After 250 Years, France Falls for Marie Antoinette
Newest celebrity in Paris is Austrian-born queen who was guillotined in 1793.
At the Ladure patisserie on Paris’s left bank, the calorific Marie Antoinette Collection filling two window displays gave a new meaning to the mythical phrase let them eat cake. Pyramids of pastel macaroons inspired by the ball gowns of the "unappreciated heroine" were on sale next to white chocolate royal carriages and special Marie Antoinette tea.
"She’s everywhere you look," sighed Pascal Seebag, a businessman from Aix-en-Provence, queuing for macaroons.
"When I was at school she was just ‘that wicked queen’, but now she’s a misunderstood celebrity. The fact that we’re a republic makes no difference. We’re obsessed with celebrity gossip magazines and other countries’ royal families. We had King Mitterrand and King Chirac, we have a monarchic presidency, so I suppose it’s a logical step that we’ve become completely obsessed with Marie Antoinette."
Ladure – ironically on rue Bonaparte – is not the only business to realise that France’s last queen, who was guillotined amid popular jubilation in 1793, has become a powerful marketing tool, taking over from Napoleon as icon of the moment. Ladure supplied the cakes for Sofia Coppola’s anachronistic punk-rock film Marie Antoinette. Described as "Lost in Revolution" by one French writer, the film was booed at Cannes and rather than the Palme d’Or it won the Palm Dog for best canine performance, by a pug called Mops. But some newspapers lauded its frivolity, and young audiences have made a rush of inquiries to the Marie Antoinette fan club.
Cashing in
The Marie Antoinette publishing boom, already riding high on last year’s 250th anniversary of her birth, has been revived. Historians have taken to TV chatshows to debate the queen. A Michelin-starred restaurant at Versailles is offering a Marie Antoinette meal, a CD has been made of music she would have listened to and a limited edition of the perfume she wore is to go on sale for thousands of euros.
So it is no surprise that the Chateau of Versailles – Marie Antoinette’s home from her arrival from Austria aged 14 to marry the future Louis XVI until four years before her death – is cashing in. Today the castle opens its Marie Antoinette estate, a tour of the queen’s fantasy playhouses, including the Petit Trianon, pavilions, grottoes, the thatched-roof cottage where she played at being poor, and the mock farm complete with sheep, goats and geese where she liked to pretend to be a milkmaid.
There are no new exhibitions but the restored buildings have been opened up and rebranded as a paying Marie Antoinette tour. Of the 4 million visitors to Versailles each year, until now only 300,000 had ventured to Marie Antoinette’s corner of the Versailles gardens. The museum staff make no secret of wanting to seize on tourists’ interest in the film and happily refer to Marie Antoinette as "the Lady Di of her era".
"It’s delightful, but it’s all very surprising," said Lady Antonia Fraser of the phenomenon now known in France as Marie Antoinette mania. Fraser’s biography of Marie Antoinette was the basis for Coppola’s script and has just been translated into French. It has been on the bestseller lists for five weeks.
"When I was doing my book all those years ago Marie Antoinette was not exactly flavour of the month within France," she said. "I would be going round museums or Versailles and I would hear teachers telling the children this is a wicked queen. I wanted to burst out in indignation but I thought to myself, no, no, go away and write your book." She added: "I hesitate to pronounce about this, but France is in a period of introspection. They have looked again at Marie Antoinette. Once they looked, they liked what they saw and prepared to revise the view that they maybe had been taught as children."
It is not a rehabilitation, she stressed, but a question of trying to understand the tragic queen as a human being.
In Le Figaro, Sbastian le Fol said the French were no longer "asking whether she should or shouldn’t have had her head chopped off … now Marie Antoinette the queen is less important than Marie Antoinette the woman".
Soap opera
As the boundaries between the public and private lives of French politicians blur, with the presidential contender Nicolas Sarkozy staging a public reunion with his wife Cecilia, and the Socialist frontrunner Sgolne Royal hinting this week that she will marry her long-term partner, the Socialist party leader, Franois Hollande, some argue that France is happy to return to the greatest celebrity of all – the real-life soap opera of one of its historical hate figures.
Queen at 18, Marie Antoinette was an Austrian outsider, a frivolous big spender who ordered two pairs of shoes a week. She evolved as a politician before she was imprisoned, tried on charges that included incest and beheaded for treason, but the myths about her abound. Her supposed comment "if they don’t have bread, let them eat brioche" was in fact an urban tale that had been doing the rounds before she was born.
In her study in Paris the historian Evelyne Lever, who advised Coppola, served tea on a silver tray and explained that France’s current period of malaise had sparked an escapist retreat into a history. "We’re dancing on a volcano and daren’t look into it, so we turn towards frivolity. Marie Antoinette fits that bill because she was a fashion victim. If you want to understand Marie Antoinette’s place in politics, put Lady Diana in place of Margaret Thatcher."
Marie Antoinette still attracts fans like Michele Lorin, 60, head of the Marie Antoinette fan club, whose flat in Paris is filled with thousands of pieces of memorabilia including books, cuttings, busts, a Marie Antoinette Barbie and a porcelain Miss Piggy dressed as Marie Antoinette. "I have dedicated my life to La Reine," she said. "The queen has given me an education which until I started collecting busts at 12, I never had. She has given me culture."
| © Guardian News & Media 2008 Published: 6/30/2006 |
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