Crazy for the queen of pomp - the current Marie Antoinette obsession

In Our Hall of Mirrors, a Queen Looms Large – by CAMILLE PAGLIA

Marie Antoinette is back in vogue. A two-hour Public Broadcasting Service documentary on the last queen of France will be broadcast September 25, followed by the premiere of Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette on October 20. There has been a remarkable spate of books on this subject: two works of historical fiction — last year's The Hidden Diary of Marie Antoinette, by Carolly Erickson (St. Martin's Press), and Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette, by Sena Jeter Naslund (forthcoming from William Morrow in October) — plus a scholarly study, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution, by Caroline Weber, a professor of French at Barnard College (Henry Holt, due out this month).

All of the above are indebted in varying degrees to Lady Antonia Fraser's beautifully crafted biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001). Coppola's interest was initially sparked by the abridged English translation (released in 2000) of a massive 1991 biography of Marie Antoinette by the French historian Evelyne Lever. Coppola bought the rights to Lever's book (which takes a somewhat chilly view of the queen) and later hired her as a historical consultant for the film. But it was the Fraser biography, which Coppola said had "humanized" Marie Antoinette, that directly inspired the screenplay (written by Coppola herself).

The film, Coppola's third feature, stars Kirsten Dunst and by special permission of the French government was shot on location in the gardens and palace of Versailles, including the Hall of Mirrors. It was shown to mixed reviews (there were reports of booing) at the Cannes International Film Festival in May. Controversy is already swirling over the score's quotation of 1980s "New Romantic" pop music as well as the film's startling neglect of the French Revolution (it ends before Marie Antoinette's imprisonment and death by guillotine). Coppola provocatively claims she has simply made a movie about "teenagers in Versailles." Fraser herself (along with her husband, the writer Harold Pinter) has been enthusiastic, calling it "the most beautiful film I have ever seen."

The Marie Antoinette saga presents daunting problems to any adapter. Where should our sympathies lie: with the plucky, fun-loving 14-year-old girl torn from her home at the Habsburg court in Vienna to serve as a broodmare for French royalty — or with the impoverished French proletariat whose taxes underwrote the ostentatious luxuries of a parasitic aristocracy? For the past two centuries, views of Marie Antoinette have been sharply polarized: She was either a saint and martyr or a monster and Messalina (one of the many scathing sobriquets flung at her in her lifetime).

Deftly evenhanded, Fraser makes Marie Antoinette a palpable, pitiable presence without ever coercing us to suspend ethical judgment. She explodes myths (Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake"), dismisses salacious rumors about the queen's nymphomania and lesbianism, and induces respect for the queen's courage in adversity. But Fraser also accepts as credible the charges of treason, partly based on a leak of military secrets, which led to Marie Antoinette's conviction and execution. Fraser dwells relatively little on the systemic problems in French society that would erupt in the revolution of 1789. Medieval feudalism lingered in France as it did not, for example, in England, which was already in the first stages of the Industrial Revolution. And the French resistance to banking reform depressed its economy until the 19th century. In Fraser's engrossing book, the suffering or frustration of the French citizenry sometimes seems like mere background noise — as it was for too long for Marie Antoinette herself.

While drawing on multiple sources, the PBS documentary, written and directed by the award-winning producer David Grubin, betrays its beguilement by Fraser. As in her book, we are very precisely placed in time and space, with a rich sense of cultural context. Marie Antoinette's role as a hapless intermediary between competing European superpowers is well portrayed, as is her empress mother's domineering intrusion from afar and her young husband's endless public humiliations. The future King Louis XVI was a shy, affable, blundering gourmand who fell so far short of his royal forebears' womanizing prowess that he failed to complete sexual intercourse with his own wife for the first seven years of their marriage.

Grubin's production uses Marie Antoinette's multitude of surviving portraits magnificently. The camera's slow pan fairly caresses her changing face as it matures into doting motherhood. The location photography and crisp editing are splendid, but less impressive are the dull recreations where an actress standing in for Marie Antoinette gratuitously wanders around with a parasol, her slack or striding contemporary body language and mannish, athletic hands at jarring odds with what the narrator is telling us about the queen's "Habsburg dignity and French grace." The magical "Versailles glide" is nowhere in sight.

Admirably, this Marie Antoinette uses subtitles instead of voice-overs for its fascinating interviews with French historians. Foreign languages are too rarely heard on mainstream American TV, including news programs, an omission that can only worsen national provincialism. In this case, the elegant, aggressive formality and residually neoclassic syntactic parallelism of French provide a thrilling dramatic approximation of the haughty court ritualism in which the young Marie Antoinette was trapped.

Among the interviewees, Lady Antonia and the French contributors scintillate with wit and charm, while Simon Schama, the British historian who teaches at Columbia University, decidedly does not. His insulting condescension to the American audience (we get dated slang — "airhead," "shopaholic," "Valley girl") is cringe-making. It's a positive relief whenever we leave Schama's snide glibness for Fraser's disciplined deep emotion: As Marie Antoinette's family life turns tragic, Fraser's voice catches, and her eyes well with tears.

A recurrent dilemma with this program is that the silky, elegiac music and dazzling visuals so enchant that we over-identify with the embattled heroine, as in a fairy tale. Escalating political events get summarized more and more rapidly (there go the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man!) until they seem like annoying distractions. Stick-figure period drawings in which writhing crowds protest and rampage seem aesthetically repellent: Who are those untidy, faceless creatures who dare invade Marie Antoinette's pastoral dream?

The struggle to maintain political perspective is abandoned altogether in the Carolly Erickson and Sena Jeter Naslund novels. Fraser, from her historical distance, shows Marie Antoinette gaining reflectiveness and stature over time. Erickson and Naslund, however, make the peculiar decision to cast their books in the first person as well as the present tense, which collapses the reader with the protagonist and allows little space for detachment or objectivity.

Erickson's book purports to be a diary left by Marie Antoinette in her prison cell. The story begins the night before her execution in 1793, then snaps back 24 years to the pubescent archduchess being hawked on the international marriage market. There is action and titillation throughout — a clash with Madame du Barry, stolen moments of sexual ecstasy, massacres of peasants, bricks crashing through windows. But the queen's diary seems suspiciously eloquent for someone who had documented difficulties with reading and writing. Furthermore, Erickson's invention of characters and incidents (such as a protracted sex holiday enjoyed by the queen in Sweden) and her omission of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (a hoax that irreparably damaged Marie Antoinette's reputation) seem questionable for a writer who has produced straightforward biographies of Elizabeth I and the Empress Josephine.

Naslund, the author of the well-received Ahab's Wife (based on Melville's Moby-Dick ), makes Marie Antoinette's inner voice even more florid than does Erickson. There is a density of poetic description and historical reference in this 500-plus-page novel that seems highly improbable for any character's spontaneous reaction to unfolding events. And as with Erickson's novel, Marie Antoinette's diction and tone change too little from adolescence to adulthood. The chronicle follows Fraser closely, except that the queen is exonerated of all fault; she is brought low by dastardly lies and hearsay. But with its lavish settings and heightened emotions ("My heart flutters"; "My other breast is dying of jealousy"), the book will undoubtedly offer pleasure and instruction to loyal readers of historical romances.

Though sometimes impeded by excess recycled biographical material, Caroline Weber's Queen of Fashion examines Marie Antoinette from an arresting angle — her theatrical persona as a fashion innovator (a theme that Fraser touches on but strategically underplays). Forced to jockey for position, French courtiers were slaves of fashion, while queens tended to be more modest and reserved. Fashion flash was practiced instead by the kings' semi-official mistresses — a role that Weber demonstrates was borrowed by Marie Antoinette (whose husband had no mistress) and that eventually compromised her reputation and made it easier for scurrilous pamphleteers to caricature her as a whore. Regularly exceeding her annual clothing allowance at a time of national debt, she was scorned as "Madame Déficit."

Marie Antoinette's opulent clothing occupied three public rooms at Versailles, but nothing survived the mob's sack of the palace in 1789. Her "look books" (studied by both Fraser and Weber) have been preserved in the French national archives: They show the pinpricks made by the queen as she chose her dresses each morning. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's controversial patronage of commercial stylists and her extravagant "pouf" hairdos, bejeweled ball gowns, Renaissance masquerade costumes, and daring masculine riding habits, followed by her shift to rural straw hats and simple muslin and prints, which nearly bankrupted the French silk industry. For Weber, the queen's embrace of simplicity in refurbishing her country retreat, the Petit Trianon, was itself a fashion landmark.

The nagging question is why Marie Antoinette has suddenly become so ubiquitous. Though the invasion and occupation of Iraq have been perceived by many around the world as an exercise in American imperialism, our current first lady, Laura Bush, has more in common with the cloth-coat Pat Nixon than with Nancy Reagan, who spent $200,000 on new White House china during a recession, or with Hillary Clinton, who donned a lavish black-velvet opera coat trimmed with gold braid to sweep, Marie Antoinette-like, into her interrogation by the special prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr.

Has representative democracy, paralyzed by rancorous partisanship and bureaucratic incompetence, become the waning ancien régime assailed by hordes at the gates? There is an uneasy sense of siege in Europe and the United States from restive immigrant minorities who have taken to the streets or bred saboteurs. The intelligentsia seem fatigued, sapped by pointless theory, and impotent to affect events. Fervor has shifted to religious fundamentalists in both Christianity and Islam. Materialism and status anxiety (evident even in higher education, with its brand-name snobbery) have come to the fore in the glitteringly high-tech West. Yet the turbulent third world offers agonizingly stark contrasts. The Marie Antoinette story, with its premonitions of doom amid a giddy fatalism, seems to signal a pervasive guilt about near-intractable social inequities.

The court machinery created by Louis XIV at Versailles was a precursor of the star-making Hollywood studio system, with its glorification of beauty and glamour. Under the dithering, ineffectual Louis XVI, however, the artificial superstructure of the French elite had reached its decadent limit. As Weber shows, Marie Antoinette's fashion display was no longer about the nation but about unfettered self-indulgence. Similarly today, "image," as fabricated by stylists and often divorced from any discernible achievement, has become the primary focus of celebrity culture (and has overflowed into the art world). Yet stars have become smaller and smaller, interchangeable ciphers with blank doll faces. The perverse agelessness created in the late 18th century by powdering of the hair of both sexes is now paralleled by cosmetic surgery and nerve-deadening injections, which produce a strained simulacrum of youth.

In this period of bland, gender-neutral ideology in the workplace, the Marie Antoinette milieu may offer the archaic fantasy of sophisticated womanly wiles and the alluring arts of seduction. At times, the novels about Marie Antoinette seem to recall Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, with its epic panorama of the destruction of a pleasure-driven, heedlessly exploitative civilization. But Scarlett O'Hara, of course, survived through spunk and grit. The picture of an innocent Marie Antoinette as scapegoat, facing down her accusers and led to the slaughter, is reminiscent of plays and films about Joan of Arc, which used to be much more in circulation. There are also resemblances to Princess Diana, who was similarly recruited for royal procreation and found herself lost in a cunning, deceptive courtly maze. And like Marie Antoinette, Diana came to a violent end in Paris.

After 9/11 — when great towers fell, like the Bastille, in a day — coping for the professional class has required cognitive dissonance. Life's routine goes on amid a surreal bombardment of bulletins about mutilations and massacres. When since the Reign of Terror has ritual decapitation become such a constant? The fury and cruelty of the French mob were strangely mixed with laughter — as when the severed head of Marie Antoinette's friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, was spruced up by a hairdresser and waved on a pike outside the royal family's window. These are the grisly surprises that now greet us every day through our own windows — the glass monitors of TV's and PC's. The return of Marie Antoinette suggests that there are political forces at work in the world that Western humanism does not fully understand and that it may not be able to control.

(Camille Paglia is a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia. Her latest book is Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems.)