“Paradoxically, for somebody who became infamous for supposedly being frivolous and overly committed to luxurious excess, she was actually all about dressing down,” Weber says. Though she certainly went through more shoes than the average French person, Marie Antoinette “wasn’t known to have been a particular shoe freak” at Versailles, says Weber. At least four members of the royal family spent more on clothing than she did-including Louis XVI’s brother the comte d'Artois, who ordered 365 pairs of shoes per year. She didn’t create it, and she didn’t take it to the extremes that others did. This culture of waste and excess was something Marie Antoinette stepped into when she arrived in France. Instead of cleaning their shoes, the royals and aristocrats would throw them out every few days. Versailles, for all its decadence, was a very dirty place, filled with animals and excrement. Painting her as an immoral woman who slept with her brother-in-law-as some of the pornography alleged-was one way for revolutionaries to argue the monarchy was corrupt. This pornography insinuated that Marie Antoinette slept with many men and women in the court, when in reality, there’s only evidence to show she had one intimate friend (and that relationship may have been purely platonic). But without a mistress to ridicule, political pornographers targeted the queen. “Marie Antoinette really was bearing the brunt of a level of public indignation coupled with misogyny that had traditionally been channeled toward these mistresses,” Weber says.īefore she became queen, the politically themed pornographic pamphlets and books that circulated throughout France only featured the king’s mistresses, who were considered promiscuous for sleeping with a married man. Scholars have noted that since Louis XVI had no mistresses, Marie Antoinette was subject to an extra level of disparagement. She was the subject of pornography.īefore Louis XVI, both the queen and the king’s pampered mistresses shared the weight of critics’ displaced frustration. One of the most “well-known” quotes in history is that Marie Antoinette, when told that the French people had no bread to eat, replied: “Let them eat cake.” But Marie Antoinette never said this.īy the time the Austrian-born Marie Antoinette took the throne, French people had been attributing this phrase to the foreign queens of French kings for decades as a kind of “displaced frustration with the crown,” argues Caroline Weber, author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.Īs economic inequality grew in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was “easier for patriotic French people to imagine that a foreign-born queen was insensitive to their plight rather than the French king himself,” she says. Here are five facts about the famous queen. And in some ways, Marie Antoinette is still misunderstood. Yet not all of the criticisms of the queen were warranted, or even true. She also wore flour on her wigs while many French people went without bread. She believed that the French Bourbon monarchy had been ordained by God, and so she didn’t accept the idea that royals like her were equal to their subjects. To be clear, Marine Antoinette was no saint. Or her supposed decadence, anyway.īy the time she was executed at the guillotine on Octo(nine months after her husband, King Louis XVI, was killed the same way), she had been disparaged as a frivolous, selfish, and immoral woman whose lavish lifestyle had increased economic inequality. Marie Antoinette is famous for her decadence.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |