Cinema audiences can finally watch Jeanne du Barry – the sex-soaked saga of Louis XV’s mistress that premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2023. Directed by the French filmmaker Maïwenn (who also stars in the title role), it has been billed as the first step in Johnny Depp’s redemption. Wafting through Versailles in a wig and white face-paint, Depp’s role as the 18th century king is his first since the trial involving him and his former wife, Amber Heard.
Speaking at the UK premier earlier this week, Maïwenn told audiences she had wanted to make the film “since 2016”. “I was obsessed by Jeanne du Barry for many years because she was a feminist before everybody else”.
Maïwenn’s assessment of du Barry’s feminist credentials might be novel, but her interest in the courtesan – Louis XV’s last official mistress and a victim of the violence of the French Revolution – is hardly new. The “royal whore” has featured in as many as ten films (from a 1915 silent production to Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette), two operas, and a handful of plays and TV series. Even Dostoyevsky couldn’t resist the pull of her story: in his 1869 novel, The Idiot, one of his characters drunkenly recounts how he prays for the “repose” of du Barry’s soul: “a Countess who rose from shame to reign like a Queen” who was guillotined “for the satisfaction of the fishwives of Paris”.
A feminist hero or a “great sinner” – who was Jeanne du Barry? When pieced together by biographers, the facts of her life sound like the plot of a salacious 19th century novel.
Born in 1743 (she would later take years off her age), Jeanne Bécu was the illegitimate daughter of a poor seamstress. One theory has her father as a monk; a shadowy figure called, ironically, Brother Angel, who would later appear at her wedding masquerading as an uncle. Jeanne’s childhood was split between the sacred and profane. She spent time with the courtesan of one of her mother’s former lovers – all gorgeous dresses and ornate hair brushes – before entering a convent.
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