Frances Wilson: The Real Marie Antoinette
Here we go again, losing our heads over Marie Antoinette. The cake-fixated clothes-horse whose rumoured appetites are widely held to have resulted in the French Revolution appears on screens this Friday in the much-anticipated film by Sofia Coppola. Marie Antoinette, sporting a head of hair which would put Marge Simpson in the shade, is played by Kirsten Dunst. Her "sprite-like spirit and dazzling, pale complexion" were precisely what Coppola was after.
The last actress to take on the role was Norma Shearer, whose performance in the 1938 MGM production of Marie Antoinette inspired Eva Peron to dye her own hair blonde. Dunst's glamour is already having a similar effect, and the catwalks this autumn have taken their inspiration from her sumptuous costumes. No matter that the fashions in the film bear little relation to any of the jewel-encrusted creations actually worn by the queen: the relationship between reality and fantasy has long been broken down when it comes to Marie Antoinette.
She was the most hated woman in France. In the Republican pamphlets written to stir up animosity towards the monarchy in the years before the Revolution, the bride of Louis XVI was called the "Austrian she-wolf", a "monster who needed to slake her thirst on the blood of the French".
Recent historians have suggested that the figure seen as a vampire by her people, satisfying her own desires by sucking the country dry, was no more than a construct of the revolutionaries, a convenient scapegoat for the excesses of the ancien régime. In reality she was brave and courageous, a dedicated wife, mother, and monarch, a committed conservative who was prepared to die for her beliefs. Saint or sinner: will the real Marie Antoinette please stand up?
Coppola, who won an academy award for Lost in Translation, does something rather different with her version of the French queen, representing her as a woman who rightly enjoyed her privileges and was wrongly made to suffer for them. Kirsten Dunst plays the part with the determined superficiality of an American teenager home-alone for the holidays. Once you get to know her, Coppola says, Marie Antoinette is really "quite sweet". She sees her as someone who has been lost in transmission, obscured behind two centuries of myth-making. The she-wolf who was said to have told her starving subjects eat cake during a bread famine was in reality a naive Austrian teenager negotiating her way between the sexual intrigue, stifling etiquette and endless extravagance of Versailles on the one hand, and a France precariously positioned between the ancien régime and a new sense of nationalism on the other.
Coppola's indulgent celebration of court decadence, which she sets against a thumping soundtrack by the likes of Adam Ant, was greeted by the critics at Cannes with a chorus of boos. Even if it has now been proved that Marie Antoinette didn't actually say "Let them eat cake", Coppola's unapologetic and shallow heroine does little to explain her or to account for the hatred she generated. As ever, Marie Antoinette divides opinion, and the role she played in the history of the French Revolution is in the midst of a retrial....
... the real reason for the hatred of the queen is not that she was promiscuous but that she lavishly spent on herself while the country went bankrupt, and that she was rightly suspected of plotting to stop the revolution.
But according to Munro Price, author of The Fall of the French Monarchy, the two key factors against Marie Antoinette had nothing to do with her extravagance either, and were things she could do nothing about. The first was that she was Austrian and therefore the enemy. The second was that she was a woman. Time after time, it is the femininity of Marie Antoinette that is made the issue. Her supposed promiscuity was a mark of the danger she posed to the natural order of things: the state was becoming feminised; the king was weak and the queen had made him so....
Read entire article at Independent (UK)
The last actress to take on the role was Norma Shearer, whose performance in the 1938 MGM production of Marie Antoinette inspired Eva Peron to dye her own hair blonde. Dunst's glamour is already having a similar effect, and the catwalks this autumn have taken their inspiration from her sumptuous costumes. No matter that the fashions in the film bear little relation to any of the jewel-encrusted creations actually worn by the queen: the relationship between reality and fantasy has long been broken down when it comes to Marie Antoinette.
She was the most hated woman in France. In the Republican pamphlets written to stir up animosity towards the monarchy in the years before the Revolution, the bride of Louis XVI was called the "Austrian she-wolf", a "monster who needed to slake her thirst on the blood of the French".
Recent historians have suggested that the figure seen as a vampire by her people, satisfying her own desires by sucking the country dry, was no more than a construct of the revolutionaries, a convenient scapegoat for the excesses of the ancien régime. In reality she was brave and courageous, a dedicated wife, mother, and monarch, a committed conservative who was prepared to die for her beliefs. Saint or sinner: will the real Marie Antoinette please stand up?
Coppola, who won an academy award for Lost in Translation, does something rather different with her version of the French queen, representing her as a woman who rightly enjoyed her privileges and was wrongly made to suffer for them. Kirsten Dunst plays the part with the determined superficiality of an American teenager home-alone for the holidays. Once you get to know her, Coppola says, Marie Antoinette is really "quite sweet". She sees her as someone who has been lost in transmission, obscured behind two centuries of myth-making. The she-wolf who was said to have told her starving subjects eat cake during a bread famine was in reality a naive Austrian teenager negotiating her way between the sexual intrigue, stifling etiquette and endless extravagance of Versailles on the one hand, and a France precariously positioned between the ancien régime and a new sense of nationalism on the other.
Coppola's indulgent celebration of court decadence, which she sets against a thumping soundtrack by the likes of Adam Ant, was greeted by the critics at Cannes with a chorus of boos. Even if it has now been proved that Marie Antoinette didn't actually say "Let them eat cake", Coppola's unapologetic and shallow heroine does little to explain her or to account for the hatred she generated. As ever, Marie Antoinette divides opinion, and the role she played in the history of the French Revolution is in the midst of a retrial....
... the real reason for the hatred of the queen is not that she was promiscuous but that she lavishly spent on herself while the country went bankrupt, and that she was rightly suspected of plotting to stop the revolution.
But according to Munro Price, author of The Fall of the French Monarchy, the two key factors against Marie Antoinette had nothing to do with her extravagance either, and were things she could do nothing about. The first was that she was Austrian and therefore the enemy. The second was that she was a woman. Time after time, it is the femininity of Marie Antoinette that is made the issue. Her supposed promiscuity was a mark of the danger she posed to the natural order of things: the state was becoming feminised; the king was weak and the queen had made him so....