Paris in July does not just include books. Contributions on your Paris vacation, your favourite meal or restaurant, French movies, music, art, Parisian history and more are very welcome. On the home page for the event you will inevitably discover perhaps new to you authors, movies as well as recipes to send you if you are lucky to Paris or at least the kitchen.
Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to The Revolution by Caroline Weber - 2007 - A Paris in July 2024 Work
Marie Antoinette
Queen of France 1755-1793
Born - October 16,1730 - Vienna
Marries (at age 14) May 16,1770
the heir to the throne of France in an arrangement meant to build an alliance between the Hapsburgs and the Bourbons
May 10, 1774 - her husband succeeds to the throne as Louis XVI
Bastille Day - July 14, 1789
Executed- September 3, 1792
"When her carriage first crossed over from her native Austria into France, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was taken out, stripped naked before an entourage, and dressed in French attire to please the court of her new king. For a short while, the young girl played the part.
But by the time she took the throne, everything had changed. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber tells of the radical restyling that transformed the young queen into an icon and shaped the future of the nation. With her riding gear, her white furs, her pouf hairstyles, and her intricate ballroom disguises, Marie Antoinette came to embody--gloriously and tragically--all the extravagance of the monarchy." From Publisher
As Weber vividly details as the wife of a future king, every aspect of the life of Marie Antoinette was prescribed by rigid etiquette. At the huge Palace in Versailles there were nobles whose only function might be giving Marie water, putting on her shoes. Arriving shy from a sheltered less rigid life in the Hapsburgs court, Marie was at first overwhelmed. Slowly she became a favourite of her husband's grandfather. This brought her into conflict with his mistress Madame de Pompadour. Many at the court did not want an alliance with the Hapsburgs.
Her only purpose as Weber explains was to produce an heir to the throne. However her husband was either too shy or simply not interested in having sex with her. In the intense gossip of the court this was portrayed as her fault. (They would eventually have four children.)
Weber's focus in on the clothing worn by Marie, her make up, and the incredibly elaborate hairstyles worn at court. Tradition demanded she have the most expensive outfits.
Weber also provides a detailed very informative social and political account of the period.
Caroline Weber (Barnard) is a Professor of French specialized in the literature and history of the 17th- and 18th-century royal court, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. At Columbia, she has offered seminars on Rousseau, modern literary theory, May 1968, and Images of the French Revolution, team-taught with Professor Elisabeth Ladenson. A graduate of Harvard (A.B., summa cum laude) and Yale (M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.), she was a junior faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Barnard and Columbia in 2005; she has also been a visiting professor at Princeton. Focused on the intersections between literary, political, and visual culture (including fashion), she has contributed articles to such scholarly journals as PMLA, Philosophy and Literature, Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Nineteenth-Century French Studies, and to such mainstream publications as the New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, W magazine, Town & Country, and Vogue. Professor Weber has published the following books: Fragments of Revolution (Yale UP 2002), an anthology of essays coedited with H.G. Lay; Terror and Its Discontents: Suspect Words in Revolutionary France (U of Minnesota P 2003); Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Holt 2006/Picador 2007), a New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post Best Book of the Year; and Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Knopf 2018), a finalist for the American Library of Paris Book Prize and the winner of the French Heritage Society Literary Award.
Mel Ulm
The Reading Life
You wrote of the King and Queen: “They would eventually have ten children.” Actually, they had only 4 children. Also, you gave two different dates for her death. She certainly had a powerful and controversial image in the historic record!
ReplyDeletebest, mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Mae Travels. Thanks for the input
ReplyDeleteMae Travels. Actually here time as Queen ended in 1792 but she was not Executed until 1793
ReplyDeleteAdding this one to my list! Sounds good!
ReplyDeleteInteristing view of the Revolution time.
ReplyDeleteTo go on with Mae: it is said that she actually love her children. There's a famous painting of them together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette_and_Her_Children
Could be an interesting touch on her life. I am now reading a book about her hairdresser, Just started but promising to be interested. The hairdos in those days were something out of the extra ordinary.
ReplyDeleteYou are doing a fab job of reading (and watching) for this challenge!
ReplyDelete