A Comm for Historymemes

There are stories that people were pissing and shitting in hallways and corners of the palace of Versailles.

This is heavily taken out of context. there is a picture source of people empting their night (toilett) bowl onto the streets onto the heads of fellow people. only problem, this source is from a saterical piece. most likely that was considered comedy back then. like porttraing a wrong world or unbelivably stupid people. we also got similar sources about people carrieing sunlight with baskets into a house without windows. yet noone acts as if that was reality (so far lol).

My tip for checking such rumours is to find actual pictures from the time. in books, or paintings, you overwhelmingly see citys with no dirt or trash on the roads. also citys streets where made of stone in contrast to modern belive.

On top of all of this we got fee letters all the way back to the 11th century, taxing people for failing to remove dung or other unpleasant stuff from their property. You could get a pretty hefty fine for beeing smelly.

Which makes sense, since medicine of the time singled out miazmas, aka. bad smells, to be the primary way of sicknes to infect humans. Medival humans were way more concerned about bad smells than we today. it was liked to the black death and all sorts of desieses.

(Thank you so much for asking, you can see i spend years of hyperfocus on this and am very passionate to fight against the "dark" middle ages picture for it simply beeing wrong) (also all i say mosty relates to the roman emoire, i know less about france)