What Everyone Gets Wrong About Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette is one of the rare historical figures whose legend has grown so wild that there’s a whole industry dedicated to pruning the inevitably regenerating lies. Thanks to propaganda, artistic license, and weirdly, a fad of post-execution musical caricatures, a fairly normal royal has been turned into a symbol of fatal greed. Well, not on our watch. Let them eat facts!
She Wasn’t French
Sure, she was Queen of France, but Marie Antoinette was born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Österreich-Lothringen in Austria, which only primed the French people to hate her. If a French royal destroys the country, well, that’s their right, but they drew the line at some foreigner.
She Didn’t Play Peasant
One of the ways they hated her was by spreading rumors that she had her own life-size poverty playset where she and her friends milked cows, grew crops, and other #justpeasantthings. In reality, the supposed cosplay village was just a normal country estate, like all rich people had. There were cows, but she was definitely not milking them.
She Was Never Even Accused of Cake-Based Apathy
If you know anything about Marie Antoinette, it’s that she emphatically did not say “Let them eat cake” in response to bread shortages. Those caught up on their Schitt’s Creek will recall that “that line was actually written years before Marie Antoinette allegedly said it,” but there’s no evidence that anyone even did any alleging until she was long dead, which is just salt in the brioche.
She Cared About the Poor
In fact, when the poor in France did need grain during a famine, Marie Antoinette sold her own stuff to buy it for them. That wasn’t her only act of charity: She distributed food to the needy on the regular, ran a home for unwed mothers, and personally took in more than one unfortunate soul. In today’s political landscape, we would not only not execute such a person, we might invent a national religion to canonize them.
She Didn’t Bankrupt France
Contrary to the popular French sentiment that the country was broke due to women and how they be shopping, France was broke before its last queen even showed up. A much larger factor of France’s economic turmoil was King Louis’s decision to help America fight the British, so, um… oops. Our bad.
She Wasn’t Unusually Spendy
Under such circumstances, though, you’d think she could cut back to only five grand balls per week, but Marie Antoinette didn’t actually spend much more than any other French royals. To be sure, any given meal at Versailles was an act of class warfare, but she didn’t invent that lifestyle, and she was expected to adopt it. Hell, her brother-in-law spent more on clothes than she did.
She Wasn’t a Shoe Freak
Marie Antoinette’s thirst for shoes is legendary, but it very much was a “thirst” in the sense of a real biological need that could be hazardous to suppress. Versailles was fucking filthy, with animals and courtiers alike relieving themselves in every dark corner, so keeping your shoes clean was impossible. She likely didn’t love shoes as much as she loved not being caked in shit.
She Was a Tomboy
If anything, given her own way, Marie Antoinette preferred a more utilitarian lewk better suited to her hobbies of hunting and horseback riding and had to be patiently instructed and then exasperatedly goaded into wearing fancy gowns. Her mother pretty much only wrote to her to call her a hot mess.
She Was a Peasant Fashion Queen
Ironically, for someone who was so viciously criticized for living large, she was just as vilified for her penchant for simple, comfy clothes. When she appeared in a basic white dress of her own design, she was branded an offense to the crown for failing to live up to her image as a queen, even as it became the trendiest style of the day for common French women. She really couldn’t win.
She Wasn’t an Austrian Spy
For basically only xenophobia reasons, many in France believed that Marie Antoinette, rather than sealing an alliance with Austria, was sending state secrets back to her home country, siphoning French funds to them, and/or intentionally taking the country down so Austria could steal it while no one was paying attention. While she did maintain some “secret correspondence,” it was always in the interest of stabilizing France. She was, to put it politely, not the brilliant strategist she was accused of being.
She Only Had (Maybe) One Lover
Marie Antoinette was a woman, so naturally, her critics knew the worst label they could apply to her was “big ol’ skank.” She was accused of boinking everyone from her ladies-in-waiting to the Marquis de Lafayette, but the only person she even might have stepped out with was a Swedish soldier named Axel von Fersen. Even that might have been platonic, but whatever the case, Louis seemed cool with it, so mind your own business.
She Was Punished For Her Husband’s Fidelity
But even for a woman, slut-shaming the queen like that was unusual -- she might be foreign traitor hellbent on bleeding the country dry, but she’s still the queen. That kind of derision, plus the pornographic depictions in books and pamphlets that people passed around, was usually reserved for the king’s mistress, but Louis was too boring to have one. Without a royal mistress to be misogynist at, they just heaped extra scorn upon his wife.
She Was a Redhead
Modern depictions of Marie Antoinette, from Norma Shearer to Kirsten Dunst, portray her as a blonde, and to be fair, it’s hard to tell in all those paintings. Surely only a blonde could powder her hair so white? But no, according to all the evidence we have of people actually describing her appearance, she was more Willow than Buffy.
Her Hair Didn’t Turn White
Of course, Em-Ant lost her access to hair powder after she was captured, but conveniently, she was so terrified that all of her hair turned stark white overnight -- at least according to legend. It almost certainly didn’t happen that way, as scientists don’t know of any biological mechanism that could cause that. The closest they’ve come is inducing patches of white fur on extremely stressed mice, but the Cruella de Vil look doesn’t tend to inspire sympathy.
She Wasn’t a Champagne Glass Model
The most relevant myth about Marie Antoinette today is that the champagne coupe glass was modeled after her breast, but it’s also the most easily debunked. The glass was invented nearly 100 years before she was born, for one thing, but it was also rumored that a number of other women served as its model, proving only that liars have a weird thing about drinking from boobs.
Top image: Palace of Versailles/Wikimedia Commons
