Reward for Versailles if it relocates to Belgium

The French producers of the global television sensation Versailles have issued a warning to President Francois Hollande.

Jury President of the 53rd International Film Festival, French director, Luc Besson gives a thumb up during a photocall in C...

French hackles were raised when Louis XIV, the country’s grandest monarch, started to speak English. Now a threat to relocate him to Belgium has added insult to injury.

The Sun King is the central character in Versailles, a French television series shot in English to attract international viewers.

Although the first series has yet to be broadcast, it is being hailed as a success, bought by 15 TV stations around the world including the BBC, which plans to screen it in the first half of next year.

Canal Plus, the subscription channel, expects a big audience when Versailles, starring 25-year-old British actor George Blagden, is aired in France in November. It will be dubbed into French.

A second series is planned, but in a fresh blow to national pride producers say they are considering shooting it in Belgium. The move would be posthumous humiliation for Louis XIV, whose armies fought over the lands now known as Belgium in the War of Devo­lution and the Franco-Dutch War in the 17th century.

Gaspard de Chavagnac, the chairman of production company Zodiak France, said the program received €3.5 million ($5.6m) in taxpayer cash towards the €30m cost of the first series, which was shot outside Paris, with some scenes in the Palace of Versailles.

He adds it would have received €7m if made in Belgium, which is where the second series would be filmed if President Francois Hollande failed to change the law to increase subsidies for TV in France. He says the series had given work to 600 people and generated €5.5m in taxes for the French treasury.

Hollande last month agreed to rewrite French law to subsidise the latest film made by Luc Besson, who had threatened to relocate production to Hungary after being told Valerian, his £180m ($390m) science-fiction movie, was not eligible for tax credits because it was in English.

The Times