On the last queen of France – Catriona Seth in TLS:

‘The continuing appeal exercised by Marie Antoinette is at least partly visual. Before Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna of Habsburg-Lorraine was packed off from Austria in April 1770, at the age of fourteen – in a procession of sixty-nine carriages – to marry the Dauphin, heir to the French throne, a painter from Paris had been entrusted with the task of producing a portrait of the archduchess to show Louis XV’s court. Joseph Ducreux’s first attempt to represent her was judged unsuccessful. His second picture (a pastel now part of the Château de Versailles’s collections) depicts a young woman oozing sophistication: an early idealized vision of the Viennese teenager; a catalogue bride with an unblemished appearance. Repeatedly throughout her life, Marie Antoinette was asked to pose for artists – these included Jean-Étienne Liotard, Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty, Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller and Alexandre Kucharski – though she often complained that they were not much good at capturing her likeness. Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun was to shape her patron’s image for posterity. She produced what visitors to the Académie Royale’s Paris exhibition in 1783 considered a shockingly intimate portrait of the sovereign wearing a straw hat and a muslin frock, and, by way of contrast, several iterations of a formally garbed “Marie-Antoinette à la rose”, probably the most reproduced picture of her. Prints helped to circulate official representations, but also multiplied the cruel and often lewd caricatures mocking the one person who, above all others, was picked on as a symbol of a bankrupt society. Louis XV’s mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry, had acted as magnets for popular hostility, deflecting criticism from the royal family. Louis XVI’s lack of an official favourite and apparent absence of interest in sex – for seven years the marriage remained unconsummated – made his wife the focal point first for gossip, then for animosity. Admired during her early years in France for her elegance, taste for luxurious dresses and spectacular hairstyles, she became a target for accusations of profligacy.’

(…)

‘When the Revolution came, the king was still respected by most of his subjects. Forced to move to Paris in October 1789, melancholic and still grieving after the death of his first son earlier that year, incapable of reconciling his obligations to the new regime with his true feelings, Louis XVI sank into inertia. His wife, by contrast, sought new forms of agency. With her freedom curtailed while under virtual house arrest in the Tuileries, she turned to power games: she maintained an impressive network of clandestine correspondence with influential friends and foreign heads of state to try to bring about a restoration of the old order in France.
In the weeks before the blade of the guillotine ended Marie Antoinette’s life on the recently rechristened Place de la Révolution on October 16, 1793, another woman published a brief topical pamphlet. Often the butt of challenges against any form of female intervention in the public sphere, and perceived as a foreigner (although born in Paris) because of her Swiss protestant parentage, Germaine de Staël, the daughter of the former finance minister Jacques Necker, wife of the Swedish ambassador and mistress of an ephemeral minister for war, was something of a celebrity. Her Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine (Reflections on the Queen’s Trial, 1793) was anonymous, but described on the title page as “par une femme”. Staël showed foresight in her perception of where things were heading, observing that the march of current affairs was editing women out of plans for a bright new future. She called on the revolutionaries to act with generosity, claiming that the widow of the executed king, separated from her family and detained in the Conciergerie, had already suffered too much. She also warned them against sending their most illustrious prisoner to the scaffold: “by immolating her you will consecrate her forever”. History has proved Staël right. Almost a century later, the widow of another deposed ruler of France, Empress Eugénie, was sent into exile and is now largely forgotten. Marie Antoinette’s execution, seen by many outside France as gratuitous and cruel, turned her into an overtly political figure and, in the eyes of some commentators, into a martyr. As the pageantry of the Olympics suggests, France has not yet managed to treat her in a dispassionate manner, though tourists flock to the Petit Trianon and films, miniseries, exhibitions and books bear witness to her enduring magnetism.’ (…)
‘The main strength of this new biography lies in the archival material its author has uncovered. No question regarding household matters is too minute for Vial, and he illuminates numerous aspects of the royal finances thanks to dizzying sets of numbers. In the second semester of 1779 alone, 137,893 livres were spent on expenses relating to Madame Royale, including particularly onerous baby garments supplied by Vanot and Barbier. Around the same period, we are told, the tree-planting and earthworks budget for the Trianon gardens kept on rising inexorably, from 31,588 livres in 1777 to 40,097 in 1778, 88,064 in 1779 and 126,000 in 1780, with the landscaping of the “mountain”. These extraordinary sums of money, at a time when most ordinary workers earned less than 500 livres per annum, are given in the official records, but at various points in his study Vial quotes spurious or unverifiable reports drawn from a variety of sources, highlighting their relative value in his notes.’ Read the article here.

If you want your enemies to be largely forgotten, send them into exile. Well, that doesn’t always help.

Napoleon for example. Israel tried exile with Hamas, to no avail, but that’s another story.

The Austrian or the bitch (‘In her host country, the youngest daughter of the formidable Empress Maria Theresa, the archduchess whose marriage had been agreed as a form of additional guarantee of the pact signed in 1756 between two traditional enemies, would always remain “l’Autrichienne” – the Austrian woman – but also, by an almost perfect homophone, “l’autre chienne” – that bitch.) – literally, that other dog, there were days the other could be a queen and an Austrian.