'The Sexy & Scandalous Truth About Versailles"

Started by Orchid, May 28, 2016, 01:00:42 PM

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Orchid

Antonia Fraser: the sexy and scandalous truth about Versailles | Television & radio | The Guardian

QuoteA few months ago, when reviewing the papers for Radio 4's Broadcasting House programme on a Sunday morning, I was confronted with a story from the Mail on Sunday fulminating about a forthcoming television drama depicting court life in Louis XIV's Versailles. Apparently it was to feature "gay sex, a cross-dressing prince and a queen with a penchant for dwarves". My fellow panellists knew I had written a serious, fully sourced, history of life at Versailles and expected me to decry this sensationalism of history. But instead, I had to report to them that it was all true.

Versailles comes to BBC2 next week, and I am surprised that it has taken so long for a TV blockbuster to use this material. My book, and it appears the television series as well, begins with sex and ends with sex and in between you have royalty, mistresses, intrigue, illegitimate children, gay sex, happy marriages of state and unhappy marriages of state, all centring round this extraordinary man, Louis XIV, the Sun King, who ascended the throne when he was four years of age in 1643 and ruled for the next 72 years until his death in 1715.

It's tricky to know where to place this as it's both factual in its historical makeup and television-based... so I hope our members will deem it appropriate here.

Although it's about a soon-to-air BBC television show it is, by all known accounts, grounded in the extraordinary reality of life in Versailles.  Whoever said Royalty is conservative and "proper" clearly skipped this part of history.  :teehee:


One of our past members @Savanna would have been interested in this subject.
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
-Winston Churchil