The Bride Stripped Bare

Lev Raphael

In her more than two decades as queen of France, Marie Antoinette came to inspire a level of vituperation among that French that's astonishing to read about today. In the anti-royalist and often pornographic publishing furor that preceded the French Revolution and flourished with its successes, one of many political pamphlets excoriating her swore that all of France's “calamities past, present, and to come, have always been and will always be her doing.” That's quite an indictment, but worse was to come when she was tried before her execution.

Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber’s elegant and consistently enthralling biography of this doomed and unwittingly self-destructive queen marshals evidence from French fashion annals and contemporary letters and diaries to study Marie Antoinette's rise and fall flounce by flounce, showing how uneasy lies the head that eyes the gown.

How did Marie Antoinette offend the French?  Let us count the ways.

She was Austrian by birth and though her marriage to the then-Dauphin was meant to create a new alliance with a formerly hostile power, it was a transplant that never seemed to take. One of her less unpleasant cognomens was l'Autrichienne, the Austrian woman. Emphasizing the chienne (bitch) made the cognomen even more demeaning. This otherness was constantly used against her and morphed into any number of sickening variations until near the end of her life she was even accused of incest with her young son. She was not only not French—which was bad enough—she was simply inhuman.

Though her main function was to ensure the succession, she was childless for seven years after marrying the young man who became Louis XVI. This was not her fault, but the fault of her bumbling, shy husband, who also apparently had some physical problems, not to mention a basic lack of understanding of what constituted full sexual congress between man and wife. Their union only bore fruit after the Queen’s brother had a brutally frank discussion with Louis.

Marie Antoinette felt stifled by the elaborate, deadening, often ridiculous court etiquette at Versailles that had been established by Louis XIV to glorify himself and the Bourbon line. Coming from a more informal royal court, she was appalled by Versailles and her initial resistance to its stifling nature was first expressed in her unwillingness to wear a specific type of corset reserved for state occasions. She created an international incident thereby, with her mother the Austrian Empress begging her not to demean herself by such antics. Marie Antoinette relented, but her resistance flourished in other ways.

A gorgeous jewel of a place, the Petite Trianon, became her getaway not far from Versailles whose court was “an abode of treachery, hatred, and revenge.” Though magnificent in our eyes, the Trianon Palace was infinitely simpler in decoration than Versailles, and so were the rules there: people didn’t have to rise when the Queen entered a room, they could use her name, and they could speak without waiting to be addressed by Her Majesty. But how dare she break the rules there and how dare she remove herself from the quasi-public scrutiny she was meant to endure 24/7. What could she be up to in this hideaway? Orgies?

Once she learned to ride to hounds, Marie Antoinette brazenly rode astride as men did. Even worse, she adopted dashing male-style clothing. This horrified members of the court and led to gossip and sniping that she was unfeminine and perhaps even a “tribade” (the period’s word for lesbian). To claim these privileges of riding astride and wearing clothing akin to a man’s was to demean her womanhood and cast doubt on her husband's manhood (see bumbling husband above).

The Queen was stymied in many ways, and Weber reads her as deliberately seeking power and attention through what she wore and how she dressed. It wasn’t enough to have an entire cupboard of crown jewels, she made constant innovations in hair styles, headdresses, and gowns that forced the court to rush headlong after her. Though she became a fashion goddess, she was also widely decried for her extravagance, while contributing towards making French style even more internationally longed for and imitated.

Yet when her clothing became simpler, less fussy, she not only outraged all levels of society by seeming to blur the lines between aristocrats and commoners, she actually had a financial impact on France's economy. By eschewing French silk for muslin from England and Flanders, she not only benefited traditional enemies of France, she devastated the French silk industry.

And on and on. From very early in her reign, there really was nothing Marie Antoinette could do that wouldn’t outrage somebody and lead to villainous rumors and pamphlets which went a long way to undermining royal authority, respect for the upper classes, and reverence for the Bourbons, all of which were already diminishing in the wake of widespread financial hardships due to drought, famine, and excessive borrowing by the government. France financed the American Revolution as well as every major and minor fashion revolution instigated by the Queen. Bankruptcy, disaster, and war were the result—so everyone in France became a fashion victim. 

Even if you've read Antonia Fraser’s recent superlative biography of Marie Antoinette, this is not a book to miss. Caroline Weber narrates each episode of the story with wit and verve, and if the tone occasionally veers towards the academic, the odor of scholarship is never overpowering, merely piquant. Weber gives us a balanced account of a willful woman in way over her flour-powdered big hair, never understanding the ramifications of the forces leagued against her, or how her slightest move could be a grave misstep.

The iconic moment in her life came in her mid-teens when she was bound for Versailles to marry the Dauphin. She was stripped completely naked in a drafty makeshift pavilion on an island between French and German territory (Sophia Coppola's Marie Antoinette film captures only some of the awfulness.) Once nude, she was dressed entirely in French clothes so that nothing of her past should pollute her new life; such was French custom in dealing with foreign brides. Ironically, the clothes she arrived in had been made in France, but that didn’t matter.  This humiliating, demeaning, rather cruel ceremony was the first shot fired in a battle the author memorably says Marie Antoinette would be “waging in some form or other [from] her first day on French soil.”  The battleground was her body.

Queen of Fashion reads like a thriller, but instead of explosions, car chases and state secrets, we get miles of brocade, piles of ostrich plumes, and closets full of panniers and redingotes. It’s a tribute to Weber's extraordinary powers as an author that she marshals these elements into a magnificent story of the rise and fall of a couturier's wet dream whose story was the story of a France on the edge of collapse, disaster, and rebirth.

Books mentioned in this column:
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber (Henry Holt, 2006)
Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser (Anchor Books, 2002)


Lev Raphael grew up in New York but got over it and has lived half his life in Michigan where he found his partner of twenty-four years, and a certain small fame. He escaped academia in 1988 to write full-time and has never looked back. The author of nineteen books in many genres, and hundreds of reviews, stories and articles, he’s seen his work discussed in journals, books, conference papers, and assigned in college and university classrooms. Which means he’s become homework. Who knew? Lev’s books have been translated into close to a dozen languages, some of which he can’t identify, and he’s done hundreds of readings and talks across the U.S. and Canada, and in France, England, Scotland, Austria, Germany and Israel. His new memoir My Germany was recently published by the University of Wisconsin Press. You can learn more about Lev and his work on his website. Lev has reviewed for the Washington Post, Boston Review, NPR, the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, Jerusalem Report and the Detroit Free Press where he had a mystery column for almost a decade. He also hosted his own public radio book show where he interviewed Salman Rushdie, Erica Jong, and Julian Barnes among many other authors. Whatever the genre, he's always looked for books with a memorable voice and a compelling story to tell. Contact Lev.