Mon Amie, Marie Antoinette

In my Paris: Biography of a city book for my Art History Class - I've come to the chapter on the French Revolution. This subject as always fascinated me - mostly, I think, because of my weird yet severe obsesssion with Marie Antoinette and Versailles. (Louis XVI.... not so much.)

So, of course after reading all about her today for homework, and visiting the Musee Carnavalet this past weekend, I had a sudden urge to watch the movie, because not only is it one of my favorites, but it is truly a visual feast of fashion, pasteries, and pugs! What could be better?

I love this movie because while historically it is most likely farther than way off, and we all know from paintings that Marie was not nearly as cute as Kristin Dunst is - it does paint such a wonderful picture of how every girl imagines life as queen would be, and makes her into a heroine. I have felt rather attached to her since I saw it the first time. I think had I lived in the 1700s, I would have been one of her favorites. I may even have been able to advise her not to say some things that got her in serious trouble with the Parisiens - like "let them eat cake." I would have suggested she instead bake everyone cupcakes! Problem solved! Maybe then she would have been buried with her head in tact!

The Real Marie Antoinette vs. Kristin Dunst as Marie Antoinette

What is most interesting about her to me is that she truly set the fashions for all of Paris. Her "royal designer" Rose Bertin, would not let anyone wear a new style until she had. So Marie was always the first to set the trends of how many bows should be on your dress, and how high your matching hairdo should stand! She called the shots! Marie was the Anna Wintour of the 1700s.

However her life of eating Laudree macaroons, drinking endless glasses of champagne and playing with her pugs could not last too long. Marie was eventually taken prisoner in the Conciergerie (which happens to be one of my favorite buildings in Paris). The revolutionaries killed her best friend and "waved her severed and desecrated head on a pike" in front of Marie's prision window, until she was eventually taken to the Guillotine and killed. Now no one deserves that!

The movie was actually filmed at Versailles too - which is an amazing way to live vicariously through film if you have never been. I love - love - LOVE Versailles. Just to walk up the grand walkway and imagine 300 years ago arriving in your horse and carriage, being in an enormously huge and elaborate dress, ready to attend some sort of fete. I could sit in the jardin there all day, and let my imagination go wild.

So, I would like to attempt to clear Marie Antoinette's name. She probably had very little, if anything, to do with the decisions being made by the regime, yet she was blamed. She had a husband who had countless mistresses, so she never found true love and she was never liked by the French from the start - purely for being Austrian! So she sought happiness in the things any girl would - macarons, dresses, and puppies. Is that really such a crime?