0:01

When I was a kid, I was obsessed

0:03

with the nineteen eighties ABC primetime

0:06

soap opera Dynasty. The

0:13

series centered on the wealthy

0:15

Carrington family of Denver, Colorado,

0:18

a patriarch oil tycoon, and

0:20

a cast of feuding family members.

0:23

Let's just say that I feel as I do because

0:25

we have so much in common, such

0:27

as what our blood,

0:30

our teens. But

0:33

that dynasty, for all its drama

0:36

and dysfunction, had nothing

0:38

on the real life dynasties we're going

0:40

to talk about today, like the

0:42

Habsburgs, the family that

0:44

ruled much of Europe for centuries.

0:47

These people are so powerful, I mean power

0:50

over tens of millions of people and

0:53

gazillions of acres of land.

0:55

This royal family, however, was

0:57

a little too close. The

0:59

final Habsburg, ruler of Spain,

1:01

who died in seventeen hundred, is

1:04

considered to be the most inbred

1:06

royal ever.

1:08

His Habsburg jaw was so pronounced that

1:10

his two sets of teeth couldn't touch

1:12

at all. He couldn't keep

1:15

food in his mouth.

1:16

In this episode, we're going to look at

1:18

the practices of intermarriage

1:20

and inbreeding among several

1:23

major royal families and how

1:25

these practices built and in

1:27

some cases led to the unraveling

1:30

of their respective empires.

1:32

The strategy for survival and for enhancement

1:35

of power becomes, especially in the

1:37

Habsburg case, the recipe for its undoing.

1:39

From CBS Sunday Morning and iHeart

1:42

I'm Moacca and this is

1:45

mobituaries, this

1:52

moment, the Habsburg jaw

1:55

and the death of a dynasty.

2:15

Royal families and inbreeding

2:18

are they kind of like peanut butter and jelly.

2:21

There are two great tastes that went great

2:23

together mo for a really long time.

2:27

I'm talking with my friend Caroline

2:29

Weber. Carries a professor of

2:31

French and comparative literature at

2:33

Barnard College and a best

2:35

selling author.

2:37

At the moment, I'm working on a book on royalty

2:39

around the world in the late

2:41

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And one of

2:43

the amazing things to underscore

2:45

is that this kind of royal intermarriage

2:48

really continued for a very long time.

2:50

Even though it led to the end

2:52

of some dynasties, It's persisted among

2:55

a number of especially European dynasties.

2:57

And the most recent example, I think,

2:59

in kind of contemporary collective memory

3:02

is the late Queen Elizabeth I and

3:04

Prince Philip who are cousins, Who.

3:05

Were cousins, and how close were their cousins.

3:08

They were third cousins, so not

3:10

super close by royal standards. They shared

3:13

a common great great grandmother in

3:15

Queen Victoria.

3:17

Marriage between royal relatives

3:19

has many precedents. For example,

3:22

scientists believe that the parents

3:24

of boy King Tutan, common in

3:27

ancient Egypt, were brother and sister.

3:29

In ancient Rome, Emperor Claudius

3:32

married his niece Agrippina

3:34

the Younger. But this practice

3:36

became super charged throughout

3:38

Europe from the Late Middle Ages around

3:41

the year fifteen hundred all the

3:43

way until the outbreak of World War

3:45

One in nineteen fourteen. Now,

3:49

before we get into it, let's define

3:51

one word that's central to this topic,

3:54

consanguinity.

3:56

Consanguinity is a word

3:58

that describes blood relatedness

4:01

between people who marry.

4:03

If you were a king and you wanted your children to

4:05

be recognized as a king, you

4:07

would want to marry somebody who was perceived

4:09

also to be of royal blood,

4:12

and that royal blood often meant

4:15

that they were in some way, shape or form

4:17

related to you.

4:18

Wow, So consanguinity inter

4:21

marriage equaled stability.

4:23

Yeah, it did. It represented a few

4:25

things. I mean, on the one hand, consanguinity

4:28

did mean concentrating family

4:30

resources and territories and keeping

4:32

them as it were in the family. So

4:35

that was a big part of consanguinous

4:38

marriages, this idea that you weren't going to

4:40

let hard won territories

4:42

in your kingdom potentially pass into

4:44

the hands of a rival king somewhere

4:47

else. But the disadvantage, politically

4:50

speaking, was that consanguinity

4:52

meant that you missed an opportunity to form

4:54

an alliance with a rival king who was not

4:56

already related to you.

4:58

So for a good stretch of history,

5:00

the incentives to intermarry were

5:03

greater than the disincentives.

5:04

Yes, especially because the disincentives

5:07

weren't very well known. I think

5:09

just the idea of genetics

5:12

as an actual science that didn't even

5:14

start to come into being really until the nineteenth

5:17

century. So for hundreds of years when you intermarried,

5:20

the big incentive was this purity

5:22

of your bloodline and this kind of reinforced

5:25

intrafamilial connection, which became

5:28

more and more meaningful as your family

5:30

expanded its territory more

5:32

and more. And this is why the Hobsburgs are such

5:34

a good example or bad example

5:37

of inbreeding.

5:40

Who were the Hobsburgs.

5:42

So the Hobsburgs were a royal

5:44

family who traced their origins

5:47

to the early Middle Ages

5:49

in Central and Eastern Europe

5:51

what we would call today Austria and Hungary.

5:54

The Habsburgs held some of their power

5:56

through their relationship with what was known

5:58

as the Holy Roman Empire,

6:01

a vast Christian political entity

6:03

in Europe modeled on the original

6:06

Roman Empire.

6:07

Since Charlemagne in the ninth century,

6:09

Europe had had an elected

6:12

Holy Roman Emperor who was the defender

6:14

of the faith for all Catholics,

6:16

but essentially the Habsburgs kept

6:19

becoming Holy Roman Emperor.

6:22

Enter Maximilian the First. He

6:25

was a Habsburg and put the family

6:27

on the map quite literally with

6:29

his election as Holy Roman Emperor

6:32

and by his marriage to Mary of

6:34

Burgundy.

6:35

Marie of Burgundy basically through her

6:37

father had inherited much of

6:39

Burgundy in France, but also the

6:41

Netherlands and some territories kind of stretching

6:43

into what we would today consider to be Belgium.

6:46

And when she married a member of the

6:48

Habsburg royal family, the

6:50

Austrian Habsburgs then sort of took

6:52

over that whole swath of land as well.

6:55

Maximilian the First and Mary

6:57

of Burgundy, who were not closely

6:59

related, had one surviving son.

7:02

This son would expand the Habsburg's

7:05

influence even further than his father

7:07

did.

7:08

This guy's son was known as

7:10

Philip the Handsome Philippe Leubel we

7:12

called him in French. Philippe Leubel

7:15

then crucially married the

7:17

last offshoot of a Spanish

7:19

royal family known as aragon and Castile.

7:22

So most Americans have heard

7:24

of Ferdinand and Isabella. They sponsored

7:27

Christopher Columbus's trip to the New World. They

7:29

had a daughter known as Juana the Crazy

7:32

Juana la Looca, and so some of the I think

7:34

the lunacy that the Habsburg's

7:36

later evinced was actually inherited

7:39

from this woman, who was born a Castilian

7:41

an Aragonese princess. But she married

7:44

a son of this Habsburg Roman

7:46

Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor called Philippe

7:48

Leubel.

7:49

To recap Philip the Handsome,

7:51

the only surviving son of the Habsburg

7:53

Emperor, marries Juana the Crazy,

7:56

the heir to the Spanish throne. This

7:58

meant their descent and so would inherit both

8:01

the Habsburg and Spanish territories,

8:04

and Guana la Loca would be an amazing

8:06

telenovellah

8:10

I Love Betty leafea which became Ugly Betty in

8:12

the United States. It was originally a Colombian telenovela.

8:15

And yeah, and one on La Loca would be amazing.

8:17

It's just a great title already.

8:18

And she, by most accounts, really was

8:21

insane.

8:23

But Juana and Philip's son had

8:26

some sense. He ruled as

8:28

Charles the First of Spain and

8:30

Charles the Fifth of the Holy Roman Empire.

8:33

When Charles came of age,

8:35

he made the very smart decision that he

8:37

wasn't going to try to be in control

8:39

of both Austria, Central Europe,

8:42

Northern Europe and also Spain.

8:44

So he essentially split the Habsburgs

8:46

into two branches, and he founded the

8:49

dynasty of Spanish

8:51

Habsburgs as separate from

8:53

his Austrian Habsburg cousins.

8:56

The likeness of Charles quint as

8:58

he's known has been to pay did by

9:00

a number of painters. They all

9:02

show him with a distinctive

9:05

mandible.

9:07

So he did have what

9:09

became known as the as the Habsburg

9:11

jaw, this very protuberant

9:14

lower jaw, that kind of jutted out.

9:17

If you see there's a famous painting of him by

9:19

Titian where you can kind of see he's got

9:21

very sickly looking skin. He suffered from

9:23

gout. He may have suffered from epilepsy, which

9:25

became a kind of a hereditary habsburg condition.

9:28

But the main thing is the jaw, and the jaw

9:30

kind of was often associated with something

9:32

that modern scientists call maxillary

9:35

deficiency, where the upper jaw kind

9:37

of was sunken in. And the Titian portrait

9:39

of Charles Quint really shows a head that almost

9:41

looks like a cashew. It's kind of collapsed

9:43

in the center, with a bulbous forehead

9:46

up top, and then this really outwardly

9:48

jutting jaw and underbite

9:50

at the bottom.

9:51

An Italian writer named Antonio de

9:54

Biats, who met Charles Quint,

9:56

wrote in fifteen seventeen that he

9:58

had a long, avarice face

10:01

and a lopsided mouth which drops

10:03

open when he is not on his guard. So

10:06

this King Charles wasn't exactly Prince

10:08

Charming, but his decision to divide

10:10

the dynasty between Spain and

10:13

Austria would guarantee that his

10:15

descendants would be even less portrait

10:17

Jenic.

10:21

His parents were not that closely

10:23

interrelated. Charles quint was not

10:25

really the product of significant inbreeding,

10:28

but because it was his decision

10:30

essentially to try to split the Habsburg

10:32

family into two branches of a royal

10:34

family that together ruled so

10:36

much of Europe. His son became

10:39

the Spanish Habsburg King, who was really

10:42

just in charge of Spain and

10:44

the Holy Roman Empire, and his younger brother,

10:46

Charles Quint's younger brother, Ferdinand

10:49

I, became the head of the

10:51

Austrian branch of the family and ruling

10:53

over Austria and its associated territories.

10:55

He really instituted, I think the policy

10:58

of significant innermarriage tween and among

11:01

so what you then have after Charles Quint

11:03

is generations of Spanish Habsburg's

11:06

marrying Austrian habsburg to keep it,

11:09

keep it all together.

11:10

Keep it all together. Yeah, by splitting the empire,

11:12

he actually encouraged incentivized

11:15

intermarriage.

11:16

That's right, and that's why I think you find so much

11:18

more intermarriage in the Habsburg family

11:20

than in other European royal

11:22

families.

11:23

So much so that a Latin motto

11:25

was coined in connection with the Habsburgs.

11:28

There's no evidence that they invented it themselves,

11:30

but it became one that was cited every time

11:32

you saw news of yet another Habsburg

11:35

marriage. It would say, let other nations

11:37

wage war, You happy Austria

11:39

conquer through marriage.

11:43

Jamie and I are more than brother and sister.

11:45

We shed a wound, came into this world

11:47

together, we belonged together. Contrary

11:50

to what the Game of Thrones extended

11:52

universe might have you believe, Incest

11:55

wasn't a personal preference as much

11:57

as it was a political strategy.

11:59

Because he really was trying to manage an empire

12:01

that was so vast. People forget

12:03

that actually Mexico was part of

12:06

Charles Quint's empire. I mean, he claimed

12:08

Mexico in that obviously dubious

12:10

and problematic colonialius way. He

12:12

claimed the Philippines, and so his

12:15

empire really covered so much of the globe

12:17

that it didn't make sense for all of

12:19

that to be concentrated into one branch of

12:21

one family. And so by creating this kind of separate

12:24

but equal branch of the Austrian Habsburgs,

12:26

he had a kind of a constant pool of intermarriage

12:29

where none of these territories would go outside

12:31

of the family.

12:32

Wow, they had so much power,

12:34

and they were trying to maintain that power.

12:36

That's right.

12:36

Is there any family today that's the equivalent

12:40

God the Kardashians. I was going to say, are they as

12:42

powerful as the Kardashians.

12:43

I think it's hard

12:45

to tell, because, yeah, their brand wasn't

12:47

as beloved apparently as the Kardashians.

12:50

But yeah, in terms of ubiquity and

12:52

everywhere you look, there they are.

12:54

There is a kind of a Kardashian effect that you

12:56

see, we haven't yet lived long enough

12:59

and the Kardashians haven't lived long enough for us

13:01

to see what happens with the children of Kim

13:03

and Chloe and Courtney.

13:04

Well they do.

13:04

They have their own TV shows, those kids.

13:07

They will by the time this airs, and

13:09

they have delightful charles. They

13:11

look great.

13:11

Oh right, yeah, well I do feel like that. Yeah,

13:14

the Kardashians have done a much better job

13:16

of kind of diversification in.

13:18

Marriage, and that's why the Kardashian

13:20

dynasty will last even centuries longer

13:22

than the Hopspurs.

13:23

Yeah. Now,

13:25

I want you guys to be able to do

13:28

this. Tell you're my age

13:30

and one of your kids takes over, that's a

13:32

whole that's the Joy.

13:36

Charles quint had a son who became

13:38

Philip the Second of Spain, who

13:40

had a son called Philip the Third, who

13:43

had a son called Philip the.

13:44

Fourth, and they all

13:47

interestingly and importantly married

13:49

Austrian either nieces

13:51

or cousins.

13:53

And as the consanguinity picks up

13:55

in pace, so do its consequences.

13:58

Because the hobsburg is what you really see is just

14:01

generation after generation, the problems

14:03

that we now either know or

14:06

suspect were genetically

14:08

transmitted just get more and more pronounced.

14:10

Philip the Fourth and his niece slash

14:13

wife had one surviving son,

14:15

who would be known as Charles the

14:18

Second or Charles the Bewitched

14:21

due to his many infirmities.

14:23

Well, Charles the Second is important

14:26

because he really represents the

14:28

worst of what can happen with these

14:30

successive consanguineous marriages

14:33

from one generation to the next. His habsburg

14:35

jaw was so pronounced that his two

14:37

sets of teeth couldn't touch at all, he

14:40

couldn't keep food in his mouth.

14:42

He never really mentally developed

14:45

beyond the age of about ten

14:47

years old.

14:48

Charles was unable to speak until

14:50

the age of four, and he couldn't walk

14:53

until the age of eight. He looked

14:55

elderly when he was only thirty years

14:57

old, suffering from edemas on

14:59

his feet, legs, abdomen,

15:01

and face in his teeth

15:04

not meeting his inability

15:06

to chew. And this is centuries

15:10

before protein shakes. Like, there's right, I mean

15:12

the thunder straw has

15:14

been invented probably at that point.

15:16

Yeah, how did he eat not well?

15:18

And it wasn't pretty. This is one of the fun

15:21

things about studying royalty is if you're in a Storian

15:23

like me and you're trying to read contemporary accounts,

15:26

nobody wants ever to say anything bad

15:28

about the king, so you

15:30

get a lot of euphemisms like his

15:33

majesty did not eat well tonight, and

15:35

you think, okay, does that mean that he could barely get

15:38

the food in or was it just a disgusting

15:40

spectacle? And these euphemisms you

15:42

can never say definitively what they mean, but you suspect

15:44

that they hide a thousand embarrassments.

15:47

Genetic analysis has determined

15:49

that in the average Spanish Habsburg,

15:52

about ten percent of maternal

15:54

and paternal genes were identical,

15:57

which means they were more closely inbread

15:59

than the child of two first cousins.

16:02

By the time Charles the Bewitched was born,

16:05

the problem was even worse.

16:07

One of the takeaways from one of these scientific

16:09

reports was that even though Charles

16:12

the Second's parents were quote

16:15

primarily or only uncle

16:18

and niece, they

16:20

were so closely related already

16:22

by the previous generations of inbreeding that

16:24

they were as closely related as brother and sister.

16:27

So Charles the Second really was the

16:30

product of so much inbreeding that essentially it was

16:32

like his parents were siblings.

16:34

Oh my goodness. They

16:36

tried to marry him off.

16:38

They tried to marry Charles the Second off, and

16:40

it did not go well because generally,

16:43

one of the functions of slightly idealized

16:46

royal portraiture was that you could send the

16:48

equivalent of a photo to a

16:50

foreign court and say this is who

16:52

you'll be marrying. And there are

16:54

countless stories throughout

16:57

European history, at least, of massive

16:59

dissipate ointments and temper tantrums

17:01

when the person actually shows up.

17:03

Some things never changed, some things never changed.

17:06

Yeah, now, I mean, I guess it's like what does your Tinder

17:08

photo look like? And how much have you tinkered with it? But

17:10

in the case of Charles the second whatever

17:13

miniature portrait of him was sent to

17:15

the court of France where he got his first

17:17

bride, did not reveal the full

17:20

effect. So his first

17:22

wife, Marie Luise of.

17:23

Orleans, she swiped right.

17:25

She swiped right, or her parents swiped right

17:27

for her. When she got to Madrid

17:30

and saw who her husband was, apparently

17:32

she had a nervous breakdown. Of course it had to be

17:34

restrained, and like dragged up to the altar

17:36

screaming, and.

17:37

Did anyone say to her, honey, but his personality

17:40

haha?

17:41

Well, sadly, because he couldn't really talk, we

17:43

don't know what his personality was. He didn't

17:45

even have that going for. He couldn't even cultivate

17:47

the personality ride. He couldn't make himself understood.

17:50

I'm suddenly reminded of Paul

17:52

Rubens's bravura performance

17:55

in the sitcom Thirty Rock as

17:57

the genetically compromised European

17:59

Prince Gerhart Habsburg.

18:02

Thank you, all, dear friends,

18:05

fuck on it to my bad day.

18:08

I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Yeah,

18:12

would he like to dance? Sadly,

18:15

because my body does not produce joint

18:17

fluid, I cannot but

18:20

I would enjoy watching you dance moonbi

18:24

Um, that depiction

18:26

may not have been so far off from reality.

18:29

During the last years of his life,

18:31

Charles could barely stand up and

18:34

suffered from hallucinations and

18:36

convulsive episodes. Charles

18:38

the Bewitched died in seventeen

18:41

hundred at the age of thirty eight. According

18:44

to his autopsy, his corpse

18:46

did not contain a single drop of

18:48

blood. His heart was the size

18:50

of a peppercorn, his lungs

18:52

corroded, his intestines rotten

18:54

and gangrenous, He had a single testicle

18:57

black as coal, and his head was

19:00

water.

19:01

So he really became a poster child for what can

19:03

go wrong with interbreeding, and the line

19:05

died with him because he couldn't conceive

19:07

a child by either one of his wives.

19:09

And that has real repercussions.

19:12

Yes, yeah, I.

19:13

Mean it basically threw the Spanish

19:16

monarchy into a succession crisis, and

19:19

yeah, and a war, the War of that's known as the

19:21

War of Spanish Succession. There

19:24

were claimants from the Austrian

19:27

side who said, well, we're

19:29

Hafsburgs too, and then you had

19:31

the French who had a claim on the throne of Spain.

19:34

The war of Spanish succession

19:36

began in seventeen oh one and

19:38

went on for more than a decade, claiming

19:41

more than four hundred thousand

19:43

lives in combat.

19:46

It was almost a generation of young people

19:48

just grew up with this war where it was unclear

19:50

where the throne was going to land, and so in

19:53

terms of drawbacks to consanguineous

19:55

marriage and the genetic effects

19:58

of that, this is another one. Right, the dynasty, which

20:00

has drawn its legitimacy from a bloodline,

20:03

dies out.

20:04

But while the Spanish Habsburg

20:07

line died out with Charles the Bewitched

20:09

in seventeen hundred, the Austrian

20:12

branch of the Habsburgs kept

20:14

going. After

20:17

a short break. We'll meet one Austrian

20:20

Habsburg who could make this unsightly

20:22

jaw look chic.

20:24

Marie Antoinette was a Habsburg. Can we go to

20:26

Marintoinette?

20:27

Notte? When

20:35

I went to the Queen the pot

20:38

take no bread for you

20:40

know what? We fred let

20:42

them eat cake.

20:44

That's such nonsense. I would never say

20:46

that. Marie Antoinette, portrayed

20:49

here by Kirsten Dunst in Sophia Coppola's

20:51

twenty oh six film, is probably

20:54

the most famous Habsburg in history,

20:57

a product of the Austrian branch

20:59

of the family. In seventeen seventy,

21:01

she was married off to the air to

21:03

the French throne, the future

21:06

King Louis the sixteenth.

21:08

And he had significant Habsburg blood himself,

21:10

because both Louis the fourteenth and

21:12

Louis the thirteenth had been married to Habsburg

21:15

first cousins of theirs.

21:17

I'm back with author and professor Caroline

21:19

Webber.

21:20

So both she and her husband had this Habsburg

21:22

blood line. But she was the one who really

21:24

visibly had something of a Habsburg underbite,

21:27

a kind of protuberant lower jaw

21:30

that I think people who didn't like her took

21:32

to be some kind of equivalent of resting

21:34

bitch face. You know that she always had

21:36

this kind of haughty set

21:39

to her face because she also had a

21:41

pendulous lower lip, which was associated

21:43

with the Habsburg jaw.

21:44

It was the pendulous lower lip.

21:45

The pendulous lower lip was basically just a

21:47

lip that would kind of hang low over

21:50

the protuberant chin, and she

21:52

had something of that according

21:54

to contemporary reports.

21:56

By most accounts, Marie Antoinette's version

21:59

of these trees was not crazily

22:02

exacerbated. Her mother an

22:04

Austrian princess and empress

22:07

had married a little bit outside of the bloodline

22:09

into the ducal House of Lorraine, and so Marie

22:11

Antoinette got a little bit of variety in the bloodline

22:13

there. When she came

22:16

to France as an almost

22:18

fifteen year old girl in seventeen seventy, it

22:20

had been a long time since the French people

22:23

had seen kind of a fresh faced,

22:25

young, pretty, fun

22:28

loving teenage girl who was heir

22:30

to the whole thing by dint of being

22:32

married to the future king. And she

22:35

became one of the first fashion

22:37

celebrities in eighteenth century Europe, realiant

22:40

in the history of all of Europe, and

22:42

she was the first European royal whose

22:44

likeness was reproduced in

22:47

kind of a primitive early version of fashion magazines,

22:49

which were these fashion illustrations. Those were

22:51

generally quite idealizing when they depicted

22:53

her face. It didn't have a super

22:56

pronounced Hapsburg jaw. You'd maybe see a little

22:58

hint of it, and people who admired

23:01

her and thought she was elegant and liked the kind

23:03

of crazy new way she liked to dress

23:05

wanted to look like her, So you might see

23:07

people kind of doing a poudy lip to

23:09

try to vaguely affect. Yeah,

23:12

but they didn't have plastic surgery back then, so there

23:14

was no surgical method for

23:16

making your lower lip puff out a little bit.

23:21

There is a really funny story, for instance, of Marie

23:23

Antoinette loved experimental hairstyles,

23:25

and we all know the kind of the fashion plates

23:27

and the portraits of her with like the three foot high

23:30

beehive headdress sometimes

23:32

that had like a fully rigged sailing

23:34

ship ensconced in the in the

23:36

coils of her hair.

23:38

Yeah.

23:38

Yeah, I wrote a book about

23:41

this year's ago,

23:43

but I mentioned it just to say anybody who wants to see

23:46

the pictures I did reproduce as many

23:48

as I could in Queen of Fashion. But one thing that that

23:50

I thought was so funny and really captures this kind

23:52

of contemporary aspirational celebrity

23:55

culture that could

23:57

have some relationship to like the card today

24:01

where the King and Queen are the ones who

24:03

everybody knows about, who have all the money, who have

24:05

all the power, who are everywhere all the time,

24:08

and this invitation frenzy Marie Antoinette

24:10

with these crazy hairstyles apparently

24:13

spawned tens

24:15

of thousands of copycats, both in the

24:17

upper classes where they could really afford to have somebody

24:19

spend six hours on their hair teasing it into a

24:21

cathedral shape, or little working

24:23

girls in Paris who would just try to do what they could

24:26

with, like teasing in a comb. But one

24:28

woman famously at court, some kind of rich

24:30

woman saw Marie Antoinette in a headdress

24:32

that, instead of having flowers and pearls

24:34

and ribbons, like the sort of standard way would

24:37

have been at Bearsies at that time, Marie Antoinette had a cabbage

24:39

and some carrots and like

24:41

maybe a cucumber some other vegetables in it,

24:43

and was called her pouf a lajardigne, a

24:45

gardener's poof. And this woman

24:47

said, never again, where will

24:50

I wear anything but vegetables in my hair?

24:52

It looked so beautiful, your majesty, And

24:54

this idea was people were desperate to look like the queen.

24:56

So I think even if she had a bit of a

24:58

Habsburg jaw and a bit of a Habsburg

25:00

pendulous lip, she did become this kind

25:02

of fashion icon who people wanted to resemble.

25:04

And what do you think she saw when she looked in the mirror.

25:07

That's a great question, and you know Versailles

25:09

was not lacking in mirrors. Well, you know, the royal family

25:11

had to walk through that huge hall of mirrors

25:13

every day on their way to lunch. So she I

25:16

don't know. I mean, she did complain that she felt like

25:18

most portraits painted of her didn't capture

25:21

her her essence, But

25:24

I don't know if that's because the paintings

25:26

were too idealized or not idealized

25:28

enough. You know, we really don't

25:30

know. And because she was such a controversial figure, you

25:33

know, France and Austria hadn't been allies

25:35

for a really long time in European history,

25:37

and so when she came and married the future Louis

25:40

the sixteenth, there were a number of people at court who

25:42

were just opposed to her presence

25:44

there because she represented an alliance with Austria.

25:46

So they would be the ones who would maybe go a little

25:49

bit farther in talking about how ugly she was

25:51

with this habsburg jaw, and the people who were

25:53

partisans of her and the alliance she represented

25:56

would talk about how beautiful she was with all that in

25:58

her hair, with all that rough dinner hair. Kept

26:00

her young. I mean, she died at thirty seven. But who's

26:03

to say how long she would have survived otherwise?

26:05

Right head of Lettuce And then there's something

26:07

there. Okay, no, but you know, boy,

26:09

that confidence she shows up in France.

26:12

She's Austrian and she's like, this is how I'm gonna

26:14

dress, wear my hair.

26:15

Yeah, and that she actually sort of not

26:17

only presumed to dictate fashion

26:19

to the French, but she kind of pioneered

26:22

the concept of the French

26:24

being the ones who were the people

26:27

to beat when it came to fashion.

26:28

Is that where we get it from here? Yeah?

26:29

I mean from her and from her and her husband's

26:32

shared ancestor, Louis the fourteenth, He really

26:34

kind of invented peacocking

26:36

and power dressing for men, you know, the high

26:39

heels, the red souls, the kind

26:41

of early Christian lubautint, the big

26:43

wigs and the big hair and the ribbons

26:45

and the lace. And Louis the fourteenth became a walking

26:47

billboard for the French luxury industries,

26:50

and he understood that France, in

26:52

order to kind of fill its coffers, needed

26:54

to have these these luxury exports that it

26:56

could do better than anyone else, like lace, like

26:59

silk. But he really kind of took the

27:01

fashion plate concept to an extreme

27:03

in terms of how kings could power dress

27:05

and show you just how much money they had. But he wasn't

27:07

interested in trends per se. Marie Antoinette

27:09

when she came to France in seventeen seventy, Paris

27:12

was just starting to become a place where what

27:14

we now know is fast fashion was coming

27:17

into being, where there was a

27:19

whole sub industry of women who weren't

27:21

allowed by guild law to make dresses

27:23

or make hats, but they could make the trimmings that you put

27:25

on dresses and the trimmings you put on hats, and those

27:28

became the trends that you could wear and

27:30

kind of change every day to change

27:32

your look all the time. And Marie Antoinette really became

27:35

the royal god parent

27:38

of that phenomenon and spawned

27:40

the French fashion industry as we still know it today.

27:44

The queen eventually fell out of fashion

27:47

with her French subjects. Here she

27:49

is portrayed in nineteen thirty eight by

27:51

film actress Norma Shearer.

27:53

People threw stones at the carriage.

27:56

They threw stones and

27:58

shall have ill sums. I'm

28:04

trembling still. Those

28:06

pale faces full of hatreds

28:08

shouting what's being shouted all over front for

28:11

an Austrian leech.

28:15

I suppose you can only speculate, But do

28:17

you think that when she looked in the mirror

28:19

that the hair,

28:22

the clothes, everything

28:25

around it was I don't know.

28:28

I don't want to say a way of compensating for the jah

28:30

on the lip, but a way of like

28:33

anyone would like I would if I looked and I saw

28:35

I don't like that about me. Yeah, I'll do this

28:38

to balance it out, to draw attention.

28:39

Indeed, if you wear a three foot

28:42

high headdress on your head, you are going to

28:44

kind of direct the eye

28:46

away from your pendulous

28:49

lower lip and you're extruding habsbrug

28:51

jaw. And it would explain why she gravitated

28:53

toward that trend. Of all possible trends,

28:56

I mean, there are all kinds of crazy things that she

28:58

could do in the name of fashion, but

29:00

to choose specifically as your signature

29:03

hairstyle, this gigantic,

29:05

bulbous, three foot high construction,

29:07

you do think that that must have really softened the chin.

29:11

In the end, of course, Marie Antoinette

29:13

took it on the chin and much

29:15

more when she and her husband

29:17

were beheaded On the other

29:19

side of the break. Did centuries

29:21

of royal inbreeding lead to

29:24

World War One? The downfall

29:26

of more defective and despotic dynasties

29:29

coming up next? Europeans

29:39

throughout these centuries, did they not

29:42

imagine another way of doing things

29:44

other than dynastic rule?

29:47

I mean, I think so much of the symbolic

29:50

strength of monarchy in Europe from

29:52

the Middle Ages too, maybe even to today,

29:54

but certainly from the Middle Ages until World War One

29:57

rested on this mythology that the older

30:00

and the purer your bloodline, the better.

30:02

But as early as the nineteenth century,

30:05

questions were being raised about the

30:07

wisdom of royal relatives marrying

30:09

each other. In eighteen seventy, Charles

30:12

Darwin wrote that consanguineous

30:15

marriages lead to deafness,

30:17

and dumbness and blindness.

30:20

Darwin, for what it's worth, married and

30:22

had ten children with his first cousin,

30:24

Emma Wedgwood. In the

30:26

US, concerns over so called

30:28

cousin marriage were growing rapidly.

30:31

At the ninth Annual meeting of the American

30:34

Association for the Advancement of

30:36

Science in eighteen fifty five, a

30:38

Boston clergyman named Charles

30:41

Brooks delivered a fiery

30:43

lecture warning against the

30:45

health consequences of consanguineous

30:48

reproduction, and by the end of the nineteenth

30:50

century, more than a dozen states

30:53

had passed laws banning such

30:55

marriages.

30:56

And nowadays people are envisioning another way

30:59

the crown, so that the heir to the throne of

31:01

England now is married to a woman with no obvious

31:04

or known royal blood. So royals

31:07

today, I think, do understand that

31:09

there are some advantages beyond just getting to

31:11

marry a person you love, to marrying outside

31:13

of the gene pool.

31:14

The tradition of European royals

31:16

marrying each other also meant

31:18

that a disorder carried by one royal

31:21

line was likely to be carried over

31:23

to other royal lines, since

31:25

all these lines were tangled up. Take

31:28

the blood clotting disorder hemophilia,

31:30

which is often described as the royal

31:33

disease.

31:35

Because it was something that was genetically

31:37

transmitted, and it's something

31:39

that really came to flourish

31:42

in and among European royal houses throughout

31:44

late nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe.

31:47

Because Queen Victoria was a

31:49

carrier of the gene and so she

31:51

had one son who was a hemophiliac,

31:53

and then she had several grandchildren

31:55

who were carriers of the disease.

31:57

And because she had cast her net

32:00

wide over Europe, you really see

32:03

heemophilia taking off in these generations

32:06

of matches that were made between

32:08

and among the children and grandchildren

32:10

of Queen Victoria.

32:11

In the case of the royal houses which were

32:13

beseicked by it in the late nineteenth and early

32:16

twentieth centuries, hemophilia

32:18

wasn't just a family matter. It

32:20

threatened to upend the world

32:23

order.

32:24

The best example I can think of is Nicholas

32:26

the Second, the last Czar of Russia,

32:29

the Romanov, the Romanov who his

32:33

wife, the Czarina, was a granddaughter

32:35

of Queen Victoria. Her brother had

32:37

been hemophiliac and had

32:39

died young. He fell out a window and basically

32:41

died of internal bleeding. I mean, basically,

32:44

you can't be a hemophiliac and a child

32:46

and have any of the normal bumps and scrapes

32:48

that a typical child would have growing

32:50

up. And so her and Nicholas's son,

32:53

Alexei, who was the Tsarevich,

32:55

the heir to the throne, was born

32:58

a haemophiliac. But essentially they

33:00

spent the entirety of

33:03

his life until the whole family was murdered by

33:05

the Bolsheviks, hiding

33:07

him from the public and hiding the fact

33:10

that he was a hemophiliac.

33:13

The family drama inside the last

33:15

Russian monarchy was dramatized

33:17

on screen in the nineteen seventy

33:19

one film Nicholas and Alexandra.

33:22

There is no doubt of it, no doubt of any kind.

33:25

It is unquestionably hemophilia. I

33:27

see, the female is the carrier.

33:30

The mother gives it to the son. Your

33:32

mother got it from her mother, Queen Victoria, and

33:34

passed it on to you.

33:36

I see.

33:37

A big part of why Zar

33:40

Nicholas the second was so disliked by

33:42

the Russian public is because they never

33:44

saw him. He was invisible

33:46

to the people of Russia. And it was largely because

33:49

he and his wife were just consumed

33:51

by dread that after years and years

33:53

of not having a son and only having daughters,

33:56

and they finally had this boy, and then they realized

33:58

that he can die at any moment from the slightest

34:01

thing. So

34:03

they were constantly in seclusion with their

34:06

child. Resputant

34:08

was brought in which is you know, kind of resputant

34:10

is always invoked as the kind of proof

34:12

of how crazy and out of touch these Tsars

34:15

were, And they wanted this Charlatan faith

34:17

healer, mad priest, sex maniac

34:20

to come into the heart of their family

34:22

and run things as he did.

34:24

But he was perceived by them as the

34:26

only thing that was standing between their son

34:29

and death from the complications of hemophilia.

34:31

I knew you were going to send for me. I

34:33

knew the child was sick.

34:36

I know what's the matter with him?

34:38

You can't I see blood

34:40

when I shut my eyes.

34:41

The blood he may have seen was that

34:44

of the whole family executed

34:46

by Bolshevik revolutionaries in

34:48

nineteen eighteen.

34:50

So by the time they died, with still a

34:52

very young Tsarevich and the rest of their

34:54

children, their daughters, nobody in Russia

34:56

knew that the boy was a hemophiliac.

34:58

Oh, my goodness, But the tsar and

35:00

Tsarevich's in soelarty

35:03

and then the entrance of resputen.

35:06

Both of these things which are

35:08

to their detriment, are connected to their

35:10

son's hemophilia.

35:11

I intimately connected my only close royal

35:13

friend, His great great great grandparents

35:16

were the aunt and uncle of Zar Nicholas

35:18

the second, and his name is Dimitri

35:20

of Yugoslavia, and he's the best storyteller

35:22

around. And one of the stories that

35:24

he tells about Rasputin

35:27

is that one day the Tsarevich was playing

35:30

inside in one of the big Russian palaces

35:32

and he was sitting in one of these kind of massive, ornately

35:35

decorated rooms where there were gigantic chandeliers

35:37

hanging from the ceiling, and Rasputin came

35:39

running into the room and pushed

35:42

this little boy kind of out of the way, and

35:45

a gigantic chandelier came

35:47

crashing down. And the thought was that

35:49

Rasputin really does have these visionary

35:52

qualities because he saw that this

35:54

boy was about to be crushed by a chandelier.

35:56

Wow. While Resputen's

35:58

name has gone down in history as

36:01

a byword for someone who wields

36:03

deceitful influence, perhaps

36:05

it should be more celebrated. The

36:07

euro disco group BONEYM seemed

36:10

to think so.

36:12

The same.

36:20

Okay, so you are writing a book now

36:23

on another dynasty.

36:25

I'm writing a book on a number

36:27

of interrelated dynasties, but the center

36:30

of gravity is a Bavarian dynasty

36:32

called the Vittelsbach And who are they?

36:34

They are an old Bavarian

36:37

family, so south of Germany, Catholic

36:39

dynasty. They were already

36:42

in the nineteenth century one of the oldest royal families

36:44

in Europe. They could trace their ancestry back

36:46

to the eleventh century. They had actually

36:48

intermarried with both Spanish

36:50

and Austrian Habsburgs

36:53

throughout history, sporadically

36:55

periodically, because they were Catholic royals

36:57

and Catholic royals tended to like to with

37:00

each other, and the same for the Protestants. And

37:02

they really came to the fore as one of the

37:04

more colorful royal families in the second

37:07

half of the nineteenth century.

37:08

And there are some particularly

37:12

colorful members of this family.

37:14

Yes, I want to call my book Glass

37:17

Piano Girl and Other Stories of Royal

37:19

Dysfunction. I'm not sure that's what it will be allowed

37:22

to be. But the Vittelsbach princess who won my

37:24

heart was the daughter of

37:26

a Vittelsbach Bavarian king Ludwig

37:28

the first. Her name was Alexandra of

37:30

Bavaria, and she, when

37:32

she was around eighteen, became

37:35

thoroughly convinced that she had swallowed

37:38

two foreign objects that were

37:40

threatening to destroy her from within. The

37:43

largest and most problematic of these

37:45

objects was a glass grand

37:47

piano that she thought was lodged in her stomach.

37:50

And she also believed that there was a miniature

37:53

sofa that was wedged in her skull,

37:55

like somewhere in her brain, and she would have

37:57

these fits of I think what psychoanalyst

38:00

would call hysterical blindness, where the doctors

38:02

couldn't find anything wrong with her optic nerves.

38:05

There was no as far as we know, prominent

38:08

genetic Vittelsbach hereditary

38:10

condition that led to these

38:12

moments of blindness, and the Vittelsbach themselves

38:15

had intermarried for generations like

38:17

so many royal families. But she

38:19

believed that this little miniature sofa was pressing

38:21

on her eyes and making her blind.

38:24

And can I ask was the sofa

38:26

in the same room as the piano? Was it like a

38:28

drawing room or a situation.

38:30

Or I don't know how she It's funny

38:32

because she became a writer in later life, but she never

38:34

really wrote about the floor plan, the

38:36

floor plan of her body as a set

38:39

of different chambers. But I mean, definitely they were distinct

38:41

scale differences. The piano was a

38:44

properly sized grand piano, whereas this little

38:47

sofa was tiny enough to somehow fit in

38:49

her skulp. But her doctors finally

38:51

tricked her out of believing that she had this

38:54

tiny sofa in her head because they induced vomiting

38:56

one day, and then in the bucket

38:58

that they held out to collect her sick they

39:00

fished out the surreptitiously

39:03

slipped in piece of dollhouse furniture.

39:05

They took a little, tiny dollhouse sofa and said,

39:07

do you see, your highness, Thanks to the emetic

39:10

that we've prescribed, you've been purged of it now.

39:13

But because she was convinced that the piano

39:15

in her abdomen was full sized, they

39:17

could never come up with a similar trick,

39:20

so she really off and on suffered from

39:22

incredible periods of almost paralyzing

39:25

terror, where she was afraid that if she moved

39:27

even the least bit the wrong way, or if she

39:29

jostled up against a person or a wall,

39:32

or a door or the arm of a chair, that the

39:34

whole thing would shatter and shred her inside.

39:38

Royal photography was starting to come into vogue

39:40

in this period, and we do have at least

39:43

two photographs of her. But

39:45

the photographs we had of her are of just a woman

39:47

who looks haunted and hunted and

39:49

kind of you know, just like a hollow

39:53

face, because she was afraid to eat too. I

39:55

mean, eating became a challenge. Everything

39:57

was a challenge. She saw potential day

40:00

everywhere and lived a fairly long

40:02

life by those standards. I think she died when she was around sixty.

40:05

And this is Princess Alexandra of Bavaria.

40:07

Then Ludwig the castle Builder,

40:13

Ludwig the castle Builder, So Ludwig the Second

40:16

was Alexandra's nephew.

40:19

Ludwig the Second was the

40:21

most flamboyantly eccentric of all the Vittel's

40:23

Box and probably of all royals in the nineteenth

40:26

century. He had this kind of

40:28

also delusional quality to his

40:30

mental makeup, where, for instance, he believed

40:33

that he was in constant communion

40:35

with the ghosts of the royals that he most

40:37

admired, who weren't even necessarily

40:39

close relations of his or related at all.

40:41

In particular, he would have these kind

40:44

of spiritual conversations

40:46

with Marie Antoinette and Louis the fourteenth,

40:49

and he so firmly believed that they were

40:51

around him and talking to him and advising him

40:53

that he would have these elaborate dinner parties

40:56

served where it was just himself and

40:58

the bust of Louis the fourteen, the bust of Marie

41:00

Antoinette, and he would have dish after dish brought

41:02

in by valets and liveried valets standing

41:04

in attendance, and they would clear away the

41:07

plates of like mounds of pheasant,

41:09

mounds of suites. He loved sweets that Obviously,

41:12

these bust statues were not consuming.

41:14

But the favorite extravagance of the Ludwig

41:17

the castle Builder was building

41:20

castles.

41:21

And he built castles all over Bavaria.

41:23

One of his castles, Neus s Fonstein,

41:26

was the one that became the basis for the Disney World

41:28

Castle. So when we think of a cartoon

41:30

version of a castle with crazy turrets,

41:33

and it almost looks like it's something out of a fairy

41:35

tale, this was born of the feverish

41:37

imagination of Ludwig the

41:40

Second.

41:40

Ludwig believed he ruled by divine

41:43

right, which meant no checks or

41:45

balances from his royal cabinet, which

41:48

meant he ignored all warnings

41:50

about the disaster his frienzied

41:52

spending was leading towards.

41:55

He bankrupted Bavaria single handedly

41:57

by building these castles, and was actually caught

41:59

by his men ministers writing letters

42:01

to various bankers around Europe offering

42:04

to sell them Bavaria so that they would

42:06

advance him the money to keep building his castles.

42:08

So he was really quite

42:10

a maniac. But the palaces that

42:13

he built that were so hard

42:15

on the Bavarian treasury, in fact, are now huge

42:17

tourist draws in bavarias if people go to Bavaria,

42:19

they want to see those castles.

42:21

Crazy rich Bavarians.

42:23

Crazy rich Bavarians. He

42:25

didn't know how to spend it fast enough.

42:27

How confident are you that this

42:29

behavior was at least

42:31

in part due to intermarriage.

42:33

The vittels Box intermarried a lot,

42:36

not as much as the Habsburg's, but it was really a proud

42:38

tradition and it dated back many many

42:40

generations, and anecdotally,

42:42

by the nineteenth century there was

42:45

a kind of what we would call a meme

42:47

about something called the Vittelsbach madness.

42:50

Then the perception really was that Ludwig

42:52

had inherited this madness

42:54

from the Vittelsbach side of the family,

42:57

and so it was seen as this kind

42:59

of possibly hereditary taint.

43:02

Then Ludwig's younger brother.

43:04

Oh Auto Ludwig Ludwig

43:07

was overthrown by his cabinet in eighteen eighty

43:09

six, who were afraid that he was going to sell the Kingdom

43:11

of Bavaria. They couldn't get him to stop spending

43:14

on the castles, and they overthrew him,

43:16

knowing that his younger brother was even crazier

43:18

than he was, but thinking that at least the younger

43:20

brother Otto, who was handed the throne as

43:22

Otto the first, would be pliable

43:26

in their hands. Because Otto basically

43:29

went through protracted periods where he believed

43:31

that he was a dog, and so Otto

43:34

never really even tried to rain. Otto never

43:36

had the power of the purse. Otto was really

43:39

run by his one of

43:41

his dog walkers.

43:42

Yeah, and his belief

43:44

that he was a dog. How did this manifest?

43:46

I belief that he was a dog manifested itself

43:49

in lunging, snarling, biting.

43:51

He actually he was kept for most of his adult

43:54

life and most of his reign in one

43:56

particular kind of out of the way palace that not

43:58

too many people would risk a visiting. Sometimes

44:00

his relatives felt bad and went to visit him, and they

44:02

were the ones who would report that he was like leashed

44:05

to a wall. And when they would come into the room,

44:08

you know, and you'd be presented, because he was still the

44:10

kings. He'd be presented with all this pomp and like

44:12

liveried servants, and you'd do your deep curtsies

44:14

if you were a woman, or your deep ritual bows if you

44:16

were a man, but you'd see this snarling

44:19

person on all fours, tethered to the wall

44:21

and like snapping at you and apparently foaming

44:24

at the mouth. There are reports also that he would

44:26

only eat out of like a dog bowl or a

44:28

bowl on the ground.

44:30

Now, Carrie points out that as a young man,

44:32

Auto had been forced to fight in the

44:34

Franco Prussian War, where he witnessed

44:36

atrocities and suffered post

44:39

traumatic stress disorder.

44:41

But the dog delusions had already kind of started with

44:43

Auto when he was a teenager, before he went off to war,

44:45

And I think more just sent him over the edge, and.

44:47

Just exacerbated and sent him over the edge. Can

44:49

we draw a line between there

44:52

and the outbreak of World

44:54

War One?

44:55

I think in many ways we can, because

44:58

By the time World War One broke

45:00

out in nineteen fourteen, Europe

45:02

was still almost entirely ruled

45:05

by people from old

45:07

royal families who had varying degrees

45:10

of inbreeding and varying disadvantages

45:13

that attached to that. And so the kingdom

45:15

of Bavaria, for instance, I mean, I think it's

45:17

incredible fragility is highlighted

45:20

by the fact that these two kings, Ludwig

45:22

the second and Auto the First, were kings, and yet

45:24

they couldn't govern, They were incapable

45:26

of governing, and Bavaria

45:28

is one of the kingdoms that collapsed with World War

45:30

One. The Romanovs were, you

45:32

know, autocrat of all. The Russia's was actually

45:35

the Bizar's title. And the idea was you

45:37

ruled by autocracy because you were chosen

45:39

by God and the people are not supposed to have a voice

45:41

at all. And when people started wanting to have a

45:43

voice, Nicholas the second didn't listen

45:45

to them, partly through his retrograde

45:48

convictions in the superiority of royal

45:50

birth and his divine mandate, but partly again

45:52

also because he was so distracted by his son's

45:55

chemophilia.

45:56

And we can't forget about those Austrian

45:59

Habsburgs.

46:00

The Emperor of the Austro

46:02

Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph, was

46:05

himself the product of Habsburg

46:07

and a Vittelsbach marriage. His wife

46:09

was twice over of Vittelsbach.

46:11

Her parents were Vittelsbach cousins.

46:13

Their only son, Rudolph, died

46:16

by suicide after killing his seventeen

46:18

year old mistress in a hunting lodge

46:21

in what became known as the Mayrling

46:23

Incident. It would have a profound

46:26

effect on European geopolitics,

46:28

since Rudolph was seen by royals

46:30

as the great progressive hope.

46:33

He was the one who had really had these

46:35

kind of ambitions to liberalize and

46:37

modernize the Austro Hungarian Empire

46:39

and give the people more of a voice,

46:41

adopt some of the kind of more modern

46:44

liberal notions of constitutional

46:47

rule and checks and balances. But

46:49

his mother was terrified that by

46:51

dint of being doubly a Vittelsbach on her mother's

46:54

on her father's side, that she had transmitted

46:56

this Vittelsbach madness to.

46:57

Him, and she felt guilty.

46:58

She felt guilty, and she might

47:00

not have been wrong.

47:02

After the prince's death, the line

47:04

of succession eventually passed

47:06

to Rudolph's cousin, Archduke

47:09

Franz Ferdinand, whose name

47:11

you may remember from high school European

47:13

history. His assassination led

47:15

to the outbreak of World War One.

47:20

To draw the line between World War One and

47:22

in reading it would sound maybe specious

47:24

or flip, but I think that the reason why

47:27

these questions about royal intermarriage

47:29

and what their actual effects were on the human

47:31

beings who were produced by those systems

47:33

is that those were the same human beings who

47:36

governed most of the world through nineteen

47:38

eighteen.

47:41

Bear in mind, in just the Austro

47:44

Hungarian Empire you had

47:46

one forgive the expression crazy

47:48

ass family deciding the fate

47:51

of more than fifty million people,

47:54

and.

47:54

The fact that World War One seesed the collapse

47:56

of the Russian Empire, the Prussian Empire,

47:59

and the Austro Hungarian Empire. It's

48:01

another death of dynasties in

48:03

effect, and all of those families

48:06

had really been mined by problems

48:08

that seem to correlate with in rereading, even though there

48:10

were plenty of other geopolitical

48:13

factors and domestically political

48:15

factors.

48:15

Honestly, folks, this is all a

48:17

reminder that democracy really

48:20

remains the best game in

48:22

town. I

48:29

hope you enjoyed this Mobituary.

48:32

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