1

Marie Antoinette: Madame Deficit or Victim of Circumstance? A Historiography of the

Image of Frances Most Infamous Queen

MARGARET RIGAS

Marie Antoinette has proven to be an enduring figure. An infamous queen
whose image became emblematic of the excesses of the 18
th
century, she has
morphed into an almost mythological individual, often portrayed as an impetus for
the French Revolution. However, there are a multitude of images of Marie
Antoinette, ranging from the sympathetic to the lewd and lascivious. This is
precisely what is so fascinating about the scholarship and historiography
surrounding the figure of Marie Antoinette. In her case, what is up for debate are not
what she may or may not have done in her life, but rather how to interpret her as a
symbol of eighteenth century France. Both popular culture and recent scholarship
has been devoted to recasting Marie Antoinette in a more sympathetic light.
Why, over 200 years after her death, are historians and the public alike in
their desire to better understand Marie Antoinette? This paper will examine three
specific periods of scholarship beginning with the portrayal of Marie Antoinette by
her contemporaries and the revolutionaries. From there, it will examine the
resulting portrayals of Marie Antoinette in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. Finally it will
conclude with an examination of 21
st
century scholarship, which, has brought about
a more compassionate portrayal of the French Queen and has sought to dispel the
compassionless portrait painted by Revolutionaries.
---- Who was Marie Antoinette? ----
Marie Antoinette was born in 1755 and was the youngest daughter of the
archduchess of Austria and queen of Bohemia and Hungary Maria Theresa and her
2
husband Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor.
1
Her mother, Maria Theresa was
renowned throughout Europe as both a shrewd politician and effective leader and
she utilized her sixteen children to help solidify political alliances through carefully
arranged marriages. No child of hers played perhaps as important a role in such
political maneuvering than Marie Antoinette. After the death of her husband Francis
in 1765, Maria Theresa grew increasingly apprehensive of the strength of Prussia,
the protestant German states, and England. Thus, in 1766 she sought to secure an
alliance with the traditionally powerful French to redress the balance of power in
Europe through the marriage of Marie Antoinette to the young Dauphin of France,
Louis-Auguste.
2

Many biographers of Marie Antoinette have attested to her tremendous love
for her mother Maria Theresa but they have also been sure to point out her mothers
lack of oversight for her daughters education and discipline. Biographer John
Hearsey argues that as happy as her upbringing must have been, it was the worst
possible grounding for her future life and that Maria Theresa never considered
Marie Antoinette being educated in a way befitting of a future queen of France.
3

From governesses who allowed the young archduchess to merely ink over the
penciled in answers to her schoolroom exercises to a lack of discipline that resulted

1
Hooper-Hamersley, Rosamond. Europe 1450 to 1789, 1 ed., s.v. "Marie Antoinette."
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004.
http://go.galegroup.com.ezp1.villanova.edu/ps/retrieve.do?sgHitCountType=None
&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=GVRL&userGroupName=vill_main&tabID=
T003&searchId=R1&resultListType=RESULT_LIST&contentSegment=&searchType=
AdvancedSearchForm&currentPosition=1&co (accessed December 1, 2012), 33.
2
John Hearsey. Marie Antoinette. New York: Dutton, 1973, 5.
3
Hearsey, 6
3
in her every desire and wish being almost instantaneously fulfilled, Marie Antoinette
grew into an impulsive and unbridled young woman.
4

The lack of structure and education produced a young woman who, quite
simply put, was unprepared for and unaware of the expectations that were inherent
aspects of being the Queen of France. At just fifteen, Marie Antoinette was handed
over to the court of France and wed to the Dauphin, Louis-Auguste, a similarly
immature boy of sixteen in 1770. From the beginning of her time in France, Marie
Antoinette was an outsider subject to court gossip and public curiosity and
suspicion due in part to her being Austrian. Tensions between Austria and France
were historically high and many people, both inside the French court and the public
at large, were suspicious and wary of an alliance with Austria, which Marie
Antoinette obviously represented.
The suspicion and intrigue her arrival in France brought only grew
throughout her tenure in France, and her behavior did little to help public
sentiment. From lavish parties to huge expenditures on clothing, shoes,
hairdressing, entertainment, and furniture Marie Antoinette came to be known as
Madame Deficit by the mid 1770s. As Frances debt grew and poverty and social
unrest became more widespread, Marie Antoinette became emblematic as a symbol
of all that was wrong, unjust, and morally deficient in the monarchy. Unable or
unwilling to understand her perceived role in the problems of the French populace,
Marie Antoinette failed to alter her behavior until it was too late. Though many
biographers have exaggerated her influence on domestic politics before 1789, she

4
Hearsey, 6-7
4
certainly did undermine, or at least attempt to, the efforts of reforming ministers in
the early days of the Revolution. Her role in orchestrating an attempt to flee the
country with her husband and family, which came to be known as the failed Flight
to Varennes, arguably sealed her fate. She was subsequently charged with aiding
the enemy and inciting civil war within France, tried, found guilty, and condemned
to death. On October 16, 1793 Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine and
executed for her purported role in the crimes against the First French Republic.
5

---- Political Pornography and the Evil Foreign Queen: 18
th
Century
Interpretations of Marie Antoinette ----
From the beginning, Marie Antoinettes tenure in France was plagued by
suspicion, intrigue, and distrust. From the its very inception, the union between
Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste placed tremendous pressure on the young
couple as more than a successful marriage was at stake.
6
The marriage was in fact
the living symbol of the alliance between Austria and France as it was a political
union, not a love marriage.
7
The motto went Bella gerant alii, tu, Austria, nube
(others wage wars; you, happy Austria, marry), and the pressure placed on 14-
year old Marie Antoinette to guarantee the safety and prosperity of Austria was
palpable.
8
Despite the importance of the union, it appears no one impressed upon
Marie Antoinette that she would have a duty not just to the Empress [her mother,

5
Hooper-Hamersley, 33-34
6
Bernier, Olivier. Secrets of Marie Antoinette: A Collection of Letters. New York, N.Y.:
Fromm International Pub. Corp., 1986, 2-3.
7
Bernier, 3
8
Bernier, 3
5
Maria Theresa of Austria] but also to her new country.
9
Instead, Marie Antoinette
left Austria under the impression that the French were to be lucky to have a
daughter of the great Maria Theresa as their future queen.
10

Such impressions and other such contradictions, ranging from the young
Antoinettes understanding of the role of an 18
th
century wife to her lack of
instruction in French court etiquette, set the young dauphine on a doomed course.
From the very beginning, she was dubbed lAutrichienne by the Madames de France,
the unmarried daughters of Louis XV, which designated her as foreign, un-French,
and even more damningly, as forever and unchangeably Austrian. This designation
as permanently foreign resulted in the widespread image of Marie Antoinette as
disinterested in the betterment of the French citizens, concerned only with her own
pleasure and with furthering the interests of Austria.
11

Such interpretations of Marie Antoinette from the very beginning placed her
in an exceptionally vulnerable political position. The attacks on her character,
morality, and politics were plentiful and came to constitute two crucial 18
th
century
interpretations of the queen. The first cast Marie Antoinette as the evil foreign
queen, and the second, involved the utilization of political pornography to attack
not just the queen herself, but more broadly the entire institution of the monarchy.
12

It is in these two popular 18
th
century constructs that we see the emergence of

9
Bernier, 3
10
Bernier, 3
11
Bernier, 13
12
Katherine Crawford. "Constructing Evil Foreign Queens." Journal of Medieval and
Early Modern Studies 37, no. 2 (2007): 393-418, 393.
6
Marie Antoinette the villain, the Austrian, and Madame Deficit, all of which were
used to propel the French Revolution and ultimately led to her execution.
One of the most effective devices in the execution of the French Revolution in
bringing down the reputation of Marie Antoinette and Ancien Regime was the use of
pamphlet literature. As historian Chantal Thomas asserts in her article The Heroine
of the Crime: Marie-Antoinette in Pamphlets, pamphlet writing quickly became the
perfect expression of this acceleration of time, inseparable from the Revolution.
13

Furthermore, Thomas argues that because of the ease and speed of production,
coupled with concise, basic writing style of these pamphlets helped to spread
revolutionary sentiment. Despite the widespread illiteracy of the French populace,
many of these pamphlets were set to popular rhymes or simple songs and thus
spread their messages both in writing and orally.
14
Thus, the influence of
pamphleteers became widespread as the information was disseminated both orally
and in written form. As noted by Roger Chartier, the rapid advance of an ephemeral
pamphlet literature, which, was a mobile and nervous literature of value only as it
related to the political climate, rendered almost all other dissemination of fact,
fiction, and gossip obsolete.
15

Furthermore, Chantal Thomas argues that the manner of distribution and
sale of these pamphlets was also instrumental in the rapidly growing scope of their
influence. Thomas asserts that the message and words of these pamphlets were

13
Chantal Thomas. "The Heroine of the Crime: Marie-Antoinette in Pamphlets." In
Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen. New York: Routledge, 2003. 99-
116, 100.
14
Thomas, 100-101
15
Thomas, 100
7
easily remembered because they were sung to well-known tunes, which, put the
pamphlets in the register of vocal space, of the shout, of the refrain which situated
them in the public sphere.
16
This broad scope of influence, argues Thomas,
contributed to the talk on the street, to the rumors of the crowds, to the movement
of altercations, and to a certain kind of obscene collective laughter as well which
ultimately spread the French Revolution and the unpopularity of the Queen.
17

Marie Antoinette was a favorite and principal character in pamphlet
literature, especially after 1789.
18
Lynn Hunt asserts that utilization of pamphlet
literature in the downfall of the French monarchy was because it was an effective
means of attacking the entire establishmentthe court, the church, the aristocracy,
the salons, and the monarchy, through the use of a singular symbolic character,
Marie Antoinette.
19
Furthermore, Hunt argues that the use of Marie Antoinette in
these often erotic, pornographic pamphlets offers a unique and fascinating
perspective on the unselfconscious presumptions of the revolutionary political
imagination.
20
Chantal Thomas furthers Hunts argument by noting that many of
the charges leveled against Marie Antoinette in these pamphlets gained credibility
due to the source of the material; the court itself.
21
Like the second popular 18
th

century narrative of Marie Antoinette, the evil foreign queen, the court origins

16
Thomas, 101
17
Thomas, 102-3
18
Lynn Hunt. "The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the
Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution." In Marie-Antoinette: Writings on
the Body of a Queen. New York: Routledge, 2003. 117-138, 128.
19
Hunt, 117
20
Hunt, 117
21
Thomas, 106
8
played a critical role in adding a layer of legitimacy to the rumors perpetuated by
the pamphlets.
22

The pamphleteers attack of Marie Antoinette began as early as 1774 and
continued, with varying intensity, through 1788. Historian Vivian Gruder reveals in
her article Whither Revisionism? Political Perspectives on the Ancien Regime,
Marie Antoinettes popularity in pamphlet literature though sustained, had
identifiable peaks of intensity; specifically the years of 1778 to 1783, 1785 to 1786,
and 1787 to 1788.
23
Between the years of 1779 and 1783 the largest number of
pamphlets featuring Marie Antoinette were published, including the three most
famous pornographic pamphlets: Les Amours de Charlot et Toinette (1779), Essai
historique sur la vie de Marie Antoinette, reine de France, pour server a lhistoire de
cette princesse (1781), and Let Portefeuille dun talon rouge (1781).
24
It is in these
years that some of the first attempts were made to delegitimize the monarchy and
again, Marie Antoinette, fit the purpose perfectly. It was in these years that the first
royal child and the dauphin were born and such occasions provided an opportunity
to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the children.
25

Over time, as attacks on the institution of monarchy grew, so did the attacks
on Marie Antoinette personally. One particularly pornographic pamphlet, The Tipsy
Autrichienne, or the Royal OrgyProverbial Opera, explicitly branded the queen as
sexually perverse. In The Tipsy Autrichienne, a supposed bodyguard to the queen

22
Crawford, 406
23
Vivian R Gruder. "Whither Revisionism? Political Perspectives on the Ancien
Regime." French Historical Studies 20, no. 2 (1997): 245-285.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/286890 . (accessed November 19, 2012), 257.
24
Gruder, 258
25
Gruder, 258
9
reveals the salacious details of her sexual dalliances with her close friend Jules de
Polignac and the comte dArtois. This purported eyewitness claimed to have
witnessed the queen fornicating with both kings brother, the comte dArtois, and
her female companion, Jules de Polignac, over top the sleeping body of the king
Louis-Auguste.
26
Again, the court or supposed court origins, of the tales contained in
the pamphlets served to cast Marie Antoinette as an evil, sexually depraved
seductress. Furthermore these pornographic pamphlets insinuated that Marie
Antoinette employed seduction and sexual favors to gain and further her political
influence in order to pursue both her selfish, frivolous desires and Austrian interests
in the French court. Overtime, the pamphleteers succeeded in making Marie
Antoinette symbolic of three, specific types of evil: the injustice of the monarchic
system of rule, the dangers of women in the public and social sphere, and, most
successfully and damningly, as the evil foreign queen.
Another 18
th
century device that was used to sully the image of Marie
Antoinette was the designation of her as the Evil Foreign Queen. Building off
longstanding disdain for Austria and in the wake of the growing influence of the
pamphleteers, casting Marie Antoinette as the Evil Foreign Queen proved to be
another decisive step in dismantling any remaining sympathy or compassion for the
Queen. In her article Constructing Evil Foreign Queens, historian Katherine
Crawford argues that, historically, at moment of political stress the good woman
easily became the evil foreign queen deployed not as a positive model, but rather, to
assert political truths about women who enjoyed extraordinary access to power in

26
Thomas, 110
10
the French monarchy. Crawford argues that this was a device used to undermine
foreign women in positions of perceived political power from Catherine de Medicis
through Marie Antoinette.
27

While the question as of late has been the extent to which this public
disparaging of the queen mattered to revolutionary politics and the downfall of the
monarchy and which serves in part as the basis for Katherine Crawfords study of
the Queen, the construction of Marie Antoinette as the evil foreign queen is hardly a
modern construct. As was the case with the image of the queen and the stories about
her perpetuated in pamphlet literature, the painting of Marie Antoinette as the evil
foreign queen founds its roots and point of origin from within the same social circle
occupied by the queen; the court and courtiers themselves.
28
Crawford argues that
the pamphlets were instrumental in the construction of the evil foreign queen and
they cast the queen in a permanent position of otherness. The political corruption
that was assigned to Marie Antoinette drew its evidence from earlier foreign queens
including Marie de Medicis and Anne of Austria, and used their historical collective
memories to prove Marie Antoinettes guilt. Crawford writes that the pamphlet,
LAutrichienne en goguettes ou lorgie royale, was particularly instrumental in
making Marie Antoinette into the evil foreign queen. The pamphlet described a
supposed sexual tryst between the Queen and Jules de Polignac and the kings
brother the comte dArtois in which the Queen is prompted to use her sexual power
to distract the king from implementing wise policies.
29
Other pamphlets used

27
Crawford, 394
28
Crawford, 406
29
Crawford, 406
11
incest, lesbianism, and sodomy to explain the queens political corruption and
status as the evil foreign queen, concerned only with her own interests and the
interests of her home country of Austria.
30

Ultimately, pamphlet literature was decisive in the public perception of Marie
Antoinette. Its utilization of purported incidences of sexual depravity, perverse
sexual preoccupations (including incest and lesbianism), and the innate evilness of
foreign political power in the French court served to dismantle any semblance of
kind feelings toward the Queen. The image perpetuated by these pamphlets found
its longevity in the sheer volume of pamphlets, popular collective memory, because
of their widespread distribution, and finally in the rapid radicalization of the
Revolution. In many ways Marie Antoinette herself contributed to the downfall of
her image and in the perpetuation of the rumors documented in the pamphlets.
Crawford writes that given her tendency to be disastrously insensitive in very
public ways allowed for incidents like the misattribution of statements like let
them eat cake in response to the starvation of the French people (no biographer or
historian has found any evidence to support her declaration of this).
31
Unfortunately
for Marie Antoinette, this purported statement has endured to the present day as a
hallmark of her legacy, despite the lack of evidence to attach it to her.

---- God Save the Queen: A Little Sympathy Please Late Eighteenth,
Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Century Interpretations ----

30
Crawford, 406
31
Crawford, 406
12
The late eighteenth Century through the early twentieth century, with the
chaos and radicalism of the Revolution still present, brought about some sympathy
for Marie Antoinette and the monarchy. From the personal, to the academic, and
finally to the otherworldly, the revisionism of Marie Antoinette took many different
shapes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first wave of revision
came from those who knew or were acquainted with the fallen Queen and from
historians like Charles Duke Yonge, who sought to dispel and clarify some of the
attacks leveled against Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries. And the second
wave of revisionism came through what has come to be known as the Marie
Antoinette Obsession; a series of purported phantasmal encounters with the long
dead Queen. This section will explore select examples of each wave of revisionism
and consider their origins and effects.
The first, and earliest, stage of sympathetic revisionism came through artistic
tributes to the last Queen of France. One such example of this is a poem entitled
Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France by Mary Robinson, published
in 1793. Mary Robinson had a particular attachment to the French Queen, which is not
unlike many other late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth century revisionists
attachments to Marie Antoinette.
32
Robinson was the first of many later women to put
into writing the almost otherworldly connection she felt for the Queen. A huge literary
celebrity in the late 18
th
century, Mary Robinson published several poems to the
memory of Marie Antoinette including an earlier piece that attempted to recreate

32
Stephanie Russo and A D Cousins. ""Educated in Masculine Habits": Mary
Robinson, Androgyny, and the Ideal Woman." AUMLA: Journal of the Australasian
University of Modern Language 115 (2011): 37-50, 37-38.
13
for readers the horrors of the Queens imprisonment in the Temple prison entitled
Marie Antoinette's Lamentation, in her Prison of the Temple.
33
Robinsons most
famous piece, Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France, was intended to be
corrective to the French Queens violent expulsion from the public stage.
34
With
imagery that painted the Queen as a martyr and the sentiment that Marie Antoinettes
power was temperd, by the wish to please, Robinson portrays a beautiful, young,
virtuous woman who was the victim of her own circumstance and radicalized society.
35

Thus she sought to rehabilitate the image of Marie Antoinette that had been so pervasive
in the public sphere in the last decade of her life.
Late nineteenth century and early twentieth century revisionism was dominated,
though not limited to, women. Scholarly works like The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen
of France by Charles Duke Yonge, portrayed a more sympathetic interpretation of
Marie Antoinette, though the most fascinating reimagining of the Queen came
predominantly through nineteenth and twentieth century women. For many of
these women, their reimagining of Marie Antoinette came from the beyond and
produced an eerie, ethereal body of works that documented their otherworldly
encounters with the Queen. Historian Terry Castle refers to the womens
experiences collectively as the Marie Antoinette obsession in her article of the
same title Marie-Antoinette Obsession.
36
The first of these phantasmal
experiences to be documented was in Theodore Flournoys From India to the Planet

33
http://spenserians.cath.vt.edu/TextRecord.php?action=GET&textsid=37148
34
Stephanie Russo and .A D Cousins, 38
35
Mary Robinson. Monody to the Memory of the Late Queen of France. London: T.
Spilsbury and Son, 1793, 4-5.
36
Terry Castle. "Marie-Antoinette Obsession." In Marie-Antoinette: writings on the
body of a queen. New York: Routledge, 2003. 199-238, 199.
14
Mars. In 1900 Flournoy, a Swiss psychologist published his investigation of woman
named Helene Smith whose fantastic visions led her to believe that she was the
reincarnation of Marie Antoinette.
37
Helene Smith was a celebrated spirit medium in
Geneva in the 1890s who, when in a state of hypnotic trance, was able to relive
the past life of Marie Antoinette in precise, often bizarre detail.
38
Flournoy began
to observe Smiths sances in 1894 and his work offered an account of Smiths
transformation into the late French Queen. Flournoy referred to Smiths trance as
her royal romance, which began with her communication with Leopold, her spirit
control, and then transitioned into what Flournoy called a possession during
which Smith would take on the mannerisms and personality of the Queen.
39

Flournoys work was just the first documented instance of this late
nineteenth and early twentieth century phenomenon surrounding the memory of
Marie Antoinette. In 1907, an anonymous author who claimed to have been haunted
by the ghost of the Queen published an article in the British Journal for Psychical
Research entitled Dream Romances.
40
Given the phantasmal nature of the
womans believed connection to the Queen, she published the article anonymously
to avoid humiliation and to appeal for understanding.
41
The author claimed to have
been haunted by the ghost of Marie Antoinette for much of her life. This purported
haunting included vivid dreams in which she observed the ill-fated French Queen in
the privacy of her home, the Petite Trianon, and ultimately witnessed her being led

37
Castle, 199
38
Castle, 199
39
Castle, 199
40
Castle, 201
41
Castle, 202
15
in a cart to the guillotine in Paris.
42
Though this apparition of Marie Antoinette
never spoke to the woman, she felt that they understood one another and even
when the nightly visits from the ghost ceased, the woman still felt a deep connection
to the Queen.
43
Later in the article, the woman recalled her visit to Versailles where,
upon entering the former Queens apartments, she felt a strange choking
sensation, which further deepened her belief that she was indeed haunted by Marie
Antoinette.
44

The last and perhaps the most interesting of these cases of Marie Antoinette
Obsession, is the case of two respectable, female academics Charlotte Anne
Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain. In 1911, four years after the publication of Dream
Romances, Moberly and Jourdain published their own experiences in a book
entitled An Adventure, though they published under the pseudonyms Miss Morison
and Miss Lamont.
45
The true identities of the authors subsequently revealed them
to be Jourdain and Moberly, two well respected academics at St. Hughs College,
Oxford.
46
Jourdain and Moberly reported that in August of 1901, they were touring
the gardens at Versailles when they got lost while looking for the Petit Trianon.
While they tried to gather their bearings, the encountered a procession of unusually
dressed people in unusual attire, among them a fair-haired lady in an old-
fashioned dress and pale green fichu.
47
Both women earnestly believed this

42
Castle, 201
43
Castle, 201-202
44
Castle, 202
45
Castle, 203
46
Castle, 203
47
Castle, 203
16
woman to be the ghost of the Marie Antoinette and the other unusually dressed
characters to be members of her court.
Over the next fifteen years, the women devoted themselves to proving that
what they saw was in fact the Queen and members of her court. They subsequently
discovered that the date of their visit, August 10
th
, had been the anniversary of the
sacking of the Tuilleries during which Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were forced
to take refuge in the hall of the National Assembly.
48
Between the years of 1901 and
1911, the two women searched archives and libraries to uncover anything they
could about the former Queen and her infamous home at the Petit Trianon. In An
Adventure, through traditional academic methods, they attempted to prove that
their encounter to be true. The women carefully identified every person they
believed they saw that day to an actual person associated with Marie Antoinette
who had visited her at Trianon in 1789.
49
Furthermore, the women rested their
argument on the pale green fichu they believed they saw the Queen wearing,
tracing and matching it to an actual dress made for the Queen by her dressmaker by
scouring his notebooks from 1789. Unsurprisingly, their book produced a
tremendous amount of controversy and was attacked by academics and the public
alike.
What is so interesting about these three instances of what Castle calls the
Marie-Antoinette Obsession, is the detail with which each of these four women
recounted their interactions with the former Queen. Castle argues that it is likely
that each of these women influenced the women that followed and given the timings

48
Castle, 204
49
Castle, 204
17
of each of these accounts publication it is easily plausible if not certain that this is
the case. Furthermore, Castle argues that the political climate of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century as well as the very nature of Marie-Antoinettes
personality and the attacks that were leveled on her, including lesbianism, political
influence, and sexual deviance, may have also allowed for these women to view
Marie Antoinette as a sort of comrade. Castle posits that it is possible that given the
martyred status of the Queen, these women saw her as an compassionate comrade,
someone who was also symbolic of the struggles or difficulties they found in their
own lives. Helene Smith as a misunderstood outsider in her bourgeoisie family, the
anonymous author who hints at her unhappy childhood and lack of intimate
personal connections, and Jourdain and Moberly who grew up with fathers who
preferred their sons to their daughters and existed in a society which they felt did
not give women proper legal representation and rights.
50
Castle asserts that all of
these grievances or feelings can be explained with their attachments to Marie
Antoinette, Smith because the Queen herself was an outsider throughout much of
her time in France, the anonymous author because Marie Antoinette felt alienated
and alone in France, and Jourdain and Moberly because the Queen was charged and
convicted of utilizing her political influence. Though it cannot be proven that the
Queen actually possessed any tangible political power nor can it be proven that she
truly tried to utilize it should it have existed. All of these women felt a deep,
otherworldly connection to Marie Antoinette, which, certainly accounted for their
own revisionism of the Queen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

50
Castle, 206-208
18

---- Image Overhaul: The Rehabilitation of a Queen 21
st
Century
Interpretations ----
The 21
st
Century saw a resurgence of interest in Marie Antoinette, both in
popular culture and academic scholarship. Moreover, much of this interest has been
aimed at revamping the French Queens image and casting her in a more
sympathetic light. Journalist and author Eric Konisberg, wrote that, as of 2006, the
image of Marie Antoinette dauphine, villain, tea-party thrower in sherpardess garb
[was] in the midst of an extreme rehab.
51
Konisberg also muses that the question
should not be what to make of Marie Antoinette nor why or why now, but rather of
all the victims of history why are we suddenly flooded with these new narratives
that show Marie Antoinette vain, selfish, solipsistic, and venal as a victim?
52

While it is an interesting phenomenon, it is one with several explanations. First and
foremost, the 21
st
century has given rise to widespread consumerism and who is
better suited than Madame Deficit, queen of indulgence and luxury, to represent
such a culture? Secondly, the late 20
th
and early 21
st
century brought with them a
new, specific type of feminism, third wave feminism, which effectively coincides
with the rise of consumer culture and the redefinition of gender roles. The
remainder of this paper will explore how these two phenomena have made Marie
Antoinette the it girl, representative of consumer culture, new feminism, and
nostalgic for a bygone era.

51
Eric Koningsberg. "Marie Antoinette, Citoyenne." New York Times, October 22,
2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/weekinreview/22marie.html?_r=0
(accessed November 27, 2012).
52
Konigsberg
19
To explain the transition of Marie Antoinette from villain of the French
Revolution to cultural it girl, one must first examine the culture which has allowed
for such revisionism to take place. Konisberg remarked in a piece published in the
New York Times from 2006 that the 21
st
century, especially 21
st
century America,
was having: a Marie Antoinette moment.
53
Furthermore, Konisberg asserts that in
tandem with the rise of consumer culture there is a widespread historical illiteracy
that surrounds the contemporary image of Marie Antoinette. Historian Ron
Chernow agrees, writing that we should never underestimate our historical
illiteracy and that such illiteracy unburdened by an existing context through which
to view her life, it becomes much easier to see her simply as a captive of the
monarchy and a captive of her own celebrity.
54
Thus Marie Antoinette can emerge
as a maligned victim, no longer viewed as a "heartless, elitist, anti-revolutionary,
wicked witch of the 18
th
century.
55

Marie Antoinette as representative of modern consumer culture has become
a dominant trend in recent historiography. In keeping with the fundamental
importance of consumerism in the revamping of Marie Antoinettes image, one must
also take into consideration the socioeconomic climate of 21
st
century western
culture. Konisberg argues that the current depictions of Marie Antoinette, despite
her status as the most significant target of a most significant populist revolt have
cast her as a revolutionary herself.
56
Cornell economist Robert H. Frank states that
the gap between the rich and poor has widened significantly over the last 35 or 40

53
Eric Konigsberg
54
Eric Konigsberg
55
Mallory Young, 98
56
Eric Konigsberg
20
years. Frank also asserts that the income gap has grown, it hasnt pushed the
western world towards revolution. Instead many, especially Americans, see
themselves accurately or not in Marie Antoinette, thus Konisberg asserts that on
the level of personal experience, rather than socioeconomic station were an
entire nation of Marie Antoinettes.
57

Another popular reinterpretation of Marie Antoinette portrays her through
the lens of third wave feminism, essentially arguing that she was merely young and
naive when she began her tenure in France and thus was a victim of circumstance.
Furthermore, this interpretation argues that she was essentially your typical
teenage girl, interested in entertaining herself and escaping the strict protocols of
the society in which she lived. From films like Sophia Coppolas Marie Antoinette to
popular historical novels, this third wave feminist interpretation of Marie Antoinette
has rapidly pervaded other historical interpretations of her in popular culture.
Antonia Frasers 2001 biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey was the first to
utilize this third wave feminist approach in a study of the French Queen.
58
Given
Frasers interest in the lives of European women, specifically royal European
women, her interest in the life of Marie Antoinette was hardly surprising. However,
as scholars Mallory Young and Suzanne Ferriss assert, what was surprising was the
explosion of interest in Marie Antoinette that followed the publication of Frasers

57
Eric Konigsberg
58
Suzanne Ferriss, and Mallory Young. "Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave
Feminism, and Chick Culture." Literature Film Quarterly 38, no. 2 (2010): 98-116, 98.
21
work.
59
Frasers biography became instrumental in transforming the image of Marie
Antoinette in both academia and popular culture.
After the publication of The Journey in 2001, the late Queen was transformed
into a twenty-first century it girl. This conception of it girl, Young and Ferriss
argue, emerged from chick culture, a group of mostly American and British
popular culture media forms arising in the mid-nineties and focused primarily on
twenty- to thirty-something, middle-class and frequently college educated
women.
60
Young and Ferris argue that this it girl designation transformed Marie
Antoinettes image post-2001 from that of a "heartless, elitist, anti-revolutionary,
wicked witch" to that of a a sympathetic, unfairly maligned victim.
61
Furthermore,
the authors argue that this chick culture interpretation of Marie Antoinette is
especially influential when examined at its intersection with the consumerism-
based interpretation discussed earlier. Young and Ferriss argue that this
interpretation: hinges primarily on imagining her position as a 14-year old
Austrian archduchess separated from her family and forced to live among strangers
at a foreign French court, a position assigned to her to create empathy for her
situation.
62
Such an interpretation made Marie Antoinette a popular and appealing
figure for a twenty-first century audience and made her into a modern day heroine.
The third wave feminist interpretation in tandem with the earlier
consumerism-based interpretation made Marie Antoinette into a twenty-first
century cultural darling. After 2001, popular films and documentaries like Sofia

59
Young and Ferriss, 98
60
Young and Ferriss,98
61
Young and Ferriss, 98
62
Young and Ferriss, 99
22
Coppolas Marie Antoinette and a PBS documentary of the same name brought the
eighteenth century queen to a popular audience. Most influential in the popularizing
of this interpretation of the Queen is arguably Coppolas film. Coppolas film was
based on Frasers biography of Marie Antoinette, and her visual representation of
the life of the Queen takes the this interpretation to another level and to a new,
more diverse audience.
63
The film is cinematically beautiful, bringing the dead
Queens affinity for fashion and opulence to the forefront. However, despite the
films reliance on visual beauty, the message of Coppolas interpretation is much
deeper. Coppolas interest in Marie Antoinette is not to demonstrate that she was a
frivolous, unintelligent woman indifferent to her subjects starvation and
concerned only with her own pleasure but rather that she was simply an ordinary
girl caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
64
Such popular interpretations
transformed the image of Marie Antoinette in the twenty-first century on a large
scale.
The different trends in the historiography surrounding the life of Marie
Antoinette are incredible. From the disparaging of her image throughout her own
lifetime through the use of pamphlet literature, to the seemingly silly and
controversial phantasmal experiences that her image invited in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, it is nothing short of incredible that her image could
be so popular in the twenty-first century. The diversity of these interpretations has
made Marie Antoinette a fascinating historiographical study, for few subjects have
seen such dramatic and drastic changes in representation and memory. Marie

63
Young and Ferriss, 100-101
64
Young and Ferriss, 100-101
23
Antoinettes transformation from the most hated woman in France to a popular
cultural it girl, indicate a widespread cultural fascination with a bygone era and
the woman who epitomized all aspects of eighteenth century high society, both good
and bad.



















24
Works Cited:
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Bernier, Olivier. Secrets of Marie Antoinette: A Collection of Letters. New York, N.Y.:
Fromm International Pub. Corp., 1986.
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Ferriss, Suzanne , and Mallory Young. "Marie Antoinette: Fashion, Third-Wave
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e=None&sort=RELEVANCE&inPS=true&prodId=GVRL&userGroupName=vil
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Hunt, Lynn. "The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the
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http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/weekinreview/22marie.html?_r=0
(accessed November 27, 2012).
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Brothers, 1957.
Erickson, Carolly. To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette. New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1991.
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Zweig, Stefan, Eden Paul, and Cedar Paul. Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an
Average Woman. New York: The Viking Press, 1933.