‘Royal whore’ or feminist hero? The scandalous truth about Johnny Depp’s Jeanne du Barry

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 18^th 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 19^th 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. 

When she emerged at the age of 15, she chose sex over sacraments: after a brief stint working as a hairdresser and a shop-girl (and sustaining a love of luxury through her relationships with willing men), she became a kept woman. She went to live with the disreputable nobleman Jean-Baptiste du Barry, a pimp who supplied young women to other aristocrats and had earned himself the nickname “le Roué”. 

There is some debate about whether this relationship – one which would define the rest of Jeanne’s life – was a choice. Under later interrogation, Jeanne’s mother would admit that her daughter’s move had only come about after money had changed hands. Still technically a minor, Jeanne had been sold into the life of a courtesan. 

By all accounts, Jeanne was spectacularly beautiful. Blonde and blue eyed with the purity of a Fragonard painting, Jean-Baptiste du Barry worked on his protegée, teaching her the ways of Versailles life. 

Jeanne began a paroxysm of reinvention: dressed in silks and diamonds, she called herself Mademoiselle Lange, before swapping to Mademoiselle Vaubernier. She spent her nights with dukes and courtiers before, one day, being taken to Versailles and meeting the King at mass. After the Queen’s death in 1768, Jeanne became his mistress. 

There was only one problem: to be an official mistress, a woman needed to be married (presumably to a very lenient husband). Delighted by his proximity to his aims – in making Jeanne the royal favourite, he would have access to the King’s purse – Jean-Baptiste du Barry solved the quandary. He provided his small, fat brother, who was quickly married to a woman he wasn’t even allowed to touch. Jeanne Becu’s transformation was now complete: she was the Comtesse du Barry. She even had a carriage with her spurious coat of arms emblazoned on the side.

The new Madame du Barry’s life was both gleamingly brilliant and horribly isolating. She was presented at court to great shock and horror at her low-born birth; she moved into apartments above the King to the dismay of those who remembered when they had housed the King’s daughter-in-law; she tried to socialise in a catty, cloistered world which despised her. Marie Antoinette all-but refused to speak to her. 

Jeanne took respite in material comforts: she was given an exorbitant allowance of two hundred thousand livres a month, and was attended by as many as sixteen footmen and maids. One of her retinue was Zamor, a slave from Bengal who was given to Jeanne by the King. In a callousness which would come to backfire, Jeanne treated him as another accessory: a hint of the exotic in her world of jewelled slippers, rosewood tables, and gold-embroidered dresses. It is no surprise that decades later during the Revolution, Marat would claim that “the national assembly had spent for a whole year barely a quarter of what that old sinner Louis XV had spent on the last and most expensive of his whores”. 

Jeanne’s charmed life couldn’t last forever. Despite the effort the King put in the bedroom (he told one of his courtiers that Jeanne provided “pleasures entirely new to him”; the courtier quipped in response “that, sir, is because you have never been to a brothel”), Louis XV was an old man. He died in 1774 from smallpox, having been nursed by his mistress.  

From this point onwards, the courtesan’s life took a series of bizarre turns. Immediately after Louis XVI came to the throne, the new King’s wife, Marie Antoinette, sent Jeanne to a convent: she traded her morning hot chocolate for matins, and her chateaux for a cell. After two years, she was allowed to leave: unreformed, she resumed a life of luxury and love-affairs. She still had her beauty, and a groaning collection of diamonds and jewels. 

As the French Revolution began in 1789, Jeanne broadly continued her life as normal: her house became a refuge where she and her latest lover, the Duc de Brissac, could pretend nothing was afoot. While Paris rioted, Jeanne had a scented bath; as the Royal family were harangued, Jeanne kept her appointment with her coiffeur. 

But this couldn’t continue forever: Jeanne’s frivolity covered the depths of her political involvement. Throughout 1791, there is evidence that she was attempting to send money to Royalist emigrés. It was Zamor – her Bengali slave – who had her arrested. He had joined the Jacobins, and fed the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety with incriminating details about his mistress. 

Jeanne was tried and executed in 1793. She had attempted to escape her fate by telling her captors the precise location of where she had buried her jewels, but was still taken to the guillotine screaming, “You are going to hurt me! Please don’t hurt me!”. 

It might be hard to see what Maïwenn meant by Jeanne du Barry’s “feminism” (is it that age-old feminist principle of being sold into prostitution?). The enduring attraction of Jeanne’s story seems to be far less progressive: it’s the titillating appeal of the whore who gets her grizzly end. But she’s also a portrait of her topsy-turvy age: the low-born woman who was executed as an aristocrat; the mistress who was murdered by her slave. 

Jeanne du Barry is in cinemas now