Louis XV: The King Who Turned Versailles Into a BROTHEL

Описание: On September 1, 1715, the Sun King finally set. Louis XIV, the monarch who had transformed France into Europe's dominant power and constructed the most magnificent palace the world had ever seen, died after seventy-two years on the throne. His great-grandson, a frail and sickly boy of just five years old, suddenly became Louis XV, King of France and Navarre. The child who would one day convert Versailles into a system of institutionalized personal exploitation was, at that moment, merely an orphan. His parents had died of measles when he was two. His older brother had followed shortly after. The little boy who inherited the most powerful throne in Europe had already learned the central lesson that would shape his disastrous reign: everyone around him could be taken away, and he was utterly alone.
The regency that governed France during Louis XV's minority, led by Philippe d'Orléans, temporarily abandoned Versailles for Paris. The court returned to the capital, and the great palace fell into a strange quietude. But this interlude proved brief. By 1722, the twelve-year-old king returned to Versailles, and the machinery his great-grandfather had built roared back to life. That machinery — the elaborate system of etiquette, surveillance, and competition that defined court life — would shape the young monarch's psychology in ways that made his later excesses almost inevitable. To understand how Versailles became a brothel, one must first understand how Versailles became a trap.
Louis XIV had designed his palace with deliberate political genius. By requiring the nobility to attend court, he neutralized their potential for independent rebellion. Nobles who might otherwise have fortified their provincial estates and raised armies against the crown instead exhausted themselves competing for the privilege of handing the king his shirt in the morning. The "lever" and "coucher" ceremonies, during which the king rose and retired, became elaborate theatrical performances with strictly hierarchical roles. Who held the candle? Who offered the royal slippers? These seemingly absurd distinctions carried enormous significance. A noble excluded from such ceremonies faced social death, while one who gained a coveted role acquired political capital that could translate into military commissions, financial advantages, and dynastic marriages. The genius of the system lay in its self-perpetuating nature. Nobles competed so fiercely for royal favor that they policed each other, reported on each other, and remained too exhausted by constant social warfare to threaten the throne.

00:00 Intro
01:00 How Versailles Built the Perfect Machine for Royal Corruption
12:58 Inside the Bureaucracy of Royal Exploitation
26:03 How Louis XV's Pleasures Devoured the Monarchy