Fureur Antionette

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Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira
Les aristocrates on les pendra!
Si on n’ les pend pas
On les rompra
Si on n’ les rompt pas
On les brûlera.
Ah! Ça ira, ça ira, ça ira

Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
Aristocrats at the lantern
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
The aristocrats, we'll hang them!
If we don't hang them
We'll break them
If we don't break them
We'll burn them
Ah! It'll be fine, it'll be fine, it'll be fine
— "Ça Ira," popular tune of Revolutionary France

"Nevermind."
— Gilda Radner as Emily Litella on Saturday Night Live

Citoyennes et Citoyens,

For those of you who didn't get the memo, the French recently had a change of heart regarding their past grumpiness that resulted in the separation of Marie Antoinette’s head from the rest of her package. Just as we Americans are easily distracted from truths and are encouraged what to think about political figures by trivialities hammered into us by the media and special interests, so too were the French during the reign of Louis XVI. When the incredibly unhappy populace, starved for liberté, égalité, fraternité, and (perhaps most importantly) food, were worked up into a revolutionary lather by round-the-clock pamphleteers who placed much of the blame for their troubles on Louis’s high-living and seemingly uncaring bride, they cheered on their bloodthirsty leadership to hack first and ask questions later—sometimes two centuries later.

Two-hundred and some years after the executioner's celebrated slam dunk of Her Majesty’s noggin, a well-researched and well-reasoned biography of Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser and (more effectively) the 2006 Sofia Coppola film that used Fraser’s work as its basis, has convinced the French people of their poor public judgment back then and transformed modern opinion from "mad at" the woman to "simply mad about" her. The only bit of restraint I’ve been able to discern among all the gaga is their failure to honor her as they honor Mona Lisa, by manufacturing day-glo flip-flops bearing her image. Such footwear is one of the very few items of commemorative memorabilia not available in the gift shop of the Grand Palais, where people this month are paying ten euros a head and lining up for hours, sometimes in pouring rain, to suck in all-things Marie-Antoinette at the current smash-hit expo there that chronicles her life.

I haven’t had the chance to run a poll since I attended, but I may be the only person in Paris who’s disappointed by this oversight and a couple of others. Certainly there is an embarrassment of other riches from which the chotchke-starved Marie Antoinette-o-phile can choose, including Marie Antoinette needlecraft pillows in assorted sizes; Marie Antoinette gowns for four-year olds; Marie Antoinette parasols; Marie Antoinette ballpoint pens; Marie Antoinette Post-It note pads; Marie Antoinette CDs and DVDs; dozens of Marie Antoinette book titles; replicas of Marie Antoinette’s Versailles dinnerware; and umpteen styles of Marie Antoinette postcards. But Marie Antoinette zories? Zilch.

I entered the shop excited about the prospect of finding a postcard of my favorite item in the exhibition, but was terribly disappointed that whoever ordered supplies for the show—likely the same old fart who didn’t think a proper nod of apology for mistakenly chopping off a woman’s head should include printing her picture on a pair of made-in-Taiwan plastic sandals—neglected to make a postcard using the illustration from the frontispiece of a small volume of slanderous 18-century filth on display called Fureurs Utérines (Uterine Madness), a racy little inking that depicts the queen with her skirt pulled up high to reveal the most precious royal jewel. In a silent financial protest (which I understand probably went unnoticed by the cashiers processing the long line of customers whose arms were piled high with merchandise) I bought rien de la reine. Nothing.

The small volume is tucked away in a tiny case in the exhibit's final room, which focusses on anti-Marie Antoinette mudslinging, and would have been easy to miss save for the fact that the room has surprising little else in it despite reports that Revolutionary propagandists were prolific and relentless in such pursuits. According to Fraser and other historians, print shops in France worked round the clock churning out anti-monarchist matter, much of which characterized Marie Antoinette as a woman with an uncontrollable carnal appetite who denied herself little in her attempts to satisfy it, bedding both men and woman, and even her own son.

Overall, the show is disappointing in its lack of new information for anyone with a passing familiarity with French Revolutionary history, and with the exception of side-by-side portraits by Élisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun it's rather uninteresting. Le Brun might be considered the mother of modern Photoshop journalism, the genre that brought us a blacker O.J. Simpson on the cover of Time Magazine. To present a more innocent image of the increasingly unpopular queen, Le Brun was asked in 1786 to re-paint a portrait she’d done three years earlier, but this time losing the jewelry and haute couture. Using royal portraits for spin control was hardly new, especially for the Court of Versailles (another famous portrait, commissioned after the disastrous “Affair of the Necklace” from which Marie Antoinette’s public image never really recovered despite her complete innocence in the matter, shows her as the doting and relatively simple mother, more concerned with family values than sucking peasants dry to pay for sparkly neckwear), but this pair of paintings is interesting in that the artist actually re-painted the exact same portrait, changing only the queen’s clothing and accouterments. It’s a treat to view the two together, and fortunate that the original wasn’t destroyed. (Keeping it around strikes me much like leaving the original jpeg image on your hard drive so investigators can retrieve it to prove your questionable journalistic ethics.)


While overall the show’s a disappointment, it is morbidly fascinating to me to witness this hubbub over the old girl, and to refresh and expand my understanding of those times while reflecting on them in a modern context. A comparison of those days to these doesn’t reveal any newfound reluctance by people to react rashly, with one exception—and granted, its a huge exception: Today there’s no guillotine sitting in the Place de la Concorde, lopping the heads off of everyone who suddenly finds herself (or himself) on the wrong side of public opinion.

When I arrived here in September, public approval for French president Sarkozy was enormous, but in a few short months plummeted after a combination of political and social blunders to the point that now it’s hard to find anyone in Paris with a good word to say about him. Some of it’s superficial, concerning general distaste for his recent marriage to Italian supermodel/pop star Carla Bruni, some of it is policy related (which confuses me, since none of the dreadful things he’s said or done politically should surprise anyone who was paying attention before the election), and some of it has to do with a complicated sense of what it means to the French to be French and their general horror over Sarko’s low-brow cultural tastes. At the height of the Terror in 1794, any one of these things would have gotten him dragged to the scaffold after a speedy trial with a predetermined guilty verdict.

I don’t think Sarkozy will be much remembered in 200 years, or at least not remembered or studied by French schoolchildren the way the last monarchs of France are remembered, or the Girondins, or the Jacobins, or any the those who went from being ahead to losing their heads during the Terror. I do think that Carla Bruni is very, very fortunate that the French aren't as quick to behead as they were back then, even if they are as fickle. As a foreign-born, wealthy, and highly visible wife of a French leader and the subject of much negative public sentiment and a lot of negative media hype in a country facing severe problems with unemployment and rising prices, her story sounds quite a lot like Marie Antoinette's. If the French still dispatched the objects of their scorn the way they did back then, there’d be a very good chance that one day thousands of people would be lined up at the Grand Palais to view an apologetic retrospective of her life and to buy whatever the 23rd-century equivalent will be of Carla Bruni Post-It notes and ballpoint pens (and perhaps some cheap made-in-USA flip flops), disappointed that there are no postcards of the more entertaining fureurs being hyped by today’s media.

Ça ira...

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ADDED NOTE (22 APRIL): These nifty lollipops from Archie McPhee aren't sold by the unimaginative vendeurs at the gift shop of the Grand Palais, either.