/knocks on door/ what was that about the people in versailles using the palace as a public toilet?
Oh, that was popular TikTok History a couple years ago, but the myths are older than that. “There were no toilets in the palace of Versailles” (true, those had not been invented yet) + “it was a pretty public and very active place with lots of people coming and going, so sometimes commoners, servants, or visitors who were not allowed access to the courts’ commodes and were far away from the public latrines would urinate in the corner of a hallway or courtyard” (apparently true) + court writings and letters with salacious gossip about other nobles and their gross behaviors (unclear how true these are because politics and salacious gossip and mocking one’s political rivals haven’t changed in 300 years, but in any case, the descriptions of nobles peeing in a corner are portrayed as gross and beneath them, not something normal and fine) became a widespread popular myth of “everyone in Versailles was just pooping and peeing in the hallways” (not true). Like… chamber pots and commodes and outhouses were a thing, even if late 1600s/early 1700s sanitary standards were hardly up to ours, and dumping the chamber pots out windows and into courtyards and gardens was common. For a lot of its history, Versailles was a central government building as well as a noble palace, so there were also a LOT of people coming and going rather than being exclusively a private residence for royalty. And not that Common People are worse than royalty, but rather that chamber pots and commodes were kept in the private residence areas so there were limited places for visitors to pee and there seems to be a real history of them sometimes going ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ okay then!
It’s one of those things that has some real history behind it, but without source analysis it balloons into the cackling delight in the juxtaposition of such a famous and beautiful and elaborate palace being full of urine and feces, and these fancy high-class French royalty being disgusting and not even realizing how gross they were. Which was not really what was happening. We love narratives that go “wow, people in the past were so stupid and gross and backwards!” but typically the real history is not really the way people portray it.
