Melissa Ford
Hist 299
2/24/09
Marie Antoinette’s Image as Seen through Time and Gender: A Literature Review
Since her first arrival in the French Court in 1770, Marie Antoinette has become one of
the most criticized women of the eighteenth century. Her ignorance of French culture and
customs resulted in the court scorning her, blaming her behavior and personality as the cause of
their prejudice instead of their actual fear and loathing of an Austrian foreigner. The court’s
discrimination ultimately led to a general consensus of Marie Antoinette as a selfish and
uncaring individual, an image that still remains today. However, recent historians decided to
reexamine Marie Antoinette to discover if the court’s portrayal of the Queen was based on fact or
rooted in bias. Though the works produced about Marie Antoinette have consistently reiterated
the belief that she behaved in an ill manner, recent trends show that historians, particularly
female, though some of the first were male, believe that Marie Antoinette was grossly
misinterpreted.
In 1924, Hilaire Belloc, a male French-born historian, published his biography, Marie
Antoinette. One of the earliest works on the Queen, Belloc used letters, reports, and maps to
examine Marie Antoinette’s life as one that she did not control. In essence, Belloc believed that
she had no agency. The thesis and main purpose for his book was to portray Marie Antoinette as
an uncaring, worthless woman, whose lapse in judgment and failed friendships led to her death.
His focus on the latter part of her life demonstrates Belloc’s attempt to show how fate drove
Marie Antoinette to ruin. Even his argument about Marie Antoinette’s last letter, written to her
sister-in-law asking for forgiveness against accusations made against her, portrayed Marie
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Antoinette negatively.1 He argued that her last letter was not a forgery, despite its exceptional
language that was inconsistent when compared to her other letters, and this implied inability to
write correctly provided the reader with a sense of how flighty Marie Antoinette seemed.2
Similarly, Andre Castelot’s 1957, Queen of France: A Biography of Marie Antoinette, also
portrayed Marie Antoinette as uncaring and simpleminded, claiming that she did not understand
politics. Though written thirty years after Belloc’s biography of the queen, Castelot, a male
historian like Belloc, chose not to reexamine Marie Antoinette’s life from a different angle. He
used new, unpublished primary sources, including documents about the Queen’s childhood and
marriage, in order to use eyewitnesses’ exact words to provide an unbiased account of the
woman.3 Instead, he used their words to restate the view other historians, such as Belloc, had
already proved, but with more support. In fact, it would take another twenty years for a historian
to question the unkindly image thrust upon Marie Antoinette.
Published in 1981, Desmond Seward’s biography entitled, Marie Antoinette, became the
first notable source to look at Marie Antoinette’s life in an entirely different light. Interestingly a
French-born male, like Belloc, Seward, as Belloc did, decided to focus his book on Marie
Antoinette’s ruin. However, his argument maintained that the reasons for her death included
slander, the blurring of her personality with that of her husband’s, and the fact that she may be
seen as a victim of men.4 Whereas Belloc and Castelot had denied Marie Antoinette agency,
Seward believed it should be taken into account. He wished to break from the traditional portrait
For an overview of Marie Antoinette’s last letter, see Clara Tshudi, Marie Antoinette, trans. E.M. Cope
(London: Swann Sonnenschein & Co., Lim., 1902); Olivier Blanc, Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the
French Revolution, 1793-1794, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987).
1
2
Hilaire Belloc, Marie Antoinette (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924), 527.
3
Andre Castelot, Queen of France: A Biography of Marie Antoinette, trans. Denise Folliot (New York:
Harper & Brothers, 1957), ix.
4
Desmond Seward, Marie Antoinette (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 12-13.
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that Belloc and Castelot had continued and reexamine their sources. This included reevaluating
both the older sources that Belloc and Castelot had used, as well as reexamining primary sources
that his contemporary writers believed to be too biased or too inaccurate. Seward believed that
these materials, when looked at critically and with the acknowledgment of their potential bias,
could provide revealing insights.5 Though agreeing with Belloc and Castelot that Marie
Antoinette was a terrible politician, Seward became one of the first historians, and more
importantly, one of the first male historians, to attempt to reinterpret the Austrian woman’s
events from her own point of view. Seward and his idea of personalizing Marie Antoinette
became an important turning point in the historiography of Marie Antoinette, especially because
it allowed emerging female historians to provide their own similar ideas to the debate.
Joan Haslip appeared as an important female historian around the same time as Seward.
Her biography of Marie Antoinette, titled Marie Antoinette, was published in 1987, six years
after Seward’s book. Through the exploration of Marie Antoinette’s family letters, including
ones between her and her mother and her two brothers, Haslip continued the trend that Seward
had started by giving Marie Antoinette agency, rather than denying she had it, as Belloc and
Castelot had done. During this period of time, however, parallels between previous historians’
thoughts remained evident. For example, Haslip agreed with Belloc and Castelot that Marie
Antoinette made a terrible Queen, but unlike her predecessors, Haslip tried to decipher not only
why she failed so miserably, but also tried to find explanations for Marie Antoinette’s failure.6
Her work opened the way for other new female historians to add their ideas on Marie Antoinette
in a way in which they did not have to conform to traditional thoughts.
5
Seward, Marie Antoinette, 12.
6
Joan Haslip, Marie Antoinette (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), xi.
4
About twenty years after Seward and Haslip’s biographies, Lynn Hunt published an
article entitled “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of
the Feminine in the French Revolution” (2006). A female historian, Hunt expanded on what
Seward had done earlier, and once again, completely broke from traditional thought. Whereas
Belloc and Castelot had portrayed Marie Antoinette as frivolous and doomed from the beginning,
and while Seward and Haslip believed that outside influences ultimately led to her ruin through
mistakes and failures not all her own, Hunt decided to connect Jacobin attitudes towards gender
and sexuality to explain why Marie Antoinette was characterized so negatively in the first place.
She concludes that the revolutionaries condemned Marie Antoinette because they did not believe
women should play public or political roles in France.7 Hunt, instead of denying or proving
Marie Antoinette’s agency, basically decides to ignore it and instead, becomes the first to use the
French Queen as a symbol. Thus, after eighty years, historians finally took it upon themselves to
examine Marie Antoinette from completely new angles and to connect her image with the
context of her time, a process that historians usually start their research with, but which is not
true for this literature on Marie Antoinette.
Male historians from the early 1900s, such as Castelot and Belloc, wrote biographies of
Marie Antoinette based on the traditional way of looking at her as a failed woman who had no
control over herself, or her flippant behavior. Through the works of those such as Seward, and
the newly emerging female historians, such as Haslip, the late twentieth century provided the
means for the needed shift in the exploration of Marie Antoinette from the traditional way of
looking at her, to taking a more personal, careful approach. Hunt and other modern female
historians look at Marie Antoinette critically, yet much more sympathetically and attempt to
Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the
Feminine in the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, ed. Gary
Kates (New York: Routledge, 2006), 201.
7
5
connect her with other events going on at the time. In continuing the analysis of Marie
Antoinette, I will clarify how the past portrayal of Marie Antoinette was based upon
discriminatory thoughts displayed by the French court towards the Queen. I will continue the
approach started by Seward in looking at Marie Antoinette as a person who, though she had her
faults, also had redeeming qualities. I will also expand upon the theory first explored by Hunt
that the revolutionaries of the time contributed to the negative portrayal of Marie Antoinette.
Thus, I hope to contribute thought provoking points to the argument over the misrepresentation
of Marie Antoinette.
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Bibliography
Belloc, Hilaire. Marie Antoinette. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1924.
Blanc, Olivier. Last Letters: Prisons and Prisoners of the French Revolution, 1793-1794.
Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987.
Castelot, Andre. Queen of France: A Biography of Marie Antoinette. Translated by Denise
Folliot. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957.
Cronin, Vincent. Louis and Antoinette. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1975.
Erickson, Carolly. To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette. New York: William Morrow &
Company, Inc., 1991.
Fay, Bernard. Louis XVI or The End of a World. Translated by Patrick O’Brien. Chicago: Henry
Regnery Company, 1966.
Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. New York: Doubleday, 2001.
Haslip, Joan. Marie Antoinette. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987.
Hunt, Lynn. “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of
the Feminine in the French Revolution.” In The French Revolution: Recent Debates and
New Controversies, edited by Gary Kates, 201-19. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Kaplow, Jeffery. France on the Eve of Revolution. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1971.
Jackson, Catherine Charlotte, Lady. The French Court & Society: Reign of Louis XVI and First
Empire. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1881.
Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere: In the Age of the French Revolution. London:
Cornell University Press, 1988.
Lever, Evelyne. Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France. Translated by Catherine
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Maza, Sarah. Private Lives and Public Affairs: The Causes Célèbres of Pre-Revolutionary
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Thomas, Chantal. The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette. Translated
by Julie Rose. New York: Zone Books, 1999.
Tschudi, Clara. Marie Antoinette. Translated by E. M. Cope. London: Swan Sonnenschein &
Co., Lim., 1902.
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