Tea at Trianon: Marie-Antoinette and Style

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, April 21, 2008

Marie-Antoinette and Style

Author Caroline Weber offers some interesting insights into Marie-Antoinette's clever use of fashion in this article. Here is an excerpt:

Needless to say, the use of clothing to enhance one’s symbolic power had been an effective political tactic at least since the days of Louis XIV. As historians from Voltaire to Louis Marin have rightly emphasized, the Sun King’s thoughtful and extravagant manipulations of costume did much to bolster his absolutist grip on an unruly nation. In this context, it may not be incidental that while still a teen-ager, Marie Antoinette declared Louis XIV her favorite French king—“because he is so great,” she is said to have informed her tutor, the Abbé de Vermond. In fact it is telling that, shortly after her accession, when she was, as she admitted to her brother Joseph II, anxious to cultivate “the appearance of credit” she enjoyed with her newly crowned husband, Marie Antoinette commissioned Louis-Auguste Brun to paint her portrait “riding like a man.” Brun complied, and depicted the young consort heroically straddling a rearing steed, outfitted in shocking male breeches and riding habit. Unconventional in the annals of royal Frenchwomen’s equestrian portraiture (in which subjects tended to strike a ladylike, sidesaddle pose), the Brun painting bears a startling resemblance to the great representations of Louis XIV on horseback. I cannot think of a single commentator who has dismissed the Sun King’s strategically deployed equestrian posturing as that of an immature youth endeavoring “to be thought cool.” Yet Marie Antoinette’s recourse to a similar iconographic strategy somehow fails to register—with the likes of Coppola and Thurman—as anything but garden-variety teenage rebellion, notwithstanding the fact that the young queen, still childless, had good cause for wishing to appear untouchable and strong.