Search Results

This chapter examines the representation of Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, as tribade in pornography during the French Revolution. Pornographic pamphlets depicted the queen with an unusual range of sexual partners and in an imaginative array of sexual postures. This chapter analyses the political significance of the queen's alleged taste for women and the shifting meanings of the tribade during the 18th century in the context of the history of lesbianism.

This chapter explores Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette in relation to personal subjectivity and excess, specifically drawing on notions of poetic fancy, modernity, gender and ‘unwholesome’ consumption, and the poetry of John Keats. Coppola’s emphasis on sensation and surfaces elicits what Keats refers to as the ‘material sublime’, an engagement with sensory excess contrasted with the core subjectivity the Romantic sublime invokes. The film is compared to Keats’ Lamia, an allegorical poem about attempted psychological recuperation through aesthetic excess, as well as Colin Campbell’s description of ‘modern autonomous imaginative hedonism’. The chapter also engages with the ‘depth model’ of Romantic subjecthood that Coppola brings to the fore when Marie Antoinette’s bulwark of sensory pleasure is stripped away, along with its attendant aesthetic function, signalling not just the maturation found in her ethical acknowledgement of the suffering of others, but also her imminent death.

This chapter describes Viotti's becoming the most acclaimed violinist of his time after his sensational debut at the Concert spirituel in Paris. After only two seasons Viotti renounced public performance, but continued to play in private salon concerts (which this chapter treats in some detail) and for a time he was in the service of the queen, Marie Antoinette. Viotti's Paris works are described, including a section on his improvising, as well as his activities as a violin teacher. The possibility that Viotti's trip to his hometown, Fontanetto, took place in the summer and autumn of 1782, rather than the summer of 1783, as is commonly thought, is considered. Viotti's friendships with Madame Vigée-Lebrun, the painter, and Madame de Genlis, the educator and novelist, are introduced in this chapter. Viotti's putative musical participation in the Masonic Concert olympique, of which he was a member in 1786, is speculated upon.

Sofia Coppola, one of the most visible indie directors in recent years, is clearly embedded in the ‘commerce of auteurism’ (Corrigan 1991), as she actively participates in constructing her public image. Building on existing scholarship on the filmmaker as illustrative of the new critical paradigm in studies of women’s film authorship, the first section of this chapter looks at the promotional and critical discourses surrounding her films to trace the various processes of authentication and de-authentication of Coppola as an auteur (family connections, the privileged position in the American film industry, her filmmaking style marked by a focus on flat affects and the mise-en-scène’s surface details, as well as her interest in postfeminist/neoliberal femininity which has divided critics, especially with her 2013 feature film, The Bling Ring). In the exploration of Coppola’s authorial status, the chapter sheds light on the issue of genre, arguing that her engagement with familiar conventions is far more complex than current analysis of her work has acknowledged. This is particularly evident in the case of Marie Antoinette (2006), a film which has been read variably as a costume drama and/or as a historical biopic. In establishing a dialogical relationship between biopic and costume drama scholarship, the chapter centres on self-conscious devices deployed in Coppola’s film, which are mobilised not against but through a logic of a feminised consumerist culture. The aim is not to reject the supposed ‘feminising’ aspects of the costume drama or to masculinise them in framing the film as a ‘self-conscious’ biopic, but rather to investigate the gender anxieties that underlay the labelling of genres by film criticism.

This chapter begins by examining the recent origin of French musical genre, being ironically the creation of an Italian, Jean-Baptiste Lully né Giovanni Battista Lull. The genre did not die with the oild king, on the contrary it was to have a very long life, living on into the 19th century in the form of grand opera. Next, this chapter discusses three events that stood out for their symbolic importance. It then explains that Fleury’s move against the Jansenists highs and lows provoked a vigorous counter-offensive from the Parlements. Subsequently, it discusses that the Parlements paraded themselves as the defenders of the constitution of the nation — acting with the king but, if necessary, against the king. Lastly, it evaluates the lives of Louis XV, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette, and the fall of the absolute monarchy.

Chapter 4 addresses Marie Antoinette’s patronage of pastoral opéra comique—and the problems this repertory generated for the queen’s reputation and for the structures of Bourbon ceremonial rhetoric, more broadly. First, the chapter examines the activities of the troupe des seigneurs, an amateur company formed by Marie Antoinette to mount spectacles at her “rustic” retreat, the Château du Petit Trianon. The small-scale opéras comiques performed by the queen and her associates were condemned not merely for their subversive themes, but because they broke with expectations of royal accessibility; these productions garnered criticism because they were exclusive and insular, removing the mechanisms of court entertainment from public view. Counterbalancing the theatricals of the troupe des seigneurs was a corpus of extravagant ceremonial pastorals, which served to neutralize the negative publicity elicited by Marie Antoinette’s withdrawal into the private realm. This latter repertory emphasized aristocratic engagement with the plight of the third estate, depicting the mutual devotion of charitable seigneurs and the peasants that depended on them. Despite their sympathetic portrayals of the nobility, such works were themselves not without controversy, raising questions about the monarchy’s actual investment in (or rather, detachment from) the lives of its common subjects.

The political dimensions of bastardy were most evident in the public controversy stemming from Louis XIV’s attempt to declare his extramarital offspring capable of inheriting the French throne. The Affair of the Princes, which erupted shortly after the king’s death in 1715, resulted in the publication of more than forty political pamphlets, most of which concluded that Louis XIV had transgressed a principle of dynastic succession according to which the French crown passed independently of human will. Like the inalienability of the royal domain, this principle had been developed to safeguard public interests from the private passions of particular kings, much as customary inheritance laws were designed to protect children from spendthrift parents. In the wake of the Affair of the Princes, Louis XV refused to publicly acknowledge his extramarital offspring. Anxiety over royal sexuality and political corruption nevertheless continued in the eighteenth century, though it was now targeted on royal mistress rather than extramarital offspring.

The problematic reputation and status of the woman writer is the main basis for Chapter two, which discusses Robinson’s reflections on Marie Antoinette’s experience of captivity and the threat of execution in the context of other images and texts representing the queen, as well as Zoffany’s images of the Paris mob. The focus of enquiry is then broadened to consider the implications for women writers of exposure to the mass market. Robinson’s apprehensive treatment of the revolutionary mob is compared with the more enthusiastic reception given by some of her male contemporaries (including Robert Merry) to the convivial celebrations of supporters of the revolution. It is suggested that her problems can best be understood not so much as indicating reservations about democratic politics, but as an expression of the difficulties that some women writers experience in the transition to the modern market for their work. She regrets the move from the apparently easy correspondence between aristocratic patrons and cultural producers which had characterised the enlightenment ideal of the literary republic to the more modern relation between the individual author and the commercial market. In novels of the late century (Burney’s Cecilia, Smith’s Young Philosopher, Robinson’s Angelina, Godwin’s St Leon) encounters between privileged subjects of sensibility and urban crowds often seem to indicate an increasing concern about exposure to the demands of the marketplace. Robinson’s writing of the late 1790s, it suggests, is characterised both by pleasure in the potential of an expanding readership and alarm about its consequences for the woman writer, who both demands and fears publicity.

The actions and writings during the pre-revolution of the maréchal de Castries, minister of the marine from 1780 to 1787, shed significant new light on the absolute monarchy at the moment of its fall. Castries resigned his ministry in September 1787, a gesture that was widely and correctly interpreted as a refusal to serve under the new first minister, Loménie de Brienne. Yet from his retirement Castries sent a series of memoranda, most probably to his patroness Marie Antoinette, detailing his views on almost every aspect of the unfolding crisis right up until July 1789. They reveal Castries as an ‘English-style’ constitutional monarchist, convinced that the crown's problems could only be solved by the speedy convocation of the estates general, without whose consent taxation would henceforth be illegal. Castries' role in the years 1787–1789 thus offers a prime example of the loss of confidence in the absolute monarchy among those who should have been its staunchest defenders.

Chapter 3 offers a broad, archivally based reassessment of Marie Antoinette’s musical patronage. In the domain of serious opera, the queen’s interventions are well known: her support for Gluck’s tragédies lyriques instigated a “revolution” at the Paris Opéra, overturning the hegemony of older works within its repertory. This chapter, however, integrates both the Comédie-Italienne and the opéras comiques it presented at court into this established narrative of musical modernization. Government records suggest that programming changes at Versailles and Fontainebleau were even more significant than those enacted in the French capital. From the 1770s onward, these ceremonial entertainments were dominated by opéra comique, which was made increasingly extravagant to fit its new royal context. An examination of two types of lyric comedy favored by Marie Antoinette (translations of Italian opera buffa and satires of tragédie lyrique) demonstrates that the Comédie-Italienne was an active contributor to contemporaneous stylistic querelles, and that the company markedly expanded its traditional terrain for its court residencies. As dialogue opera evolved to match the conventions of royal display, it placed a strain on systems of artistic privilège—evidence of a growing rift between the progressive musical taste of the monarchy and its aging bureaucracy of theatrical administration.

This chapter examines the contemporary costume film's unique interrelationship of femininity and privacy by focusing on how the historical constraints of privacy force the post-feminist heroine to make herself anew as a feminine subject. It uses the two poles of privacy and publicness to organize relationships between gender, feeling, time, aesthetics, and identity, worked through and re-envisioned by costume films for present-day viewers. By these means, the values of privacy and publicness are recalibrated to accommodate a mutable femininity that uses aesthetics and feeling as creative methods of adaptation. The heroine's process of identity construction consists of tests, experiments, and play with self-presentation to find and utilize the sanctioned meanings and covert privileges afforded by femininity. In reassembling elements of gender and galvanizing their force to new ends, spaces for covert resistance and pressure-release emerge. This course is one of “tactical aesthetics,” or the deployment of style to access power which makes use of gendered acts, expressions, dress, and etiquette to design new advantages. To explore this concept, the chapter analyzes two films, Elizabeth (1997) and Marie Antoinette (2006), as divergent visions of femininity.

This chapter looks at the two public ceremonies by which the regime defined and sought to relegitimize itself in relation to the previous twenty-five years. It notes that the first ceremony took place in public squares in every city, town, and village of France between Napoleon's fall after the Hundred Days war and the summer of 1816. It further notes that local officials enacted the symbolic mise-en-place, or putting-into-place, of the Restoration by rounding up, inventorying, and finally destroying the “unnatural” and “corrupt” emblems of the Revolution and Empire. It emphasizes that the regime also pursued its “politics of forgetting” every year, on the 21st of January and the 16th of October, in the way which it represented the most problematic events of the Revolution, the executions of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

In the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, Queen Marie Antoinette was wrongly accused of accepting a diamond necklace from Cardinal de Rohan. Rohan purchased the necklace and gave it to Jeanne de Valois to give to the queen secretly, but Jeanne’s husband broke it up and sold it. At the public trial, the queen was exonerated, Jeanne imprisoned and branded, and the cardinal disgraced. But the French public believed that the queen had accepted the necklace from the cardinal, and this blow to her already bad reputation greatly contributed to the Revolution.

This chapter examines the complex role that shoes iplay in two films by Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring (2013) and Marie Antoinette (2006). Audience pleasures turn on the recognition of the designer shoe, and an appeal to a girl connoisseur who understands the codes of dressing. Shoes gain their power within Coppola’s feminine universe because of what girls know about them and how they deploy that knowledge. While shoes, through their sheer numbers, might still be aligned with hyper-consumption and shoe-obsessed femininity as pathology, Coppola balances this view with acknowledgement of shoes as products of artistry recognised by girls who function like trained specialists.

Focusing especially on the 1780s and 1790s, Chapter 6 asks how female intimacies became associated with fears and fantasies of power, exclusion, and secrecy in the era of the “rights of man.” At a time when exclusive clubs and secret societies proliferate and reformist pressures escalate, imaginary “anandryne” sects and accusations against specific women intersect with reformist and counter-reformist politics both in and beyond France as newspapers, pamphlets, scurrilous poems, and secret histories grapple with the broader threats of closed and mysterious societies such as the Freemasons. A discourse of similitude, attached to intensifying conversations about rights, puts the sapphic at the heart at once of class politics, fears of conspiracy, and hopes for collectivity. In the process, representations of female affiliation are invested with both utopian idealism and dystopian excess. Writings of the 1770s and 1780s often use female erotic association to work out both hopes and fears of a different future, but in the 1790s, the explicitly sapphic becomes so firmly aligned with counter-revolution that it loses traction as an exploratory site. Particularly but not only in France, sapphic subjects thus stand emblematically at the crux of late-eighteenth-century political crisis.

This chapter analyses Eugene Delacroix's Cleopatra and the Peasant and Théophile Gautier's ‘Une nuit de Cléopâtre’ in offering an image of Cleopatra for revolutionary France. It notes that at the height of the French Revolution, Cleopatra's image resonated in the execution, or the matricide by the people of France, of Marie-Antoinette, which haunted the country through the daily newspaper. The chapter also attempts to register the overlapping images made by communal fantasy and symbol of the revolutionary period, made from the figure of Cleopatra.

The coronation of Louis XVI, which took place on 11 June 1775, is described in detail in this chapter where it is considered as an amalgam of several smaller rituals each with its own provenance and meaning. Apparently transgressive gestures are granted positive meaning. The role of the queen in the coronation is considered as is the meaning of tales of the king walking among the people after the ceremony.

Royal bio-pics have been a mainstay of commercial cinema since its inception. Historians fear them as, ultimately, they are seen as a commercial and entertainment venture first and historical document second. Inevitably filmmakers will have to condense, elide, edit, and re-organize a life in order to make a satisfactory and coherent narrative. This chapter examines four films that explore the lives of queens. These include Asian director Shekhar Kapur's take on English history with his pair of films on Elizabeth I, Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007); American director Sofia Coppola's version of French history in Marie Antoinette; and the British director Stephen Frears'examination of a short period in the life of Elizabeth II in The Queen.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about is France during the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This book examines the relation of homosexuality and the Enlightenment and analyses the experiences of Marie-Antoinette, Marquis de Villette, and Mademoiselle de Raucourt. It also explores the regulation of male homosexuality, lesbian working class culture, and Michel Foucault's thoughts about sexuality and the history of sexuality in France. It demonstrates that people involved in same-sex sexual relations experienced repression and toleration in different ways and to different degrees, depending on sex and class as well as historical circumstances.