After reading some books on art forgeries and the underground art market, someone recommended I check out the wine industry and told me it was just as bad if not worse.
I'd point people to another great Vanity Fair article about wine fraud:
A similar documentary[0] around the art world blew my mind -- not only was one man fooling people into thinking his paintings were real, he was the one making them.
he recognized in them the handiwork of Pallot’s gilder and carver.
“I often use the same people on restorations, and I’m intimate with their strengths and weaknesses,”
Hooreman says. He knew that one of them, for example, was fond of painting a coat of melted-down licorice on the surface of reproductions, to make new wood look old and dirty.
In 2012, Hooreman saw a pair of ployants—folding benches—that were for sale in the Aaron gallery showroom and were billed as the onetime property of Princess Louise Élisabeth, the eldest daughter of King Louis XV, and acted on a hunch.
“I licked the chair and voilà,” he says. “I could taste the fraud.”
Sure but the reason the licorice was used was to simulate accumulated dirt and grime, so he's either licking licorice or he's licking centuries of dirt and grime. Lucky for him it was licorice!
I think it's very interesting that they don't use radiometric dating, like carbon dating, to establish the age of the parts of the chair on an absolute basis.
I suppose the forgeries could be constructed using extremely old wood, but even then, the glue or other parts would have to be relatively modern, and would provide a contrasting age.
Carbon Dating is typically for things at least 500 years old. While that might be useful for furniture, it wouldn't apply here.
Glue is useful - an older chair would have used hide glue, made from real animals. If a modern, non-hide glue was used that's an immediate giveaway. However, modern furniture builders still use it quite a lot in high end work today
There's other types of radiometric dating, like looking at isotope ratios to see whether it was made before or after atmospheric nuclear testing, if there are parts that would be different (typically metal pieces)
Why can’t you like both? Surely you can appreciate that the French monarchy had a non-zero impact in the French culture and identity that remains to this day
Sure, let's cut some throats and see some blood flowing. /s
I am a French republican at heart, proud of my country, and see our history as a complicated layer of events which all brought something in. As much Versailles as the Revolution, as the years of Christianity and the sweet laicity we have today.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5728684/