Jeanne du Barry true story: the real Jeanne was 25 when she met the king — Maïwenn plays her at 46
Maïwenn's film compresses, re-dates and softens a life that was stranger than the version on screen. Here's the real Jeanne Bécu, where the film tracks her, and the single casting decision that reshapes the rest.
The film opened Cannes in 2023 with its director playing a woman roughly two decades younger than she was. That one decision changes the power balance the entire story runs on.
Jeanne Bécu was born on 19 August 1743 in Vaucouleurs, the illegitimate daughter of a seamstress named Anne Bécu. Her father was probably a friar, Jean-Jacques Gomard. She was schooled at the Convent of St Aure, left at fifteen, and worked through a sequence of jobs the film skims: hawking trinkets on Paris streets, assisting a hairdresser from 1758, serving as a lady's companion until she was dismissed for attracting the wrong attention, and from 1763 working at a fashionable haberdashery called La Toilette.
How she actually got to Versailles
Also in 1763, she was noticed by Jean-Baptiste du Barry, a pimp and gambler who installed her in his household as his mistress and renamed her Mademoiselle Lange. From 1766 he marketed her through the top of Parisian society, and her client list included government ministers and court officials. She was a professional, and everyone at Versailles knew it.
She was introduced to Louis XV in 1768. She was 25. He was born on 15 February 1710, which made him 58.
Maïwenn was 46 during the shoot, which ran eleven weeks from 26 July 2022. Johnny Depp, born in June 1963, was 59 — within a year of the real king. The film gets the man's age right and the woman's wrong by twenty-one years, which turns a teenage-adjacent courtesan and an ageing monarch into something closer to a pair of contemporaries.
Read more: If I Had Legs I'd Kick You true story: Mary Bronstein wrote it while her daughter was in treatment
The paperwork that made her presentable
Louis XV's problem was procedural. A commoner with her history could not be an official mistress, so she had to be made into a countess.
- The marriage — on 1 September 1768 she married Comte Guillaume du Barry, the younger brother of the man who had been running her.
- The forged birth certificate — drawn up by Jean-Baptiste, it shaved three years off her age and invented noble ancestry.
- The presentation — on 22 April 1769, after one sponsor panicked and a royal hunting accident forced a postponement, she was presented at court in silver and gold with the king's jewels.
- Zamor — the king gave her a young Bengali boy as a slave. She educated him, dressed him, and it cost her, later, everything.
The part after the king dies
Louis XV caught smallpox at the Petit Trianon and sent her away on 4 May 1774. He died days later, and Marie Antoinette — who had spent four years refusing to speak to her, before conceding the famous non-sentence "There are many people at Versailles today" on New Year's Day 1772 — had her exiled to the Abbey du Pont-aux-Dames.
She eventually got to Louveciennes, took up with the Duc de Brissac, and conducted a parallel affair with an Englishman, Henry Seymour, who ended it by sending her a painting with leave me alone written on it. Brissac was killed by a mob in Paris during the Revolution, and his head was thrown through her window wrapped in a bloodied cloth.
Zamor, by then a Jacobin, denounced her after she dismissed him. She was arrested in 1793, tried for financially assisting émigrés, and tried to buy her life by revealing where her jewels were hidden. It did not work.
She was guillotined on 8 December 1793 on the Place de la Révolution, screaming to the crowd. Her recorded last words to the executioner: "De grâce, monsieur le bourreau, encore un petit moment!"
What the film does with all this
Maïwenn's version, shot on 35mm by Laurent Dailland with Barry Lyndon as the reference, had a $22.4 million budget and filmed inside Versailles. It runs 116 minutes, opened Cannes on 16 May 2023 to a seven-minute standing ovation, took $14.9 million worldwide, and landed at 48% on Rotten Tomatoes and 48 on Metacritic.
The film is a court romance. The documented life is a procurement operation, a forged document, a slave given as a gift, and a severed head through a window.
For the record: the necklace Louis XV commissioned for her in 1772, worth around two million livres, was never paid for. It went unsold after his death and resurfaced in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, the scandal that helped destroy the reputation of the queen who had exiled her.