Grandiose luxury and 1,400 dead workers: The palace that wanted to be bigger than the Vatican

“Kill them! But kill them all, so that there is no one left to blame me.” This is the phrase uttered by a king, Charles IX of France who, faced with the possibility of a revolt of unforeseeable consequences, decided to take drastic measures. To commit a crime that would clean up the crime itself. Although it seems, on the other hand, that the phrase is apocryphal. In any event, the film director Patrice Chéreau and his screenwriter, Danièle Thomson, kept it for the script of Queen Margot (1994), a cinematic masterpiece that has just turned 30 years old, and which today seems more relevant than ever. The film is an auteur blockbuster, a bloody and romantic epic. To make it, the best actors, the best technical and artistic professionals and the best locations were used. Among these was the National Palace of Mafra, in Portugal, whose history runs parallel to that of the movie itself. Two stories of splendor and also of desolation.

It was Queen Margot, but it was originally going to be The Three Musketeers. In the late 1980s, directors such as Claude Berri (Germinal), Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Name of the Rose), Luc Besson (The Big Blue) and Jean-Paul Rappeneau (Cyrano de Bergerac) were scoring huge box-office hits in France with old-fashioned blockbusters. Patrice Chéreau, France’s most prestigious theater director, had made four rather minor films and was hoping to make a popular hit of his own with a new version of the adventures of D’Artagnan and his comrades.

He was beaten to the punch by another director, Jean Becker, although that project never came to fruition. Instead Chéreau read another novel by Alexandre Dumas, La Reine Margot, about the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day in Paris in 1572, and found his ideal project. He persuaded Claude Berri, who was not only a director but also one of France’s most powerful producers, to obtain the financing — the co-production was set up with Germany and Italy — thanks to the allure of a movie star, Isabelle Adjani, who had just triumphed with her nomination for an Oscar for Camille Claudel.

The fact that Adjani, at nearly 40, was twice the age of the real character of Marguerite de Valois was not a major problem. However, the actress’ indecisive nature delayed production and even led to its being cancelled for a time. Four years passed before filming could begin. In the meantime, Chéreau and Thomson wrote nine versions of the script, which grew as they added other literary references such as Heinrich Mann’s Henry IV or Christopher Marlowe’s play The Massacre at Paris, as well as connotations derived from the geopolitics of the time.

The story mixed historical facts with literary fantasy, starting from one of the darkest episodes in French history. In August 1572, Paris celebrated the wedding between the Protestant Henry of Bourbon, King of Navarre, and Margaret of Valois (“Margot”), the sister of the Catholic monarch of France, Charles IX. This marriage was supposed to be an act of reconciliation that would put an end to the religious wars that plagued the country.

But tempers were too heated. Shortly before, Joan of Albret, the groom’s mother, had died, a death that was suspected of being a Catholic crime. Admiral Coligny, a trusted aide to the king, was also the leader of the Protestant Huguenot party, and intended to declare war on Spain for the harsh repression of Protestantism in Flanders, in modern-day Netherlands. For its part, the ultra-Catholic Guise family promoted the alliance with Spain and campaigned against Coligny and the Huguenots. The arrival of thousands of Protestants in Paris to celebrate the royal wedding sparked hostility among the predominantly Catholic population. The tension was such that any spark would have been enough to start a fire.

The trigger eventually came from an arquebus. Coligny was the victim of an attack in the street: he was shot by a man named Maurevert from inside a house belonging to the Guises. The admiral lost an arm, but was initially spared his life. The Huguenots, outraged, demanded justice from Charles IX. In return, what they got was a decision that on 24 August, St Bartholomew’s Day, the Protestant leaders of the city were to be killed. Beginning with Coligny, who was thrown out of a window, then into the Seine, then castrated, decapitated and finally hanged by his feet. The other leaders followed suit, and immediately afterwards not a single Protestant was safe in Paris.

The king then issued a counter-order, but the violence was already unstoppable. It is estimated that more than 4,000 people were killed in Paris alone, and the figure rises to 10,000 if we include the provincial towns, which also joined in the carnage. Meanwhile, Henry of Navarre, protected out of the fact of being a prince with royal blood and by his marriage to a Catholic princess, renounced Protestantism. As for Margot — this is where literary creativity steps in — she fell in love with La Môle, a Huguenot knight, and to save him she allied herself with her husband and confronted her brother the king, her former lover the Duke of Guise, and her mother, the scheming Catherine de Médici.

To tell this story, Chéreau chose historical locations, some built during the Renaissance or earlier, such as the castles of Meaulnes and Compiègne, the military citadel of Blaye, or the Basilica of Saint Quentin which stood in as Notre Dame de Paris for the wedding between Henri and Margot. But some of the best scenes in the film, those of family intrigue in the hallways and courtyards of the Renaissance palace of the Louvre (which at that time was the Parisian residence of the royal family) were actually filmed at the National Palace of Mafra, 18 miles from Lisbon, built a century and a half after those historical events in a late Baroque style.

Like Queen Margot, Mafra Palace was originally intended to be one thing, but ended up being quite another. Its origins lie in a promise made by the very young King John V of Portugal, who swore to build a small Franciscan convent if his wife, Maria Anna of Austria, gave him offspring. This happened with the birth, in 1711, of Barbara of Braganza, who would later become Queen Consort of Spain. So in 1717 work on the convent began. But the enormous profits from the gold and diamond mines of Brazil flowed into the royal coffers, so that the modest initial convent not only grew in size, but a lavish palace was added to it, which was to become the residence of the royal family.

The German-born, Italian-trained architect Johann Friedrich Ludwig was hired to design it, and his son, António Ludovice, was in charge of directing the work. It was inaugurated 13 years later, on the king’s 41st birthday, with a party that lasted eight days, although the work continued until 1755, the year of the Lisbon earthquake, which made its reconstruction a priority. The result is a building of some 38,000 square meters with 1,200 rooms and a main façade measuring 220 meters, made of lioz stone (like the Belem Tower or the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon) and white marble. At its center, the church was designed to rival the great monuments of Rome, as evidenced by its central balcony, which is similar to the one reserved for the Pope in the Vatican, the enormous dome copied from Michelangelo’s or the 68-meter side towers, inspired by those of Sant’Agnese in Agone by Borromini. It is estimated that an average of 15,000 people worked on its construction, a workforce that at times reached 45,000. Some 1,400 workers died on the job.

Although there were no fatalities on the set of Queen Margot, it cannot be said that production was a bed of roses either. An article in the French edition of Vanity Fair written by Florence Colombani evokes the jealousy, rivalry and mistrust between the male members of a cast made up of Patrice Chéreau’s usual troupe. The director was known for his absorbing ways, close to those of a cult leader, as portrayed by one of his students, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, in the film La grande jeunesse (2022).

Fuelled by this somewhat toxic competitiveness, Daniel Auteuil (who played Henry of Navarre), Vincent Perez (La Môle), Jean-Hugues Anglade (Charles IX), Pascal Greggory (Henry III), Jean-Claude Brialy (Coligny) and Miguel Bosé (Duke of Guise) produced extraordinary performances. Virna Lisi played Catherine de Médici (a role rejected by Sophia Loren and Monica Vitti) as a female version of Marlon Brando from The Godfather, capable of chilling the blood of spectators. And the superstar Isabelle Adjani, who remained untouchable and distant from her colleagues, created a Margot that was somewhat more hieratic than the director had imagined, but also endowed with an overwhelming iconic power. On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, who was then her partner, travelled by motorbike to Portugal to visit the shoot, creating a stir that the actors recall in Colombani’s article as if it were a papal visit to a convent of Poor Clares.

It took five months to shoot and just as many to edit. The first version that Chéreau presented ran more than four hours, something that the producer found unacceptable. To make matters worse, the already generous original budget of 120 million francs (just over $19 million) had been exceeded by more than 20%, but all that expenditure was barely noticeable. The sumptuous filming sets, which were also redecorated by the production team, barely appeared on screen, hidden in the shadows and ignored by a camera that paid all its attention to the movements of the actors, and to Adjani’s alabaster eyes and skin. So the Mafra palace looked as much like the old Louvre as the Spanish church of Santiago de Compostela might have.

Chéreau’s original plan was to take cues from Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Coppola’s The Godfather, but the result was closer to Orson Welles or Kurosawa. A three-hour version premiered at Cannes, where it won the Jury Prize (that year’s Palme d’Or was Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction), and Virna Lisi won the Best Actress prize, in what nearly constituted an affront to Isabelle Adjani (and rumored to have been deliberately inflicted by jury member Catherine Deneuve). The American version, distributed by Harvey Weinstein’s Miramax, was half an hour shorter, and was the one that returned to French and European movie theaters. Reviews were respectful, but rarely enthusiastic. At the French box office it performed only passably, and ended up occupying 17th place in the annual box office ranking, far from what was expected.

Something similar happened with the Mafra National Palace. After its construction, the Portuguese royal family approved it as a symbol of power and status, but because of its grandiloquence, it was considered unsuitable for permanent habitation. It was converted into an oversized and expensive hunting lodge. Today, however, it is one of the most visited national monuments in the country, a source of pride for locals and admiration for foreigners.

Similarly, the recognition of the movie Queen Margot has only increased with time. The stale expectations that existed about it at the time have expired, and it can now be seen for what it is, a total work of art in the style of the Wagnerian operas on whose staging Chéreau himself had cemented his prestige. Sequences as gruesome as the massacre, shot at night in the streets of Bordeaux, the attempted rape of Margot by her brothers or the death of Charles IX, possess a raw force to which the monumental music of the Bosnian Serb composer Goran Bregovic and the photography of Philippe Rousselot, inspired by the chiaroscuro of Vermeer, Caravaggio, Goya or Géricault rather than the brilliance of the Renaissance masters, all contribute.

But above all, and despite its historical inaccuracies, its human and political relevance remains intact. As Chéreau himself pointed out on one occasion, the project began to take shape at the time of the burial of Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran; during its production the war in Bosnia was still taking place, with the siege of Sarajevo by the Serbian army, and it was released at the time when, in Rwanda, the genocide of Tutsis was taking place at the hands of the Hutu ethnic group. Images of the Shoah also hover over the naked corpses that accumulate in the film. Thirty years later, it is impossible to watch them without remembering the tragic situation in the Gaza Strip and in the Middle East in general.

Finally, the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre is an unsolved crime. For centuries it was considered to have been premeditated, and Catherine de Médici was blamed for having ordered the death of Coligny and then having manipulated her son, the king, to instill fear in him of the possible consequences of the attack. It is a hypothesis on which the literary character of the terrible mother, the sibylline poisoner and brutal genocidal fiend depicted by Dumas is built, contaminated by the misogynistic prejudices of the 19th century, and which Chéreau took up again in his adaptation. However, since the end of the 20th century, historians had already proposed other, more plausible possibilities. For example, that it was a plot by the Guise family, perhaps allied with the agents of the Spanish king Philip II. More recently, Arlette Jouanna, in her book La Saint-Barthélemy: Les mystères d’un crime d’État (2007), defines it as a crime of state, rules out the possibility that it had been planned before the royal wedding, and speaks of a hasty but very conscious decision by King Charles IX, driven by absolutist ends that anticipated the style of the Bourbon dynasty.

What remains a fact is that Henry of Bourbon managed to flee Paris and, upon returning to Navarre, in modern-day Spain, he took up the Protestant faith again. Charles IX died amid rumors of poisoning. Years later, the new king of France, Henry III, another brother of Margot, was assassinated by a Dominican friar, which put an end to the Valois dynasty. The crown of France then passed to Henry of Bourbon, now Henry IV, who converted to Catholicism again: “Paris is well worth a mass,” was his famous justification. His reign was prosperous and relatively peaceful, and he is still often considered the greatest king in French history.

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