douse themselves in it. Literally entire bottles would be poured over their heads.

The stench would have been utterly overwhelming, nauseating, a sort of olfactory nightmare, one might say. And this would have been one of the kind of distinguishing features of walking into Versailles. This episode is brought to you by Tic Tac. Summer tastes like Tic Tac. Tantalize your taste buds this sunny season with citrus adventure and orange. Two everyday flavors that bring summer in every...

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For all his power, Louis wasn't exactly a confident man. In fact, he could be extremely paranoid, and courtiers who caught his suspicion were closely watched.

Louis, like all great monarchs and leaders, was absolutely paranoid. He was paranoid that somebody would be plotting against him. That's why he brought all of the nobles together in Versailles, so he could keep an eye on all of them and know what they were doing. He even opened a lot of the courtiers' letters as well, so he could read about what they were getting up to.

He never overcame this paranoia that somebody was plotting against him. And it's entirely likely that had he not unified the court at Versailles, that somebody would have been plotting against him. When Louis was young, there'd been a major rebellion in the aristocracy that completely freaked him out, and he never forgot that.

So he never trusted the aristocrats, and that's why he put them all in one place. And he got people to spy on them. All their mail was opened. I mean, they could assume that any letter they got had been seen by the king's spies. And he even went to the lengths of going through their top drawer, basically, through the knickers, through the stockings, and having a look to see if there was anything there that was incriminating. He wanted to know everything that his courtiers were up to.

He lived until his last hours, terrified that the nobles may rise against him. His whole life was one effort to control them. At the heart of Louis' idea of who he was and how he had to control the nobility was the idea that he was everything. He would be one king. There would be one law. There would be one faith. And he would be at the centre of all of them.

King Louis XIV ruled at a time when France was at the very height of its international powers, and being its monarch was certainly a full-time role. But those time pressures of the job certainly didn't stand in the way of feeding the king's personal vanity. It's said that Louis commissioned at least 300 portraits of himself during his reign, which works out to be roughly one every three months.

Tracy Borman is meeting with Paris-based art historian Christine Balte, who is an expert on Louis' love of art. So Christine, you have some portraits to show me of Louis, and I think we're going to start with the most famous one, aren't we? Indeed, it is his most famous portrait. It is the ultimate image of the absolute monarch. Now, what makes it the absolute monarch?

Well, many things, the coronation robes, the Order of the Holy Spirit, which is the French equivalent of the Order of the Garter, the sword, the sceptre, the crown, the red-heeled shoes, which were only given to those who were admitted to court at Versailles. And all of this would have been understood by the people at the time? Absolutely understood. But the most impressive is what I would like to call

the body language. This is the powerful pose and I suggest to everybody that try standing that way. You will be more important than you ever were before in your life.

Louis had hundreds and hundreds of portraits commissioned, and these were sent. They didn't just circulate within Versailles and Paris, they went all over the country. And we might think at first glance that this was just appealing to the man's vanity, but it actually went much deeper than that. It was all part of a well-calculated, preordained political strategy. It was all part of

extending his authority. And it worked at the time. People did begin to revere him. People began to think of him as this kind of being that was above them, someone who had a legitimate right to rule.

Next is an image of our same king as a teenager. This looks very different. I mean, it doesn't even look like Louis. No, it doesn't. He's 17 at the time. He has all his hair, because he did lose his hair. He is shown as Jupiter.

And the point of this picture really was that there was an attempt to overthrow the crown when Louis was a young boy. He and his mother fled from Paris. They lived away. This very, very difficult period. And this is, in a sense, a reaffirmation of I am the king. I'm not only Jupiter, but I'm the king too. And he's shown in an imperial Roman fashion.

This is really then a statement of power. He's trying to safeguard his position. Absolutely. It is a reaffirmation of actually his right to be the king.

Louis XIV believes that he is the Sun King, that he is a godlike figure. And so these portraits that he had done of himself, they were almost like religious icons. When they were in the room, the king was in the room. And often when he went away, a portrait would be put up on the wall, and that was the king in the room. So they weren't just ordinary paintings. They had a kind of power that was supposed to remind everybody at Versailles who the king was, even if he wasn't there.

Now I think we have to have at least one picture of our ruler in a more bellicose fashion. What is interesting is he is shown in his suit of armor with the fleur-de-lis on it. He's got the blue sash, which is again the order of the Holy Spirit.

He holds this very fancy looking tube in his hand and this was what was used to command your troops. It is a baton of commandment.

He is being crowned here by the laurels of victory. But what is also interesting is not only is he on the horse, but the two front hoofs are up in the air. This was the most difficult position of any equestrian maneuver. It could be maintained for a matter of seconds only.

And the fact that he, Louis, can actually control the horse to this degree is a sign he can control the country.

The king used portraits in the same way that dictators in the 20th century use images of themselves. It's to remind everybody who is there, who is behind the power. So even if Louis wasn't present, his portrait would be trotted out and you had to show the same amount of deference and respect to the

as you would to the man himself. You couldn't turn your back on the portrait, for example. You had to behave in the same courtly manner. You had to observe etiquette as if the man himself were present in the room. And it was this sense of all-powerful, almost big brother watching them.

So, Christine, this has been absolutely fascinating because I've always known that Louis was a great lover and patron of the arts, but actually what you've clearly demonstrated is there was so much more behind it. It was political propaganda. It wasn't just art for art's sake, was it? No. No, absolutely not. There was no nothing for anything's sake as far as Louis was concerned. All things had a purpose or could be directed towards the end that he wished to achieve.

In the summer of 1715, 76-year-old Louis began complaining of leg pain. It got worse. The leg became gangrenous, and by late August it was clear he was dying. Confined to his bed at Versailles, Louis XIV passed away on September 1st, just four days before his 77th birthday. He had ruled for 72 years, the longest reign in French history.

Even in death, Louis was still a public show. Since the time of King Philip the Fair in the 1300s, French kings had had themselves cut into three pieces, dismembered three ways. Louis had this done to himself, but in public, in his rooms in Versailles. He was too great a character to only be buried in one place. He was going to be buried in three. So this was done as a public spectacle.

It's almost as if Louis XIV hypnotized France. They lost all sense of reality. He created this wonderland, this Disney World, this royal Disney World in Versailles. The moment he dies, though, the dream starts to fall apart under his successors. I mean, 80 years after his death, his own bones are dug up and they're just tossed aside during the French Revolution. And I think you have to see the French Revolution

as payback for what Louis had done. He'd created this absolutist monarchy that, frankly, the French people, who felt completely excluded from the party, hated and resented. And eventually, of course, it ends with one of his successors getting his head chopped off.

Louis XIV was wildly extravagant, and I think the French people did identify with that, and they were actually grateful for it at the time. But it sowed the seeds for the downfall of the monarchy, because when times got tough, when the monarchy went bankrupt,

By the reign of Louis XVI, all of a sudden, it is this idea that you're paying people to watch you sort of get up and get dressed and these elaborate feasts, that just made the whole monarchy look completely out of touch and it incentivized the public to rise up and chop off all of their heads. And just like that, he was gone. The Sun King was no more. Few monarchs define an entire era the way Louis XIV did.

He left a lasting impact on France's history, culture and national identity. He wasn't always loved, in fact, some were glad to see him go. But if you're looking for a royal life full of glamour, scandal, love affairs and intrigue, Louis XIV is a pretty good place to start.

Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you liked this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday. Don't forget to leave a comment below and feel free to leave us a rating or review. Your feedback helps us reach more listeners like you.

And for more from the Like a Shot Network, check out Where Did Everyone Go? Histories of the Abandoned, a deep dive into the incredible stories behind forgotten places. Available now on your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for listening.