A decadent dinner costing nearly €475,000 for the U.K.’s King Charles III helped push France’s Élysée Palace — the office of President Emmanuel Macron —to a record high deficit last year.
France’s love for grand gestures and opulent dining are fully in evidence in the pages of a damning yearly audit of the Élysée’s budget, released on Monday by the Cour des Comptes, France’s top audit court.
The Élysée’s spending, which includes costs related to the president’s diplomatic and presidential duties as well as administration, personnel, security and estate management, reached a whopping €125 million, plunging the books €8.3 million into the red.
Among the biggest deficit drivers were two luxurious state dinners, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and King Charles III.
Should of got maccas, it would only cost $250,000.
Trump actually did that when he had the winners of the Superbowl to the white house for dinner.
Came for the maccas comment
A few hundred years ago they chopped heads off of kings and queens for spending too much on everything, and now they do it for them
plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose
(The more things change, the more they stay the same)
Why would you waste all that money on a king who is a figurehead at best ?
I think it was a 100 person dinner full of french and english celebrities, including macron, and the king.
Because it’s big club and we ain’t in it
Well they seem to have saved a lot by not providing reasonable quarters for the Olympic village so it probably works out in the end.
Imagine you get a dish worth probably tens of thousands alone and you don’t like it.
What. How do you even spend that much on a dinner, even for 1000 people.
And like. It’s King Charles. I loved the Queen and thought she was iconic, and even I don’t really care about Charles. All of my friends in my circle actively despise him and what he represents. Literally why are you trying to curry favour with him that hard.
for 1000 people
$500 per person would be quite cheap for this sort of thing, given that a middle-class wedding often costs around $250 per person. (I’m guessing each guest at this dinner drank well over $500 of wine alone.)
I have no clue how you define “middle-class” but not even the fanciest weddings I’ve been to have spent even close to $250 per person. That kind of expenditure sounds quite a lot more like upper-class to me. Assuming you invite 100 people to the wedding, an average Joe will not have 25k to spend on one party.
the national average cost of a wedding in 2023 was $35,000
The average American wedding cost $29,000 in 2023.
The average cost of a wedding is $33,000 in 2024.
I assume that these estimates are based on different datasets, and my guess is that they’re biased upwards, but they do roughly match what I know from personal experience.
The issue with these statistics is that they look at the average, which is heavily boosted by the exceptionally expensive weddings of the higher upper-class. The median is significantly lower.
https://silkstemcollective.com/median-and-average-wedding-cost/
Also I’m not American, maybe people there just spend a lot more on weddings in general than what I’m used to.
You’re correct, but even the median (with inflation) is still probably over $20,000 right now (based on the assumptions that it was $18,000 in 2019 and 2020 is not representative). I think my broader point still stands.
I know a person currently planning a relatively small wedding, and she’s trying very hard to save money. One cost-cutting measure was booking a space on the fourth floor of a building without an elevator. (She asked me whether or not it would be possible for strong guests to carry elderly guests up the stairs.) Her budget is still $10,000.
I can go to a restaurant down the street that isn’t crazy expensive and spend $150/person with alcohol easily. I’ve had Michelin starred dinners for $500/person with normal person nice wine. This a fancy state dinner for the fucking king with likely very expensive wine. French Laundry, one of the best restaurants in the world, is close to $1000/person with wine and that isn’t for fancy $2000/bottle wine.
As far as wedding costs go, $25k is pretty normal for a wedding. My cheapest friend cheaped out hard on his wedding and spent $5000 over 25 years ago in Indiana. Getting a wedding down to $10k is hard these days. The median is now $18.5k. So if the median spend is close to $20k, then middle class people are often spending more than that.
https://www.moneygeek.com/financial-planning/analysis/average-cost-of-wedding/
Let him eat cake next time!
This works out to 2500 euros per person, which is expensive but not that bad in context. It’s easily possible to drop hundreds at a restaurant in my medium-sized city, and an event like this is obviously at a whole other level.
They were probably opening $1000/bottle Burgundy wines, too.
The article mentions 40k EUR were spent on wine, which is a modest 250 per person. Assuming 4 people to a bottle, you’re right on the money.
Probably tastes the same as a 20€ bottle anyway, still a waste
Missed the “K” in the title and thought for a minute “well, I don’t know, that sounds reasonable…”
I’m going back to sleep now.
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Another reason why the monarchy should not exist
Force everyone who attended to pay their $3,000 a plate bill
That’s a few months of food for an average person
I could make so much cassoulet with $3000
A Frenchman wining and dining an English monarch. What has the world come to.
You were the Chosen One! You were supposed to guillotine the monarchs, not dine with them!
With half a million dinner
Why didn’t the king foot the bill he’s the king and he’s rich.
Let the heads roll.
He’s not the king of France.
Kings aint get rich by paying for shit.
I have a hard time being put out for the office of the president having deficits to the tune of 1 million euros if it threw 2 fancy dinners. It’s ostentatious, sure, but not crazy for heads of state and a hundred or more high powered guests in a palace. As an American, I guess I was expecting to see one more zero on the figure.
Sounds typically french to me.
