If you’ve ever visited the Palace of Versailles you know: It's an overwhelmingly opulent place. Inside, the mythology of pure, white Greek gods is everywhere: cherubic, blonde, rosy-cheeked, immortalized in oil and gold and stone, asserting an omniscience meant to communicate dominance and superiority to everyone who walked those halls. What's interesting is how much Christian iconography shares the walls: Two clashing mythologies displayed side by side by rulers who felt no real devotion to either. It didn't matter which gods were on their walls. It only mattered that those gods be made in their image.

It was a lie. A lie that let some people live like gods while others died of poverty, starvation and disease. A lie that, little by little — and then all at once — was exposed for what it was.