Marie Antoinette, headless but an influencer

LondonThe movie The Night of Varennes (1982),by Ettore Scola, is the story of the debate surrounding the emergence of a new world on the ruins of another: the one illuminated by the French Revolution due to the collapse of the Ancien Régime. The Italian filmmaker takes advantage of the historical episode of the flight from Paris of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – June 1791 – to bring together in the same carriage three real characters: Restif de la Bretonne, a libertine and popular writer – today we would call it a populist, perhaps with a tendency towards fake news–; Thomas Paine, the English revolutionary intellectual, and the famous traveler and seducer Giacomo Casanova, already elderly and quite physically deteriorated.

Most certainly, the three never traveled together. And even less so, contrary to what the film suggests, as the backdrop for one of the scenes, did they witness the capture, in Varennes, of the fugitive kings and their entourage, who were trying to escape from a people up in arms against the Crown.

Throughout the journey and the film, the three aforementioned passengers discuss the monarchy, liberty, equality, and the meaning of the Revolution, offering different visions of what was happening in France at that time. Casanova represents the old social order; Paine, the new, and Restif de la Bretonne would be, if you wish with a little imagination, the opinion-giver or theinfluencer who has contributed to the change like woodworm, with his pamphlets, against Luis, the last. In a way, Scola's film can offer a useful metaphor for reading the present and, in turn, and in reference to Marie Antoinette, for questioning the need for and the approach of the exhibition that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has just opened, dedicated to the queen and to what They call it their style.

Because even today it seems that the international order that emerged from the Second World War is collapsing, and a group of Instagram Marie Antoinettes—you could say, for example, Kim Kardashian—want to set their own style. That system, at least for the Western world, built under the umbrella of the United States, with the United Nations and liberal democracy as its benchmarks, is questioned by the Trump administration, that systematically fuels the concerns of broad sectors of a citizenry that no longer believes in the promises of social progress that were offered to them. Broken promises, precisely, because the most blatant neoliberalism – and authoritarianism – that the president represents has destroyed the social consensus established since 1945. At least for the West. And the influencers Instagram's functions are intended to distract them.

Trumpism is, in this sense, one of the symbolic chariots of the third decade of the 21st century: it shakes up post-war convictions, proclaims the end of multilateralism, and, paradoxically, highlights the decline of American hegemony. If Paine embodied the hope of a new future and Casanova the twilight of the old world, Trump would be a kind of Restif de la Bretona, a tireless chronicler on social media, noisy, iconoclastic, and extremely dangerous who, with his mix of populism, provocation, vanity, and bragging, tries to accelerate the global scene. The court that surrounds him—Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, or whoever—offers the parallel spectacle.

Decadence and Fascination

These tensions—between decadence and fascination, between the old and the new—are also present in the aforementioned exhibition on the last queen of France. But the exhibition vindicates her not as a frivolous and lustful victim of revolutionary propaganda but as an icon of fashion, of aesthetic taste through haute couture, which has enjoyed influence and continuity even 232 years after her beheading (October 16, 1793) by guillotine. Was she not so frivolous, then? Was she a more complex personality? Just a spoiled brat? A woman who lived her uprooted life by imposing a style in clothing, hairstyles, perfumes, in the halls of power—in short, what today could be read as an act of feminist affirmation?

The exhibition chooses to make Marie Antoinette a leader of her time, through fashion. And considering her influence, that is indeed the case. Not in vain did he collaborate with his dressmaker, Rose Bertin – sarcastically called "minister of fashion" by the pamphlets of the time and now considered the first couturier of history–, in outfits that set trends in France and abroad.

The revisiting of her figure – a constant, in fact: in fashion, but also in cinema or series – in an aesthetic key speaks, at the same time, of the same duality that Scola reflected: the desire to preserve the image of a sinking world, and the attraction or inevitable fear of the spectacle that accompanies it. To the extent that Trumpism and other populisms question the order that emerged after the Second World War, the figure of Marie Antoinette – today converted into an object of luxury and fascination kitsch– once again challenges the visitor to the Kensington Museum: not so much for what it was or wasn't, but for what it represents as a symbol of an era – a time that refuses to see that it is already condemned? – and its more aseptic use: without footnotes that help unravel the person and the character within it.

London critics have written wonders about the exhibition, but does it deserve them? What does the Victoria & Albert Museum offer to the viewer not especially interested in the world of fashion? The visitor captures, for example, in a final room, pompous and full of the baroque style of Marie Antoinette –a presentation repeated by the V&A in other exhibitions–, the threads that unite some of the dresses worn by the young queen – or worn by some of her younger contemporaries – with creations by the great names of current or recent haute couture: those designed by John Galliano or Maria Grazia Chiuri for Dior or the dresses that Milena Canonero made ad hoc for Sofia Coppola's 2006 film about the queen.

One of the first visual impacts is the wedding dress worn by Duchess Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotta (later Queen of Sweden): a sumptuous garment of fabric and silver lace, with a corset almost impossible to adapt to a non-anorexic body, and a wide, frame-based skirt in the style of the 1770s. When Marie Antoinette married, at just fourteen years old (a child), she also wore a similar one. Her mother, Maria Theresa of Austria, had commissioned it in Paris at extraordinary expense. However, no trace of that dress has survived. The piece on display in the museum was inspired by what the Countess of Artois, Marie Antoinette's sister-in-law, wore to the wedding at Versailles in 1773.

In total, the exhibition includes around 250 pieces that span the time since its execution until now, with designs, in addition to the aforementioned authors, also by Vivienne Westwood, Chanel, Moschino, Erdem, Valentino or the Spaniard Manolo Blahnik, who launches the capsule collection inspired by Marie Antoinette, and in his own work as a shoe designer for the aforementioned Sofia Coppola film: his new designs reinvent them.

Also on display are fragments of the queen's court dresses, although the vast majority were also destroyed during the march on Versailles in October 1789. And crockery, glassware and cutlery that Marie Antoinette used for dinners at the Petit Trianon (Versailles) or some of the Versailles products. There is a pair of silk slippers, some jewelry, furniture, even a medallion that supposedly contains hair from the queen and her son, Louis-Carles. And also the final note he wrote from his cell in the Conciergerie, hours before his death. The text is illegible to the viewer, but they are informed of what it says: "My God, have mercy on me. My eyes have no more tears to weep for you, my poor children. Goodbye, goodbye".

Should we have mercy on Marie Antoinette and what she represented, influencer and/or frivolous? Should we have pity or sympathy for what some of today's aristocrats represent – with or without a crown – who display the obscenity of their luxury and fortune – the basis of inequalities as great as or greater than before the French Revolution –, for example, at endless weddings in Venice?

Perhaps the exhibition, which will delight aesthetes and may leave a colder public engage, lacks an analysis of its historical period. But this was clearly not the objective of its sponsor, a self-confessed lover of the queen, who wanted to put an end to her dark legend. Marie Antoinette was, perhaps, the first influencer of history who paid the price for a history that could no longer bear the inequality it embodied. Icon and tragedy merged on the guillotine at the age of 37. More than two centuries later, inequalities have increased, the world is full ofinfluencers with the sole aim of monetizing their influence, and the guillotine—figurative or real—now only cuts off the heads of the weakest. In Varennes and the Victoria & Albert Museum, we hear of another epochal change.