I couldn't help but look at the various pictures of her on the German-language site of Wikipedia. She looks like Britney Spears, a little thinner, with a high forehead. Not a particularly monstruous creature, one must admit. The account of her life on that site is without pity, respectful, ordinary. She was forced to wear fashionable corsets from the age of three and had life-long breathing problems. I can relate to that.
The pamphlets and caricatures of her at the time are extremely vulgar, indecent and so far from anything her actual behavior could even suggest that there are other forces at work. They are not merely lies, they are mythical in dimension. She has lovers, she is homosexual, she is incestuous, and so on. Over time, the official mistress had come to take the brunt of this kind of attack on the sexuality of the French monarch and his consort and France has its share of famous mistresses, Mme de Montespan, de Pompadour, du Barry...ironically, because M.-A. and her husband now form a bourgeois couple, she takes the full hit of the popular imagination. The chapters form the Duprat book each begin with a quote from Guillotine, who awaits the victim. How sadistic! (de Sade himself, one will note, was released from the Bastille at the start of the Revolution).
M.-A. is not only depraved but she is blood-thirsty. She is known as L'Autrichienne, and it is an insult. We have an interesting reversal here because she was chosen as the French consort precisely because she was Austrian. Granted the diplomacy of the time was very convoluted, and aimed at strengthening royal families as much as the position of nations: this was the opposition to the alliance with Austria. But one eagerly commited to providing armies for this or that adventure, and popular opinion on such commitments wanted to be heard.
There was no police as one would understand the notion today. At their deaths,the bodies of both LouisXIV and Louis XV were transported in the dead of night through Paris to avoid unhappy public events. Were the guards of the King to defend him or take the side of Parliamentarians. This was not clear. M.-A. did not go to Paris without her husband's permission. It was not a safe place. The king had private income (stretched because he was financing Versailles) and there was a public treasury ( in debt after ever-long conflicts). How were public finances to be administered. The creation of institutions, and a legal framework, lagged behind the needs of the time.
Reading this text, one is forced to conclude that the voices of freedom aimed at by-passing censorship but the restraints of taste and ordinary politeness granted to all were not in place. And for the monarch, there were lettres-de-cachet that permitted imprisonment, but there were no alternatives and the monarch was forced to make judgement calls on a daily basis.
Perhaps we will eventually find Marie-Antoinette: from a large family (she was the 15th child of Marie-Theresa of Austria, who in turn was the one of the rare women who ruled in modern times at the death of her husband). Marie-Antoinette was not yet fifteen when she was sent to France, her husband was surely not the man of her dreams and indeed he was known to have anatomical problems. M.-A. received constant letters from her mother telling her not to trust anyone. She eventually gave birth to children who were raised by others (those dreadful women she was accused of having homosexual relations with). She spent too much on clothes. Don't we all.
Finally, this was the period in history when sugar, grown in north America, was adjoining the European diet. A book on diet and history next?!
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