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Not Just the Tudors
Marie Antoinette
00:40:46
The royal influencer who dressed like a royal mistress, and whose lavish attire cost her her life.
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- [00:00]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
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Rob Weinberg
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- [03:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Berlin to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Today we're venturing deep into the 18th century and who else could we start with? In 1770, at the age of 14, the Viennese Archduchess Maria Antonia arrived in France to marry the heir to the French throne, Louis Auguste, later Louis xvi. Fashion had long been its own currency at the French court of Versailles, and with the royal match, the young woman, now called by a French version of her name, Marie Antoinette, found that her body, political and intimate, had become public property. The young Dauphine and from 1774, Queen rebelled against the rigid protocols of the court, building her own visual identity by adopting typical male riding attire to participate in the royal hunt and rejecting the traditional robe la francaise for a star later known as the chemise a reine. She was a royal wife who looked like a royal mistress. Her attire came at an incredible cost. Cost and eventually her adoring public would come to turn on her for the very excesses they had once exhorted. On 16 October 1793, nine months after revolution, had executed the king at the guillotine, the former queen consort was similarly condemned. Dressed in a simple white chemise, all manner of artifice and wealth removed, but now not by conceit or choice. Marie Antoinette's final image was that of a woman rather than an idol, a widow rather than a queen. Today we're talking about the relationship between clothing and power in the 18th century, and my guest is none other than Caroline Weber, professor of French at Columbia University, whose compelling work traverses the political, social and artistic spheres of 17th and 18th century France. Among her many wonderful books are Terror and Its Discontents, Suspect Words and Revolutionary France, and Proust's How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of fin de siecle Paris. She joins me today to talk about her landmark biography, Queen of what Marie Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and you are listening to not just the Tudors. Professor Weber, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:56]
Rob Weinberg
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
- [05:58]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
It is a real delight to speak to you and to be talking about this extraordinary woman and to be reaching deep into the 18th century, as I said. And I suppose when we start thinking about Marie Antoinette and we're thinking about her wardrobe, the most obvious thing that comes to mind for me is because of the revolution, we presumably have very few intact examples of her wardrobe. So the first thing I want to start with is how do we know so much about it? What are our sources?
- [06:29]
Rob Weinberg
That's such a good question, Susanna. And in fact, while I was working on Queen of Fashion, my agent, who's also a dear friend of mine, would kind of call me every few weeks for updates and he would say, isn't there just a museum you can go to, somewhere that has all these clothes? And I had to explain that the work of reconstructing her wardrobe was rather more complicated for the reason you mention, which is that during the revolution, the royal family's palaces were looted and things were stolen and destroyed, but also for the simple fact that one of the conventions of the court before the revolution in France was that at the end of a season or a year, the royals would give their clothes away to members of their retinue. And so the members of the retinue wouldn't necessarily wear those clothes. They would convert them into bed coverings, altar coverings, curtains. So so much of the royal wardrobe from all members of the family was actually repurposed. But this did mean that I had to spend a lot of time digging for information about what Marie Antoinette wore in written contemporary sources. So one of the reasons I think she so successfully became the first royal fashion plate is that she came of age as young queen at a time when a new medium was also developing in France, which was an early version of the fashion magazine illustrated fashion plates that could mass produced and sold with a fairly wide market diffusion. And Marie Antoinette was actually the first royal to have her name attached to her image in a kind of a fashion plate or an image of what somebody was wearing. And so she became known as a fashionable celebrity. And those fashion plates were very, very good sources of specific and usually experimental and very interesting clothes and hairstyles that Marie Antoinette would debut for fascinated public in Paris. I also, I wrote Queen of Fashion before the age of everything being digitized. And I couldn't do word searches of books and find, oh, well, where, you know, can I search this 10,000 page book on the French Revolution and find every reference to Marie Antoinette and what she happened to be wearing. So it was a lot of detective work, just slowly plodding through memoirs and newspapers and other contemporary accounts and seeing what little scraps of information I could find about what she was wearing on given occasions. And then, more importantly, or just as importantly, what kinds of commentary the specific choices she made in fashion actually generated because her clothing was so deeply politicized by everyone around her from the day she arrived in France as a young dauphine.
- [08:58]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Yeah, it's so interesting what you say about the digitization of sources. It provides so much ease of access today, and we're all very grateful for it. But it is a question too, about what we lose. We certainly lose the lateral approach to things if we're just zoning in on key words, don't we? Let's go back to her childhood, perhaps, to start to think about her early years at the French court and what she brought with her in terms of her mentality. Was there anything that had cultivated an understanding of the importance of harnessing her image?
- [09:35]
Rob Weinberg
Yeah, you know, it's such a good question, and I think the answer is both yes and no. The no answer is simply that Marie Antoinette was not expected to be in the role of dauphine. She hadn't been bred and raised for it. She was sort of substituted at the last moment by her mother, Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria, for another archduchess in the family who died, I want to say, of smallpox. And so Marie Antoinette was kind of a marriage pawn in the royal dynastic game, substituted in very late in the day. Her French wasn't very good. She'd had very little training of any kind for this massive role that she was about to undertake. So in that sense, she didn't bring much with her in terms of an awareness of what a royal image might mean or what the importance of protocol and the kind of symbolics of projection of power at Versailles could mean. But I do believe that she developed a sense for that when she first got to court in France. She was given a tutor who trained her in royal history. And Marie Antoinette, I always like to point out, had at least as much Bourbon or French blood as her husband, Louis Auguste. And she was very proud, proud of and very interested in particular in her family's genealogical connection to Louis XIV, the great 17th century absolutist monarch who built Versailles and really developed a lot of the norms for the projection of royal power through clothing, through luxury, through splendor. And in the 17th century, and in the age of Louis XIV, the idea was that the king would project the most fabulous image in the room. When he walked into any room at Versailles, he was always the center of every eye. The architecture of Versailles was built to kind of as a stage set to highlight and accentuate royal power. The hall of mirrors he would walk through at a particular time every day when the sun was shining through the windows, reflecting onto the mirrors, and he was all in, you know, gold and jewels and huge wig and high heels, and all of that kind of royal drag was very much a sort of a male prerogative. And Marie Antoinette, in studying the history of the French kings as a young woman at Versailles, seems to have become really intrigued by the person of Louis XIV and by what he did with image to not only project an air of authority, but actually to reinforce his authority in the popular imagination and in the mind of his courtiers and in the mind of other people around Europe. So I do think that she kind of came quite young, at the age of 14 or 15, to at least an awareness that the way you put your body together and the way that you were perceived by others really could have quite an influence on the way you were treated and what kind of power you were perceived to have. And this was particularly important for her because the standard role for a French dauphine or a French queen was to have children. And Marie Antoinette had the misfortune of marrying a man who was reluctant or potentially unable to cultivate to consummate their marriage for the first seven and a half years of their union. So she needed to find another raison d'etre. And cultivating this image of royal splendor and grandeur seems to have been the strategy for survival.
- [12:46]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
That's also interesting. I wonder about that moment when famously, she's stripped at the border, taking off everything that is Austrian and putting on everything that is French. How important was it that she was seen to be divesting herself of her previous identity? And what did it mean to adopt French fashion? How did it signal that change?
- [13:10]
Rob Weinberg
The dripping at the border is really such an interesting and crucial moment, I think, in Marie Antoinette's development. So this was a ritual that foreign princesses marrying into the House of Bourbon had undergone for at least 100 years. And it was a kind of ritual that reinforced the idea that Frenchness was something, and royal Frenchness was something that would be conveyed in every tiny detail of a queen's or a princess's self presentation. I think it came as a rude shock to Marie Antoinette when she reached the symbolic border between her mother's territories and those of her future grandfather in law, Louis xv. And she was told to get out of all of her Austrian clothes and change into all French clothes. Even though France since the age of Louis XIV had already been the sort of standard bearer of and source for luxury fashions for royals and courtiers all over Europe. So Marie Antoinette gets to this border and is told to strip out of her so called Austrian clothes, which were sourced in France. But it was a really essential, I think, kind of symbolic moment for anyone marrying into the Bourbon household that they adopt this image that was understood to be purely French. And Marie Antoinette kind of made that political imperative her own by really seeming to decide quite early on that the way the public would know who she was and what she stood for was something that could be legible in the very folds of a dress. Certainly one of the things that got her in trouble a few years into her tenure as dauphine was the fact that she got very bored with the sort of standard, prescribed ceremonial, very dowdy, very clunky court dresses that women at Versailles had been required to wear since the mid to late 17th century under Louis XIV. And Marie Antoinette became enchanted with a kind of a younger, fresher, more modern fashion, which were these relatively unstructured chemise dresses made out of muslin, made out of cotton, made out of linen and muslin, cotton and linen were not understood to be French luxury fabrics. Silk was one of the great French luxury industries. So the very act of wanting to switch out some of her clunky silk ceremonial court robes for these younger looking, easier to wear, more comfortable, more casual dresses in other stuffs and other textiles really did signal to both the French court and the French people that this Austrian born queen or dauphine wasn't quite French enough, that her loyalties maybe lay somewhere else. And this was a tightrope walk that she would really do until the end of her days, that she adopted the very French mentality that she would be defined by her appearance and by her clothing choices. And yet not all of her clothing choices. Once she had the kind of latitude that she had, especially when she became Queen at age 19, to decide what clothes she wanted to wear. Not all of those clothing choices conformed to what was understood to be appropriate for a French royal consort.
- [16:16]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I mean, that's so fascinating that taking off a structural garment that confines for the freedom of a chemise could be seen to indicate political allegiance and identity is mind blowing.
- [16:33]
Rob Weinberg
And this gets back to your point, I think, about what we lose when we do digital word searches in research today that because I had to recover the traces of Marie Antoinette's fashion journey, just by reading thousands and thousands of pages of primary sources, I could actually see where then mentions of those clothing choices were situated in the middle of a big political discussion. So I was startled as well to discover that doing something like choosing a more comfortable, casual dress, especially once she did finally have her first child in December of 1778. This young woman who's recovering from pregnancy, who wants to spend time with her baby, who wants to have a little bit more freedom of movement and eventually has four children, wants to play with them, have picnics with them, play tag with them, a less confining, more comfortable and casual dress would just make sense as a lifestyle choice. And yet mentions that I would find of Marie Antoinette dressed in a chemise were invariably laden with a lot of political discussion about, oh, look, her Austrian allegiances are really shining through. And this is a woman who is trying. For instance, she was accused of this quite directly even before the revolution. This is a woman who wants to destroy one of France's most important export industries, silk. The silk makers of Lyon actually came and formally filed a petition and complaint about Marie Antoinette at the Court of Versailles, saying, because she's chosen to follow this other fashion, and where she goes, the other women of France who want to be voguish also go, she's ruining our industry, she's closing down factories, she's making us lose jobs and livelihood. So how much can she really care about the French? How much does she really care about her French subjects? So, yeah, it's amazing to think that something that might, to us today seem as banal or trivial as a simple wardrobe choice, what you decide to get dressed in when you wake up in the morning would be something that had such a. That cast such a long political shadow.
- [18:33]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And, of course, many people will be familiar with the image of her in the royal portrait by Elizabeth Vigy Le Brun, which shows Marie Antoinette in that chemise. Quite extraordinary that she also chose to be depicted in that private attire as well.
- [18:49]
Rob Weinberg
Yes, that portrait really was kind of an amazing landmark moment in her reign and in her short life. She died at age 37 for that very reason. The idea that the Queen of France would dare to present herself without any of the trappings of royalty, traditionally royal portraiture. And, you know, I think even subsequent to that painting, royal portraiture, the standard was you would appear in something that was a formal ceremonial court dress, usually with an ermine robe usually with a scepter and or a crown somewhere in the background. And for this famous portrait by Viger, which was called the Queen Angola, which was another word for the chemise dress or la reine la rose, the queen holding a rose. Marie Antoinette is just shown as a young woman holding a flower and wearing this very simple plain dress. And when Liget, Marie Antoinette's favorite portraitist, who was the painter of this portrait, showed it at the Paris Salon that year, people went crazy, and not in a good way. The irony was that that kind of dress had become so fashionable by then that a number of other members of the French royal family and French court also had portraits of themselves that were shown at the salon that year in chemise dresses. Nobody bothered about those, including at least one of Marie Antoinette's sisters in law. But everybody said it's a scandal and a shame and a slap in the face of the French people for the French queen to show herself. And they said, tricked out like a serving wench, wearing a nightgown, looking like a gutter snipe. The language was so vitriolic and the backlash was so intense that Viger, after only a few days, had to remove the portrait from the salon, had to repaint hastily a replacement that showed Marie Antoinette in all of the silken finery of a French royal consort and then placed it up to sort of placate the people. And yet these same people who were so enraged at Marie Antoinette being not sufficiently formal and ceremonial and properly royal enough in this portrait in the early 1780s, are the people who, after 1789, when the Revolution begins, will attack her for having been too much of a spendthrift, for having worn clothes that were too expensive, too fabulous, too extravagant. So her very attempt to pare down and dress in a simpler fashion in the early 1780s was something that was used against her at the time. And yet, once the revolution got underway and a number of liberal women and revolutionary women adopted the chemise as kind of a sign of their emancipation from the ancien regime and all the old protocols and customs, then Marie Antoinette's relative simplicity of dress was forgotten. And she was just charged with being someone who spent the entire national fortune or entire national treasury on her extravagant clothing.
- [21:47]
Don Wildman
In case you haven't heard, in the US it's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American history hit we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests, let us introduce you to the Founding Fathers, guide you through the West Wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by. To find out just how we got here American History Hit a podcast from History.
- [22:22]
Rob Weinberg
Hit.
- [22:26]
Naomi Ekperigan
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- [23:06]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Okay, a couple of points to think about then. I mentioned in the introduction her riding attire, and that seems to be another place in which she's issuing convention, and I wonder if we can talk a bit about that. But also, I don't want us to drop this idea of her being seen as someone who wears extravagant clothing. And so perhaps we can also think about the extent to which that is true. The parties, the breathtaking sort of sumptuous attire that we also see her in.
- [23:35]
Rob Weinberg
Yes. Okay, so I'll speak first to the extravagance because yet it is still such a central part of, I think a popular image of Marie Antoinette is the teetering high hairstyles, the unbelievably ornate, flouncy, bedazzled over accessorized dresses. One of her more famous elaborate kind of ball gown type dresses was one where all of the on these wide, enormous, wide hoop skirted skirts on either side of her hips that kind of inflated her hips out to maybe about a meter on either side of her body, give or take. All of the ribbons that held all of the flounces of those skirt had tucked into them little tiny vases of water with real flowers kind of nestled inside the folds of this dress. The attention that was paid to the just most extravagant, inventive, fabulous touches in her wardrobe that was very much signature Marie Antoinette style. In particular, though, in the early days of her time in France and in the early days of her reign. So as you mentioned, she becomes Dauphine in 1770, when she's not yet 15 years old, she ascends the throne in 1774. And really the kind of the period of maybe 1774 to about 1779, her early years as queen, is the period of her high, extravagant style. And this was a period when her Husband, finally, now being king, she was the highest ranking woman at court. And her husband was not at all a domestic tyrant or somebody who gave her a lot of instruction about what she could or should be doing as queen. And she took advantage of her queenly status to escape Versailles a lot for Paris. And in Paris, she really fell in love with contemporary French fashion. And this was something that was being developed by a kind of a newfound industry run by women. They were called fashion merchants, Marchand de mode. And they were allowed under the trade laws of ancien regime France, not to make dresses, but to ornament dresses as elaborately as the wearer could wish. In this way, these kind of gigantic, elaborate, heavy, constrictive constructions of French court dress could be made to look up to date, modern, exciting, with all these whimsical and extravagant touches. So Marie Antoinette fell in love with this style for the first four years or so of her reign as a young queen. And one of the ways that she chose to update her daily formal dress at court was through these elaborate hairstyles, these three foot high hairstyles that were known as pouf, where you could actually have an entire little vignette installed in the curls and tresses that were piled on top of your head. So Marie Antoinette had like a little rustic village scene once kind of done up in her hairdo. She famously also once had her hair topped with a fully rigged, perfect replica of a French man o war that had just won an important victory against the English in the American war for independence. This was a look that was very widely covered by the French fashion press at the time. It was my favorite image of any of her hairstyles. And it was known to my editor, who got sick of all of the images I tried to include in the book, just of this one hairstyle as ship head. But the sort of the ship head look is what we still associate with Marie Antoinette, these kind of birthday cake hairstyles. And I think what changed for her was having children and deciding that it just wasn't on anymore to take four hours a day just to get ready in the morning to sleep sitting up so that the elaborate architecture of her hair wouldn't collapse overnight like a cake in an oven. And that's when she really moved into the opposite end of the fashion spectrum and gravitated towards these more simple, kind of freer and easier, more casual and comfortable dresses. But the ornate styles really were an essential part of her early image as a fashion queen and a fashion icon. And there's no doubt that they were tremendously expensive, obscenely expensive. And even though she was charged with having said, oh, they don't have bread, let them eat cake, the poor of the realm, she never said that. I think that her hairstyles were so labor intensive, cost intensive, and even flour intensive. Flour was an ingredient in the pomade that held them all together. At a time when people were starving from flower shortages. The let them eat cake myth, I think, really emerged in reaction to these wedding cakes hairstyles. So I don't mean to downplay that that was an enormous part of who she was as a fashion icon and in the popular imagination of her time as well as afterward.
- [28:00]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And is there a sense in which, in some of her sartorial choices, she was trying to generate public appeal, that she was trying to be a kind of queen of glamour?
- [28:15]
Rob Weinberg
Yes, I think that really was the plan, actually, Susanna, that Marie Antoinette came under intense pressure and intense criticism from very early on in her tenure at Versailles as a young dauphine, because every month she was failing to show that she was with child. And this was because of the very private fact that her husband was unwilling or unable to consummate their marriage for seven and a half years. And historians have varying opinions over why that was and what was happening behind closed doors in that respect. But it did mean that Marie Antoinette needed to cultivate another source of public admiration and public authority. Her mother was the ultimate tiger. Mother, Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria, was sending her constant hectoring letters from Vienna saying, if you don't have a child soon, this whole alliance with France, which was a relative novelty on the sort of in the face of complicated European geopolitics at that time, if you don't have a royal heir soon, if you don't get pregnant soon, this alliance will fall apart and nobody will want you there, and nobody respects you, nobody likes you. And it does seem like Marie Antoinette decided to take a page from the book of Louis XIV and make herself impressive to people and famous among people for cultivating this image of fantastic glamour, opulence and splendor. And it did work. And as you indicated earlier in the podcast, the public initially really ate this up and loved seeing this beautiful young queen wearing crazy clothes and making it a huge exciting event. Oh, is she going to appear at the opera tonight? And when she does, what will she be wearing on her person and on her head? Her hairstylist, Leonard, who was probably the first celebrity hairstylist in Western European history, left these memoirs that may or may not have been apocryphal but he describes a scene at the theater in Paris, or at an opera in Paris, or at a public ball in Paris where there was actually a stampede and some people were trampled to death and bones were broken as people kind of flocked to get close to the body of this queen to see what she was wearing at the time. And at the time, I think that what the big exciting accessory was a hairstyle that was called the pouf a la comet, a three foot high hairstyle studded with rubies and long flame colored ribbon streamers that were meant to mimic a comet that had recently been seen in the sky. And so the excitement around Marie Antoinette as a kind of queen of glamour was tremendous in these early days. But life was hard for most of the French population. And Marie Antoinette then quickly became, precisely because of these opulent and expensive styles, a poster child for everything that the monarchy was doing wrong. The fact that the monarchy was kind of callously continuing in its own way of spending unthinkable sums every day on trivialities and on surface adornment when people were dying for want of bread, for want of food, became a really offensive issue to many in the French population. And because Marie Antoinette had made herself into the most conspicuous fashionable royal, she also became then the most notorious fashionable royal and the most hated royal once the revolution happened and sentiment turned against the monarchy as an institution.
- [31:31]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
I want to come back to that in just a second. Just one thought that I remember from the first time I read your book Queen of fashion, about 15 years ago or something, which is I was really struck by the possibility that there might be something proto feminist about the space that she took up with her clothing and with her hair. Is that correct?
- [31:53]
Rob Weinberg
I think so. And I'm so pleased that you say that because I didn't start writing my book on Marie Antoinette with any preconceived notion. I did have Marie Antoinette paper dolls, strangely, as a child, but I didn't grow up thinking of her as my heroine or as kind of a feminist goddess or a feminist ideal. And there's a lot that's problematic with calling a woman a feminist ideal when she's gotten to where she is entirely by her marriage. Like Meghan, Duchess of Sussex comes to mind, perhaps. But I was really struck once I started doing this research into her life about first of all, how insanely difficult it was to be a young woman at the court of Versailles and to have kind of placed on your small, thin shoulders the weight of a huge European diplomatic alliance and then the weight of an entire French dynastic trad. The idea that this young woman is constantly held to be at fault for not having children when it's her husband who won't sleep with her, and that her only value, as her own mother kept reminding her her only value was as a kind of procreative vessel for the French monarchy. To me, there was something very surprising and kind of engagingly empowering about her decision to forge a different kind of queenly identity. And she was really the first queen, at least in French history, who've made that switch. Until she came along, nobody was particularly interested in the French queen, even as a celebrity or as a public figure. They were supposed to stay behind at court and have children, and the kings were the ones who, again, encapsulated, embodied all the splendor and the symbolic power of the monarchy. So for her to arrogate that role to herself and also just to try to find another role when the traditional, intrinsically misogynistic or sexist role of wife and mother wasn't working out too well for her, was intensely moving and, I think, to me, more admirable than I would have expected to find her in general. And one definitely sees another instance, in the case of her life before and during the Revolution, of she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't. So just as she was damned if she did and damned if she didn't wear very expensive clothing, she was similarly damned for being a woman under the Ancien regime, when the tradition was. And the rule was that she was just supposed to be a bearer of royal babies. And then during the Revolution, she was equally attacked because the sort of revolutionary politics of that moment held that women were also supposed to stay out of the way and stay at home bearing babies who'd be soldiers, who'd fight in the great revolutionary army. So there was tremendous misogyny during the Revolution as well. And her trial before her execution in October of 1793. So much of the line of questioning and the line of accusation of her trial had to do with her sexuality and her supposed sexual misbehavior. And this was not something that was ever even remotely touched on at the trial of her husband, Louis XVI the previous winter. So she was somebody who was really hated for being a woman in power as well. And in that respect, I don't know that there was anything she could have done to guard against that in the end. But she definitely made it worse for herself by finding a way to assert herself as a strong woman, kind of against the grain of historical and political tradition.
- [35:23]
Don Wildman
In case you haven't heard, in the US It's a presidential election year. We're going to hear a lot of this is America. No, no, you're all wrong. This is America. But on American History hit we're leaving that to the rest of them. Join me, Don Wildman, twice a week where we look to the past to understand the United States of today. With the help of some amazing guests, let us introduce you to the Founding Fathers, guide you through the west wing of the White House, and shelter you on the battlefields of years gone by. To find out just how we got here. American History hit a podcast from history.
- [35:58]
Rob Weinberg
Hit.
- [36:02]
Naomi Ekperigan
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- [36:39]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Okay, so we have this public approval of the Queen faltering, this sense that her image was being negatively employed to propel the cause of the revolution. What then can we say about the fact that French revolutionaries came to adopt the kind of unstructured style of dress that she had made famous?
- [36:58]
Rob Weinberg
Exactly. I'm so pleased you say that because one of my favorite points in her sartorial biography, and I don't think people dwell on it nearly enough, and I think the fact that the very people who supported the revolution and who criticized Marie Antoinette came to adopt this simpler, more pared down, less expensive, more democratic style of dress speaks her tremendous success and reach as what we would call today an influencer. You know, she really did make the case for this kind of dressing down, this radical dressing down that was associated with the chemise dress and that revolutionary women adopted really quite universally once the revolution got going. And so I think she did make the case for it. She did make sure that everybody in France was aware of this style and people caught onto it and people loved it. And then they conveniently chose to forget its source. They conveniently chose to forget that this look had been pioneered by the woman who was then branded during the revolution as public enemy number one. But I do think it speaks to her sort of fashion forward thinking and to again, the sort of strangely iconoclastic nature of so many of her fashion experiments that she was turning royal and class precedent on its ear. She was dressing in a way that a woman of much lower social standing could conceivably afford to dress as well by eschewing kind of very intricately constructed and expensive court dresses for something like a chemise that was relatively easy to sew, relatively easy to a copy, and again, could be made out of less expensive materials.
- [38:35]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
And did she continue to use fashion as a symbolic language in the lead up to her arrest?
- [38:42]
Rob Weinberg
Yes, she absolutely did, and she did so in a few ways once she was imprisoned with her family. In August of 1792, the royal family saw their palace in Paris, the tuileries, sacked. On August 10th of 1792, they were taken prisoner. A month later, the monarchy was officially declared abolished and the French Revolution began. And once Brie Antoinette was in prison, she had less freedom, obviously, to make a lot of sartorial statements, but she did make a few. She was actually still commissioning new clothes for the first few months that she was in prison. And so one of the ways that she chose to sort of telegraph her political allegiances, which were entirely monarchist and entirely anti revolutionary, was through color choices. She started using a lot of green ribbon, and green was a counter revolutionary color par excellence, because it was one of the heraldic colors of her youngest brother in law, the Count of Artois, who later became Charles X during the Bourbon restoration in the 19th century. Charles X, the Comte Artois, Louis XVI's youngest brother, emigrated from France at the first stirrings of the revolution and was one of the princes who was really organizing the war against the French revolutionary state from abroad. So it was widely understood by the French public that if you were wearing green ribbons, you supported Artois, you supported the army that was rallying abroad to overturn the effects of the revolution. And this was a big deal. And Marie Antoinette was not subtle about her adoption of this color to sort of show her political loyalties. The other thing that she did that I think was tremendously brave was that when her husband was executed In January of 1793, she insisted on going into mourning and on staying in mourning permanently after his death. And so she kind of kept this black dress on day in and day out for months and months after his death. And the republican government of France at that time really didn't like her decision to do this because they were worried that it made her a martyr. And it was a constant reminder to monarchists who were the revolutionary government feared that there were still monarchists in hiding throughout France. And there were kind of outbursts of civil war in regions outside of Paris where people were still very loyal and attached to the monarchy. And so for Marie Antoinette to go about as a bereaved queen and a bereaved royal widow made her this image of royal martyrdom that the revolutionary government found was very dangerous for the stability and longevity of their own regime. And then she made matters even worse. Robespierre, who is the kind of head of the republican government at its most extreme and bloodthirsty and guillotine happy period. Robespierre specifically sent orders after she was found guilty of counter revolutionary treason in October, that she should under no circumstances be allowed to go to the guillotine in her black widow's weeds, because the fear was that it would stir up public sympathy for her in the crowds who would line the streets and line the public square in order to see her executed. And the most moving detail of her entire life that I discovered is one that you referenced in terms of how she made her last public journey to the guillotine and to her death. She had actually stuffed in a little hole between the stones of the wall of her cell in the Conciergerie, which was her final prison, a little white chemise dress that she wanted to keep pristine and angelic looking and I think, saintly. And it was also just reminiscent in clothing of happier times when she was a young mother playing tag and having picnics with her children. And so she went to the guillotine in this sort of angelic looking white dress. And white was also a heraldic color for the house of Bourbon. It was the color of the lily flower, which was the Bourbon emblem. It was also a royalist color par excellence. So Robespierre, in trying to guard against one problem, which was stopping her from going to the guillotine in black, and earning sympathy from royalists in that respect, instead enabled her to go to the guillotine in this white dress that had also all of these kind of counter revolutionary significations for people who were looking closely and analyzing it in that sense. And a lot of the most beautiful paintings and imagery of Marie Antoinette that circulated after her execution showed her in this white dress, really as a royal martyr.
- [42:57]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Right. So in other words, this last poignant image of her cements her legacy.
- [43:04]
Rob Weinberg
Exactly. And yet again, like so many of her images, it was a multivalent one. It was one that had many different meanings at once. You suggested in your introduction, this image of her in this very plain white dress that can't have been in the best shape because it had been shoved in the hole in a wall between two stones in a dank and dirty prison, it couldn't have been pristine. It couldn't have been unwrinkled. And so on the one hand, this is an image of a woman who's lost everything, as you said before, you know, she goes to the guillotine as somebody who's been stripped of all of her former royal grandeur and power and splendor. And on the other hand, it's an incredibly powerful image because it's the color of the Bourbon lily flower, because it's a style that she herself pioneered, because it was a style of her own kind of choice and autonomy. And apparently it did have quite a public effect, the expectation when she was sent to the guillotine and she was sent there not in a closed royal carriage like her husband was, but in an open cart like a common criminal. Everybody could see her. They could have pelted her with rotten vegetables, which was standard for people being sent to the guillotine in an open cart. And instead, apparently a kind of a hushed silence breeded so much of her slow procession through Paris to her beheading. And I think people really were awed and were stunned by this last very powerful and poignant image of this woman. And it does cement her legacy. And it, it did make her, over the course of the 19th century in France, when there a constant back and forth between what kind of government France would have, would they have another republic, would they have another monarchy? Marie Antoinette remained this sort of central, iconic image of royal martyrdom.
- [44:38]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Well, Professor Caroline Weber, this has been an absolute delight. Thank you so much for introducing us to the 18th century, to Marie Antoinette, and to this extraordinary relationship between sartorial choices and political power. For those who want to know more, they should rush to get a copy of Queen of Fashion what Marie Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution. It's a fantastic read. Thank you so much for coming on.
- [45:06]
Rob Weinberg
Oh, thank you so much for having me. I love your podcast. I'm delighted to be a part of it and many, many thanks.
- [45:13]
Professor Susanna Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Also thanks to my researcher, Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. If you'd like to find out more about France in the early modern period, go back and check out the episodes on Louis XIV and his mistresses or the House of Guise, Europe's most murderous dynasty, or Francois I, king of France. The links are in the show notes for this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at not just the tudors@historyhip.com Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and you can watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhip.com subscribe it is well worth it. And if you'd be so good as to follow not just the Tudors wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [46:17]
Naomi Ekperigan
E Invoicing with Pagero It's a cold world when your financial system is isolated from your trading partners. Invoices need to travel the winding, error ridden road of email and manual input. Step out of the cold friend. Connect to the pagero Network to exchange e invoices and other supply documents with millions of businesses globally. Business is better connected with Pagero. Visit pagero.com to start your automation journey.
- [46:47]
Rob Weinberg
ACAST powers the World's Best Podcasts Here's a show that we recommend.
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Caroline Weber
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Andy Beckerman
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Caroline Weber
We're a real life couple and a real life couple of comedians and we're the hosts of the podcast Couples Therapy.
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Andy Beckerman
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Caroline Weber
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Andy Beckerman
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Caroline Weber
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Andy Beckerman
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Caroline Weber
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Download Couples Therapy wherever you get your podcasts.
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Rob Weinberg
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