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.
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.
$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.
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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/