Marie Antoinette and the Price of the Image

She didn't say "let them eat cake."  She also didn't cause the French Revolution, didn't empty the treasury, and wasn't the scheming traitor of revolutionary mythology.  In this episode Sophie cuts through two centuries of propaganda - much of it begun while Marie Antoinette was still alive - to find the actual woman beneath the powdered wig: a fourteen-year-old sent to a foreign court in someone else's clothes, who spent twenty-three years navigating one of the most treacherous political environments in European history, and who demonstrated in her final months a courage and composure her enemies had conspicuously failed to credit her with.  Sophie's choice of modern figure won't surprise those who remember a previous episode - but the specific parallels she draws this time are entirely different, and considerably more uncomfortable.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Music by Gregor Quendel from Pixabay 

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2599997/episodes/18768959

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Marie Antoinette and the Price of the Image, a podcast by Sophie Manners. Hello and welcome back. I'm Sophie Manners, Professor of European History at Queen's College, Cambridge, author of biographies of women whose reputations were constructed largely by people who needed them to be something specific, wearer of a scarf that a French colleague described this morning as reasonably elegant by English standards, which I consider a compliment, and which is in any case precisely the kind of faintly qualified assessment that the subject of today's episode received from virtually everyone who ever commented on her, and which she spent twenty three years in France, unable to quite shake. We are going to Paris, eighteenth century Paris, and before that eighteenth century Vienna. And we are going to spend the next half hour with a woman whose name is so thoroughly bound up with a particular image excess, obliviousness, the cake, the powdered wig, the diamond necklace, the gilded cage of Versailles, that locating the actual person beneath the image requires the kind of sustained effort that the image was in some sense specifically designed to prevent. She did not say let them eat cake. I want to establish this immediately before anything else, because the attribution is one of the most durable historical fabrications in popular circulation, and because almost no one who uses the phrase knows it was originally attributed by Rousseau in his confessions written around 1765 to a great princess. And Marie Antoinette was ten years old in 1765, and not yet in France. The phrase was in circulation before she arrived. It was attached to her later by a revolutionary propaganda machine that needed a face for aristocratic callousness, and it has clung to her ever since with the specific tenacity of lies that are too useful to relinquish. She was, among other things, a fourteen-year-old girl sent to a foreign country to marry a stranger and produce heirs for a dynasty she had never belonged to. She was a woman who spent twenty three years navigating one of the most treacherous court environments in Europe, largely without allies, under a level of public scrutiny, that would be recognizable to a twenty first century celebrity, and that would have been entirely alien to every other woman of her class and era. She was a mother who watched her husband executed and spent the months that followed separated from her surviving children in a cell in the Conciergerie before being tried on fabricated charges and executed at thirty-seven. She was, by several accounts, and by her own behaviour in the final months of her life, a woman of considerably greater personal courage than the image of frivolous excess has ever adequately accommodated. She deserves the honest account. Here it is. Marie Antoinette was born on November 2nd, 1755 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. She was the fifteenth child and youngest daughter of Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. Maria Theresa, and I mention her because she is the essential context without which Marie Antoinette is impossible to understand, was one of the most formidable rulers of the eighteenth century. The only female ruler of the Habsburg dominions in her own right, she governed an empire of approximately thirty million people, reformed its administration, military, and educational systems, bore sixteen children, and ran a court of systematic political intelligence, from which she directed the foreign policy of a great power for forty years. She was, by any objective assessment, extraordinary. She was also, as a mother, formidable in ways that were not always comfortable. Her relationship with her youngest daughter was shaped by a specific and entirely pragmatic understanding of what that daughter's life was for. Marie Antoinette was not educated for her own development, she was educated, or rather not adequately educated, since Maria Theresa's biographers have noted with some exasperation that her youngest daughter's tutors were neither sufficiently demanding nor sufficiently organized as a diplomatic instrument. Her function was to be the bride of the French Dauphin, to cement the Austro French alliance, to produce children, and to navigate the French court without causing political incidents. She was a piece in a diplomatic game being played by adults who were neither her nor the fifteen year old boy she was sent to marry. So, after a proxy marriage and a renunciation of all claims to Habsburg lands, Maria Antonia set off for France to meet her new husband and arrived in Versailles on the fourteenth of may seventeen seventy, aged only fourteen. The ceremony at the border between Austria and France was one of the more precisely documented pieces of diplomatic theatre in the eighteenth century. She was required to remove everything Austrian, her clothes, her jewelry, even her dog, and be dressed entirely in French garments before crossing. She crossed the border by this ritual as someone else. Not yet who she was going to become, but no longer who she had been, fourteen years old in a new set of clothes, about to enter a world designed specifically to make her feel foreign. The transition from Austrian Archduchess to French dolphin was not an easy one. In addition to Marie Antoinette's lackluster French, peppered haphazardly with German phrases, her assimilation was made difficult by the strict etiquette of courtly life at Versailles. In a court designed specifically to revolve around the royal family, Marie Antoinette found that privacy was not a luxury afforded to French royals. The etiquette of Versailles was, by any reasonable assessment, one of the more extraordinary pieces of institutional theatre in European history. Every aspect of the royal family's daily life was ceremonialized, observed, attended, and managed by an elaborate hierarchy of court officials, whose offices had been created, and whose dignity was defended across generations. The levee, the ritual getting up, involved multiple attendants, each with specific rights to handle specific garments, in a specific order, and woe to the lady in waiting, who handed the dauphine her shift out of turn, when a more senior lady had just entered the room. There is a story, probably true, of Marie Antoinette standing naked and shivering while the assembled ladies in waiting handed her shift from one pair of gloved hands to another in strict order of precedence, each refusing to accept it back while someone more senior was present until the situation resolved itself. This is the court in which she was expected to feel at home. She did not feel at home. She responded to it the way a young woman of natural vivacity and genuine warmth might be expected to respond to an environment of suffocating ceremonial restriction. She retreated into entertainments, into gambling, into the small group of friends who provided something approaching spontaneity into the gossip and the fashion and the spending that seemed at least like life, even when life in the formal sense was being conducted in the suffocating chambers of Versailles around her. Her husband, the Dauphin who became Louis XV in May 1774, when Louis XV died of smallpox, was a good man in the limited and specifically unhelpful sense that the eighteenth century's most difficult political crisis required more than a good man. He was kind, conscientious, genuinely pious, genuinely interested in the welfare of his people, in the abstract, enthusiastic about locksmithing and mapmaking, and comprehensively without the specific qualities, decisiveness, political instincts, the will to use power that the situation he had inherited demanded. It is worth considering that these two were put in charge of the nation of France as teenagers, Louis being only nineteen to her eighteen when he was crowned. Two teenagers put in charge of a kingdom in structural fiscal crisis with no preparation, no political education adequate to the task, and an institutional apparatus specifically designed to insulate them from the information they needed. The fiscal crisis was not of their making. After Louis supplied economic and military assistance to the American colonies, helping them to triumph over Great Britain in the American Revolution, France went bankrupt, thanks in no small measure to the corrupt social order in which the wealthy nobles were largely untaxed. The debt was structural, accumulated over decades of war, and the system that had accumulated it, the tax exemption of the nobility and the clergy, the first and second estates, was precisely the system that Louis XVI could not bring himself to dismantle in any sufficiently radical way, because doing so required confronting the people whose support the monarchy depended on. Into this structural crisis came Marie Antoinette's spending, and here I want to be precise about scale because the popular account inflates it to a degree that distorts the historical analysis. Her courtly extravagance was but a minor cause of the financial disorders of the French state in that period. The debts of France were not caused by her wardrobe, the debts of France were caused by a century of war, by a tax system that exempted the wealthy by the costs of the American campaign. Marie Antoinette's spending was real, the petit trianon renovations, the gowns, the gambling debts, and it was politically catastrophic, not because of its financial scale, but because of its symbolic legibility. In a country where ordinary people were hungry, the image of a queen who bought 300 dresses a year was a perfect symbol of royal indifference to popular suffering. That it was a distortion of the actual causes of popular suffering was irrelevant to the propaganda value of the symbol. And the propaganda was extraordinarily effective. The sheer volume of pornographic cartoons of the Queen attests to this preoccupation with her sexuality. The pamphlet literature directed at Marie Antoinette was among the most sustained and most vicious character assassination campaigns in pre-revolutionary history. She was accused of adultery with multiple men, of lesbian relations with her female friends, of sending money to Austria, of sabotaging French military strategy. Most of these accusations were false. Some contained a kernel of truth that was inflated beyond recognition. All of them were designed to serve the same purpose, to make the Queen of France not merely politically undesirable but personally repugnant, to give ordinary French men and women a specific named female face onto which to project the accumulated anger at a system that had been failing them for generations. Madame Adelaide, aunt of Louis XV, would not tolerate any fanciful behaviour on the part of the Queen, even of the most innocent kind, and gave her the derogatory nickname of the Austrian, which would remain with her until her untimely death. She was always the Austrian, never quite French. The foreigner who had married into the French crown but could not ultimately be trusted with it, whose loyalties were to Vienna rather than to Paris, to the Habsburgs rather than to France. Whether this was fair is, by this point in the story, almost irrelevant. It was effective. And when, in June 1791, the royal family attempted to flee to the Austrian border in the flight to Varennes, the accusation was given its most damaging confirmation. The flight to Varennes was, militarily and diplomatically, a rational decision in circumstances that had become desperate. The revolution was accelerating, the king's authority was contracting, the Tuileries where the family was effectively confined, was becoming a prison, and the hope, probably always more Marie Antoinette's hope than Louis', was that Austrian and Amy Grey military forces could restore the monarchy before it was entirely overwhelmed. In June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris and headed for the Austrian border, where rumour had it, the Queen's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, waited with troops ready to invade France, overthrow the revolutionary government, and restore the power of the monarchy and the nobility. This incident, it seemed to many, was proof that the Queen was not just a foreigner, she was a traitor. They were caught at Varennes, recognized by a local postmaster who had seen the king's image on a coin. They were returned to Paris. The king was restored to the throne in a constitutional monarchy that had stripped him of most real power, and the accusation of treason, always present, always circulating, now had the evidence it needed. She had tried to run. To Austria. The subsequent two years from mid-1791 to mid-1793 are among the most painful in this series. As Queen Marie Antoinette became increasingly a target of criticism by opponents of the domestic and foreign policies of Louis XVI and those opposed to the monarchy in general. What actually happened in those years was that she managed a political situation of complete impossibility with considerably more acuity than she is credited for, corresponding with her brother the Holy Roman Emperor, attempting to maintain the appearance of constitutional cooperation, while working for the restoration of full royal authority, navigating between the various revolutionary factions, and doing all of this in a court that was no longer a court but a comfortable prison. Whether her strategy was wise is a different question from whether it was sophisticated, it was sophisticated, it was not wise because no strategy was available to her that was both sophisticated and wise. The situation did not permit wisdom, it permitted management of the rate of decline. Louis XV was executed by Guillotine on january twenty first, seventeen ninety three. Marie Antoinette was forced to view the severed head of her best friend, Princess de Lamballe displayed before her on a pole. She was moved from the Temple prison to the Conciergerie, the antechamber of the Guillotine, in August 1793. Her son, the Dauphin, was separated from her, and entrusted to a cobbler named Simon, who was instructed to give him a sansculot education, which in practice meant teaching him to sing revolutionary songs, and according to the most disturbing accounts, pressuring him to denounce his mother for sexual abuse of himself, a charge that was then used at her trial, and to which she responded before the revolutionary tribunal, with a composure and a dignity that visibly moved observers who had not come to be moved. Nature itself recoils from such a charge laid to a mother, she said. I appeal to all the mothers here present. The women in the public gallery reportedly wept. Her trial began on october fourteenth, seventeen ninety three. Two days later she was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal of High Treason and executed by guillotine on october sixteenth, seventeen ninety three at the Place de la Revolution. She was thirty seven years old. Her last recorded words were an apology to the executioner after accidentally stepping on his foot. Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose. She had cut her own hair. She wore a plain white dress, white being by convention, the colour of mourning for French queens. She rode to the scaffold in an open cart, exposed to the crowd under the October sky. She was, by all accounts, entirely composed. This was not the performance of the vain and frivolous woman of the pamphlets. This was someone who had understood what was coming, had had time to prepare, and had prepared with the specific quality of a person who has decided to control the only thing they have left to control. She had learned something in thirty seven years. Perhaps more than her enemies required her to have learned, and certainly more than the legend of Madame Deficit permits. Now what do I make of her? The historical debate about Marie Antoinette runs along a fault line that is genuinely difficult to navigate. On one side is the tradition that reads her primarily as a victim of the diplomatic system that made her a marriage piece, of the French court that was designed to make her feel foreign, of the revolutionary propaganda that transformed her extravagance into treason, of a trial on fabricated charges. On the other side is the tradition that reads her as a woman who had genuine political influence and used it irresponsibly, who encouraged Louis to resist reform at precisely the moments when reform might have prevented revolution, who corresponded with Austrian forces in ways that were genuinely treasonous against the constitutional government she had notionally accepted, who failed, finally, to understand or engage with the suffering of ordinary French people until the roof was already collapsing. Both are true. They were always both true. The mistake is to try to choose between them, to reduce her either to pure victim or to responsible agent. of her own destruction. She was both, as most people of genuine historical significance have been in this series. The victim narrative erases her agency. The agent narrative erases her circumstances. Both distortions serve purposes that are not primarily historical. What I think is historically most interesting about Marie Antoinette is the specific mechanism by which she became the symbolic target she became. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point. The image of the Queen was far more influential than the woman herself. She was useful as a symbol precisely because she was female, foreign, and visually legible as excess. The men who managed France's fiscal crisis, the ministers, the financiers, the nobility who refused to be taxed were not female, were not foreign, and could not be depicted as dressing frivolously. They were in fact more directly responsible for the structural conditions that produced the revolution, but they were not available as symbols in the same way Marie Antoinette was available, and so the image, the gowns, the necklace, the powdered hair, the cake she didn't say, was constructed around her and attached to her, with a thoroughness that the actual record of her life has been fighting against ever since. She was not the cause of the French Revolution, she was the face of it, and the face was put there by people who needed a face, and who chose hers because it was the most convenient one available. Now the T's picture a woman who arrived very young in a new world not a country but a context that had its own rules, its own hierarchies, its own specific vocabulary of appearance and behaviour that she had not grown up with and had to learn on the job someone who was expected to perform a role before she had fully understood what the role required and who made the kind of mistakes that come from youth and inexperience and an institutional environment that provided very little honest feedback. Picture someone who was from her first days in that new world subjected to a quality of public scrutiny that was specifically calibrated to find fault. Someone whose every appearance was documented, whose spending was itemized, whose friendships were assessed for political implication, whose clothing was analyzed as a statement about her character, and whose personal conduct was discussed in terms that would never have been applied to a man in equivalent circumstances. Picture someone who became in the imagination of a large and hostile audience a symbol of everything wrong with an institution someone onto whom a public that was angry about structural problems it could not easily name projected its anger in the form of specific accusations against a specific person. Someone who was blamed for things she did not cause, held responsible for systemic failures she did not create, and whose actual contributions and actual character were consistently subordinated to the symbolic function she had been assigned. Picture someone who found in the specific pressures of her situation a quality of personal resilience that was not visible in the early, more comfortable years someone who was better at adversity than at ease, who showed in the difficult later period a courage and a composure that the earlier, more celebrated years had not required and had not revealed. Picture someone whose image, the clothes, the photographs, the specific visual vocabulary of her public presence became simultaneously her most powerful instrument and her most damaging vulnerability someone who understood image as a form of communication and deployed it as such, and who found that the image once constructed took on a life of its own that she could not fully control, and that eventually overwhelmed the person underneath it. Who is this? It is Diana, Princess of Wales I know. For the attentive listeners who have been with the series from the beginning, Diana has appeared before in the Cleopatra episode, where the structural parallels of the dynastic instrument who became a person the institution could not contain were the central comparison. I want to address this directly the reason I am making the Diana comparison again this time with Marie Antoinette is that the parallels are real and they are different in character from the Cleopatra comparison and that the specific difference is instructive. With Cleopatra the parallel was primarily about political capability and institutional confinement the ruler who governed, who was reduced by tradition to her romantic relationships. With Marie Antoinette the parallel is primarily about something else the construction and weaponisation of the female image in the service of political narrative the mechanism by which both women became symbols rather than people and the specific damage that mechanism did to both their lives and their historical legacies. Marie Antoinette was subjected to pornographic pamphlets, fabricated accusations of adultery and worse, and a sustained propaganda campaign designed to make her personally responsible for structural political failures. Diana was subjected to tabloid coverage of comparable intensity to the construction of a specific image the people's princess, the wronged wife the fashion icon, the mother that was simultaneously flattering and dehumanizing, and to a media culture that fed on her image with an appetite that eventually contributed to her death. Both women were consumed by the machinery of representation that had been constructed around them. Both were in the final analysis more interesting than any version of the image that replaced them. The specific structural rhymes are precise first the foreign bride who could never fully be claimed. Marie Antoinette was always the Austrian. She was given the derogatory nickname of the Austrian which would remain with her until her untimely death Diana was always in the specific snobberies of the Windsorcourt the outsider, the Spencer girl who had not been born into the dynasty, who did not understand its protocols, who was constitutionally incapable of the emotional self suppression that the institution required, and that Diana's own constitution made impossible neither woman was ever fully inside the institution she had married into. Both were made to feel this constantly second the image as both instrument and trap. Marie Antoinette understood fashion as political communication she used her patronage of the dressmaker Rose Bertin and the painter Elisabeth Viget Le Brand to project a specific image of queenly magnificence that was in the early years of her reign genuinely effective as a statement of royal power. Diana used fashion with similar sophistication, the revenge dress, the black strapless gown on the night of Charles's Camilla admission, the shift dress in Angola surrounded by landmine victims were all precisely calibrated pieces of image making that communicated specific messages to specific audiences. Both women understood the visual field as a domain of power. Both found that the same understanding that made them effective communicators also made their every sartorial decision a matter of political analysis and public judgment. Third, the financial accusation and the scapegoating Marie Antoinette was Madame Deficit, the woman onto whom France's financial crisis was projected. Diana was not accused of financial profligacy, but she was made the symbolic centre of a different kind of institutional narrative the wronged wife, the unstable divorced princess, that served the purposes of those who needed her contained or discredited in the period after the separation. In both cases, a woman who had become inconvenient to a powerful institution found that the image of her that circulated was consistently the image most useful to that institution's interests rather than the image most accurate to her actual character. Fourth the resilience in adversity Marie Antoinette's finest hours were her last ones the dignity at the trial, the composure at the scaffold, the apology to the executioner. Diana's finest hours in terms of the quality of character displayed were the post separation years, the Angola campaign, the panorama interview, the specific quality of emotional engagement with people in suffering that distinguished her from the institutional culture she had left and that gave her global cultural significance independent of the royal context both women were as noted better at adversity than at ease fifth the trial by public opinion Marie Antoinette's actual trial before the Revolutionary tribunal was the formalization of a verdict that public opinion had already delivered. Diana was never tried by a court, but she experienced a form of ongoing public tribunal in the tabloid press, in which the evidence presented was selectively chosen, the verdict was often predetermined, and the ability to contest the charges was structurally limited by the nature of the forum. Both women knew the experience of being judged by an audience that had decided before the evidence was examined what they were Where do the parallels strain? Marie Antoinette was executed Diana died in a car crash. The deliberate judicial murder of an anointed queen and the accidental death of a divorced princess in a Paris tunnel are not equivalent, and I will not imply that they are Marie Antoinette governed a country or attempted to she had formal political influence, exercised it, and bore consequences for exercising it Diana had no formal political authority. Her campaigns on aids and landmines were the work of a private individual using celebrity as a platform rather than the work of a head of state. The structural power differential is significant and the eras are categorically different in ways that affect both the nature of the scrutiny and the available responses to it. Marie Antoinette had no mechanism for communicating directly with the sympathetic public that bypassed the hostile press. Diana had the panorama interview. The capacity to speak over the heads of the institution is a very recent historical development, the verdict Marie Antoinette and I say this with the genuine acknowledgement that Diana has now appeared twice in this series as a comparison figure, which makes her a kind of recurring structural type the woman who is simultaneously essential to and destroyed by the image machinery of the institution she inhabits and that the recurrence is itself historically instructive. But Marie Antoinette is the more compelling figure because the arc is more complete and the consequence more catastrophic. Her story runs from the border ceremony where she crossed into France stripped of everything Austrian to the scaffold at the Place de la Revolution where she was stripped of everything else. Twice of being at every moment more symbol than person, of having her reality mediated through an image that served other people's purposes, ending in the most extreme possible form of that mediation. A trial in which what she was accused of was not what she had done, but what the revolution needed her to have done so that the revolution's account of itself could be coherent. She was not the cause of the French Revolution she was its most useful story. The distinction cost her everything I grew up in Kingston upon Thames, which has, as I occasionally mention, a perfectly pleasant river and a perfectly unremarkable history by European standards. We do not, in Kingston upon Thames, send fourteen year old girls to foreign courts to cement diplomatic alliances or execute queens at thirty seven after charging them with crimes they did not commit. We consider both of these practices somewhat ill advised History unfortunately was for a very long time not consulting us Marie Antoinette born Vienna november second, seventeen fifty five, died Paris october sixteenth, seventeen ninety three, Archduchess of Austria, Dauphine of France, Queen Consort of France, prisoner of the Revolution, executed by Guillotine at thirty seven she apologized to the executioner for stepping on his foot. She had impeccable manners. She was not Madame Deficit, and she did not say let them eat cake. She was a fourteen year old girl sent to France in someone else's clothes and she was still in someone else's clothes when she arrived at the scaffold she deserved better most people in this series have deserved better. The difference is that in her case the people who gave her worse were simultaneously writing the history that explained why she had deserved it. I'm Sophie Manners thank you for being here Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette The Journey is the best English language biography and is deeply sympathetic without being dishonest about the political failures. Stefan Zweig's earlier biography is more romantic but beautifully written and if you are ever in Paris, the Place de la Concorde on an ordinary afternoon is one of the most beautiful squares in the world. It is also the place where two monarchs and a great many other people were guillotined during the revolution the fountains are very pretty the history is all around you both things are simultaneously true. Good night