Among the most famous things about Marie Antoinette are her clothes and her hair. Learn about the people behind fashion – and how anyone wore or afforded their creations – today on Footnoting History! Hello Footnoting History friends, it’s Kristin and welcome to Footnoting History’s 301st episode! If you’ve been with us for over 300 episodes – or if this is your first visit – we are so glad you’re here and thank you so much for listening.
Remember if you’d like to catch up on Episodes 1 through 300, or view a captioned version of this episode, you can do it on our YouTube Channel and at FootnotingHistory.com Please like and subscribe and share with your friends! Share the Nerd-dom far and wide! Okay, so … I admit I was in intrigued by that new Ridley Scott Napoleon movie. I like a good sweeping historical epic, I like that historical era, and I really, really like having a running text commentary with my co-producer Christine.
Who I know is outraged by the portrayal of Josephine – and you should reach out to her on social media and ask her to do an episode on why poor Josephine really got the shaft in this new Napoleonic blockbuster. Although was it? I genuinely have no idea how it did at the box office because I lost track – and interest – when I watched the trailer.
The one I watched opened with a guillotine scene (because of course it did), with a woman in a tattered fancy dress and a disheveled pompadour-esque hairdo going to her death with this sassy and defiant attitude as Napoleon watches from the crowd. And like, alright, I guess. Theater drama and what not. But then I realized the woman was supposed to be Marie Antoinette. And I just. Could.
Not. Historians know a tremendous – and I mean a TREMENDOUS – amount about what Marie Antoinette wore at the various stages of her life, including up to the very end. And the wild clothes and the elaborate hairdos are top of the list when her name comes up. It will probably not surprise you to hear that not many of the 18th-century queen’s clothes survived the French Revolution, which just for a quick refresh, began in 1789.
Marie Antoinette, who was born in 1755 in Austria and died in 1793 in Paris, had a ton of clothes over the course of her life, but even in the good days, she didn’t keep many of them long-term. However, despite not having many surviving items specifically owned by Marie Antoinette, people wrote about them A LOT, and there are many images and paintings that survive, and we have expenditure accounts, so we know the materials and the cost and when they were in the queen’s possession.
That last day on October 16, 1793, when Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine, the famous artist Jacques Louis David – you know him, you’ve seen his paintings – sketched her. She wore a plain white chemise and a cap. Her hair was cut short. With short hair was how pretty much how everyone went to the guillotine, so that guillotine could do its work efficiently, which was a good part of the point of the guillotine. And she was subdued and polite to the end.
These are all very well-known facts and if that was the opening salvo for the film, I really don’t need to see any more of it. But I will say it got me thinking again about Marie Antoinette’s clothes and her hair.
Caroline Weber’s book “Queen of Fashion” does a really excellent job of taking you through what Marie Antoinette wore and makes compelling arguments for what it meant to the queen in terms of expressions of power and individuality and how these things were perceived by the public at different times. And yeah, a lot of the fashion had to do with vanity and frivolity, but there were also political statements being made and centuries of tradition being turned on its head.
The later 18th century was the advent of haute couture, high fashion, and that in and of itself is really interesting – the fast-changing trends, the geographic reach and the sheer economy of it all, for sure. The names of the designers became like brands – and this was all pretty new for Europe and its colonies. They became almost as famous as their creations and their famous wearer.
So, let’s start with the clothes, and Marie Antoinette did not start off having a lot of choice in what she wore or who made it. Same went for her hair. She was born an archduchess in Austria, but when she married Louis August in 1770 and left for Versailles, she had to look “French.” There were a few struggles early on in terms of what she wore and what she wanted to wear, but largely the young dauphine – the future queen of France – played ball.
Well, Louis XV died in 1774, and at the coronation of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s hair and the dress she wore were … really something else. The dress was created by one Rose Bertin, the queen’s marchande de mode. A marchande de mode was a female clothing merchant and their profession seems to have emerged in the last half of the 18th century. People were developing a taste for change in fashion, but making lots of new dresses all the time was really not feasible.
So, people customized the dresses and the clothing they did have with things best described as accessories. Caroline Weber describes the marchandes as stylists. The 1769 “The Art of the Tailor” says it’s “sewing and arranging according to the mode of the day,” but they weren’t seamstresses per se.
There were a lot of different trades that went into the whole clothing empire, and they were all highly regulated and had their own very specific areas of commerce – different guilds were in charge of creating the cloth, there were different ones who cut the cloth, ones who sewed it, made the shoes, you get the idea.
To get yourself entirely outfitted, you needed to visit a lot of different vendors but the ones who had the most creative latitude, the ones who iced the cake, so to speak, were these marchandes de mode. Rose Bertin wasn’t the only brains behind Marie Antoinette’s clothes, but she was the most influential and the queen’s favorite.
Kimberly Crisman-Campbell argues that “[i]f any one person deserves credit for Marie-Antoinette’s enduring reputation as a fashion plate, it is her favorite marchande de mode, Marie-Jean “Rose” Bertin.” Rose Bertin was from the region of Picardy which is roughly 70 miles north of Paris. She was born in 1747 and was about 24 years old when she arrived in Paris in 1770 – the exact same year that Marie Antoinette married Louis Auguste, the dauphin.
Rose didn’t come from much, but she was somehow able to get an apprenticeship and establish a shop – first in a not-so-hip area, and then, in 1772, on the rue Saint-Honoré, which was THE place to be for Parisian fashion.
Her shop on the rue Saint-Honoré was called The Grand Mogol, and The Grand Mogol sold all sorts of things, lavishly displayed in its big front windows: Caroline Weber talks about “bonnets, shawls, fans, spangles, furbelows [which are a kind of fabric ruffle], silk flowers, gemstones, laces” and other things that drew people in from the street – which just so happened to be close to the Palais Royal and lots of people with lots of money to spend.
There was stuff for men, too – they shopped for fancy neck-ware, stuff for their shoes, as well as purses. There was something for everyone and those somethings were constantly changing. The shop itself was lavish and there were lots of people rushing around, trying to make you feel special.
Rose Bertin did very well – initially in part because Louis’ younger brothers were getting married and people were buying a lot of clothes for that – and the duchesse de Chartres (who was the daughter in law of the Duc d’Orleans, who was Louis XVI’s uncle) she was a big fan of Bertin – and it was the duchesse who introduced Rose to Marie Antoinette after Louis XV’s death in 1774 during a trip to Marly.
Madam Campan, who was the first lady in waiting to the queen, had a few things to say about Bertin. The memoirs of Madam Campan – born Jeanne Louise Henriette Genet in 1752 – are incredibly valuable, if not always reliable, source material – but unlike some other memoirs I’ll talk about in a minute, she likely did actually write hers. Henriette Campan was a really interesting woman who was in thick of the Versailles court and who survived the Revolution.
She definitely had a lot to say about Marie Antoinette, and it’s not always flattering to the queen. One of the things she disapproved of was Rose Bertin’s close access to Marie Antoinette. She calls Bertin “a mere … milliner” and that her admission to the queen’s household “was followed by evil consequences to her Majesty.” Rose was introducing the queen to “some new fashion every day.”
Basically, Bertin was a bad influence, according to Campan, because before that the queen had plain tastes, but under Rose’s influence, Marie Antoinette made fashion her primary occupation – one that bordered on obsession – and all the women of the court couldn’t follow her down the rabbit hole fast enough. Which was a problem. It was a lot to keep up with – the feathers and the flowers and the hats and the jeweled embellishments.
Young ladies were obsessed, older women and husbands were concerned, and they complained it was ruining families. People worried it was a morally corrupting influence, and also potentially financially ruinous. There are lots of letters to the sort. In fact, some of them came from Empress Maria-Theresa who was not thrilled that her daughter was a fashion icon who was constantly updating her look – the body of the queen was supposed to be sacred and set apart from ordinary people.
She was supposed to be timeless and untouchable and unlike anyone else – and Marie Antoinette was not honoring that expectation. Mama was not happy. People went into sometimes great debt to stay on top of the latest trends set by Bertin and the queen. To be clear, most people were not buying this stuff. Most people in France in the later 18th century were poor and just trying to eke out an existence, either in the cities or in the countryside on farms – but mostly on farms.
But. A lot of high profile people were in the market and yes, it sounds silly and frivolous to us – and yeah, ultimately, it kind of was – but it did matter that people were dressed well at court and if the queen thought you were shabby and out of date, she wasn’t going to want you around and there went all potential for favors and promotions for you and your family. In 1715, the old sumptuary laws were no longer being enforced.
Before, certain classes were allowed to wear certain things, and you didn’t cross the streams, so to speak. But over the course of the 18th century, more and more people were wearing the dress of the aristocracy who were not technically aristocracy – and the aristocracy wore things that weren’t of their class (think: those simple chemise dresses Marie Antoinette took to wearing for a time). At the high end of the market, there was just a ton of money being spent.
In 1776, Marie Antoinette spent 100,000 livres on Bertin’s merchandise. That was A LOT of money to spend. In 1785, the queen spent 258,000 livres on her wardrobe – and about 1/3 of that went to Rose Bertin. And it certainly wasn’t just the queen who was spending money like this: In 1782, there weas a prince who went bankrupt in no small part because of his fashion addiction; among his many creditors were his clothing merchants, including one Rose Bertin.
The lady in charge of the queen’s wardrobe, Madame d’Ossun, said the queen’s fashion expenditures were “excessive.” She never spent quite as much as some of the previous kings’ mistresses but, the criticism was sharp, in part because people were copying her, and in part because she was kind of acting like a mistress instead of a queen.
Even if you weren’t fabulously wealthy or an aristocrat who could buy things on credit, you might still be able to participate in the fashion economy created by Bertin – a feather or some other adornment might be within reach, even if you couldn’t afford to shop at Bertin’s fancy magasin. And there were technological innovations that brought down the price of production. There were plenty of other down-market sellers who copied what the more expensive marchandes de mode were up to.
Before Rose Bertin, clothes cost what the fabric cost and the labor of making them – which could be pretty high – but with Rose you were also paying for the name behind the creativity. And Rose Bertin was really good at advertising and using Marie Antoinette’s fame to get her creations out there and known. There are many images of Marie Antoinette wearing things that … she never actually did. The 1770s saw the beginning of what were basically fashion magazines.
Marie-Antoinette encouraged Rose (in conjunction with her hairdresser) to “publish the philosophy of their art,” in Le Journal des dames so that the public would know what she was wearing – and presumably then follow suit. These fashion magazines had wide readership, thanks to increasing literacy rates, the printing press, and an international postal system. It wasn’t just adornments for dresses that Bertin was revolutionizing. She was also one of the fashion geniuses behind: the Pouf.
I seriously love that those towering hairstyles with all the crazy ornaments are called poufs
come on. The pouf was a collaboration between Bertin and Léonard Autié, also known as Monsieur Léonard. If you’ve seen the Sophia Coppola/Kirsten Dunst Marie Antoinette movie, he makes and appearance, and that representation is how I like to think of him in my head.
There’s a fair amount we “know” about Monsieur Léonard but a lot of what we know comes to us second hand from one Baron Lamoth-Langon, who published Léonard’s memoirs in 1838 and … I’m going to bet these memoirs are highly embellished, at best. Probably in their original form they were a little bit – if you take Lamoth-Langon at his word that he was working from something that actually existed in the first place, and I’m just going to say, I do not trust that guy.
He has a tendency to make things up – it shows up in witchcraft history, he makes up large-scale persecutions of medieval witches that simply did not happen. Dude was a fiction writer who was trying to churn out product in an age when there were no copyright law and once things were printed, they were instantly pirated. I have Feelings about the misinformation this guy set loose onto history.
So, that’s my caution about him, but the “Léonard” in these memoirs is super dramatic and they are a fun read, so I’ll give him that. Monsieur Léonard was born sometime around 1746, somewhere in the South of France. We don’t know too much about him before he came to Paris in 1769.
He worked first, dressing hair for people in the theater, but he had some high-profile fans, including Madame du Barry, Louis XV’s mistress, as well as one of Marie Antoinette’s – then then the dauphine – ladies in waiting. Léonard started dressing Marie Antoinette’s hair in 1772 and in 1774, he and Rose Bertin were working on that pouf. The pouf was something else – and it too made an appearance at the coronation.
There are descriptions of Marie Antoinette showing up with hair so high, her face looked like the midpoint between the hem of her dress and the feathers at the top of her head. Affluent men usually wore wigs – and they’re an interesting research project, too, if you’re interested. Let me just wet your appetite with this fun fact: some wigs had mechanical devices in them to pull back the skin on the face, 18th-century wig botox, if you will.
But the pouf was for ladies – and it was a structure unto itself and it had scaffolding. If you’re like me and looked at those 18th century portraits and thought, who the hell has that much hair?
no one. No one has that much hair. There was a lot of filler in there. There was fake hair and cloth and wires and all kinds of crap – and that’s not even counting the ornaments that went into it. The styling was kind of … severe, and the hair one did have was teased up and hot curling irons were used on it, before being doused in powder and that all took a toll. People started getting bald patches from the styles, including one Marie Antoinette.
After the birth of her daughter in 1778, she started losing her hair, and the “frizzling” that pouf styling required did not help. So, in 1780, Monsieur Léonard came up with a new style to hide it: the baby hairstyle. There was still a lot of volume to the back of the head, but the curled hair hit at the neck and didn’t have quite so many things in it as the poufs did.
There were all kinds of variations to that famous pouf – and yes, there were feathers and jewels, but there was also a “garden pouf” that had a bunch of vegetables. There was one with a mechanical bird, whose wings would flap. A lot of them are kind of funny – but at least some of them had serious undertones. Marie Antoinette was a proponent of vaccination, and she wore a “an inoculation pouf” after her husband, whose grandfather died of smallpox, got that vaccine.
It had the serpent of Aesclepius on there. (It’s the same snake that’s on medical iconography today.) There was a club – for conquest – a rising sun – for the king - and a flowering olive branch – for peace and harmony. It took a lot of time to get all this done, hours sometimes. While their hairdresser worked, they sat in special swivel chairs with low backs and were draped in a peignoir – which is derived from the French word “to comb.”
Historians do point out that these poufs were impossible to wash – much like the very outer layers of a person’s clothing – and eventually they became kind of gross. One more accessory you needed to complete your ensemble was a head-scratcher and, not to miss an opportunity, these were lavishly decorated too. It was not easy to sleep with this hair, either, in case you were wondering and of course you were.
They wrapped up their poufs in fabric and slept propped up on pillows, looking like giant coneheads. They weren’t any easier to manage during the day either – they were really top heavy, they made dancing – and pretty much everything else – really awkward. Ladies went back to their apartments after attending Mass and tried not to move until they had to go out for their next appearance. There are depictions of women looking kind of worried at balls about the chandeliers overhead.
(And rightly so!) Sources describe women riding in carriages with their heads out the window because they literally couldn’t fit inside and had trouble getting through doors. Some of these hairstyles were almost five feet tall. There was a merchant who came up with a mechanical pouf – called the Grandma – which could be raised and lowered, so you didn’t have to make grandma mad with your fashionable hair. It didn’t take off, though. People talked about increasing the height of doorways, instead.
They didn’t, but it was ridiculous – and people definitely made fun of them and complained about it. There were lots of parodies, in print and in theater – but people were crazy about them, until the tides of fashion turned again in the 1780s. Monsieur Léonard continued to be called “the Hairdresser of the Queen,” even though he moved on from that daily role in 1787. He was pretty rich at that point, and he really liked the opera.
He became something of an opera producer and eventually had his own theater, called the Theatre of Monsieur. In his memoirs, Léonard says that he saw Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the king’s sister and children taken “almost captive” to Paris in 1789 – and his heart was “filled with pity.” He stayed behind at Versailles and was the one who took Marie Antoinette her things (that weren’t destroyed).
Léonard writes that on the night of June 12, 1791, he was summoned to the palace where Louis said he needed “a robust fellow like you, [Léonard], sure-footed, able to walk through fields and swim a river if necessary, to avoid falling into a[n] … ambush.” (You can see how a person might think this is embellished, right?) According to this, the king was talking about the famous flight to Varennes, where the royal family made a break for it and hoped to meet up with some sympathetic royal troops.
Léonard was supposed to take a message to them, to let them know that the king was coming – that was “the aim of your mission, do you accept it, Léonard?” He did. But when that mission failed (not his fault!), Léonard went to Luxembourg, disappeared for a little while, showed up in Russia, then areas of what is today Germany. Léonard did get married in 1779, and he did have four children, two of whom survived to adulthood. His wife stayed in France after he fled abroad and divorced him.
His younger brother, Jean-François, who was also a royal hairdresser, was on that famous flight to Varennes. Trying to capitalize on his brother’s fame, he called himself Monsieur Léonard, too, but they were different guys. Jean- François Autié – “called Léonard” – appears on a July 25, 1794 list of guillotine victims. The OG Monsieur Léonard returned to Paris in 1814 under the Bourbon Restoration, where he died in 1820.
As for Rose Bertin, she was in and out of France during the Revolution proper. She went to other royal European courts, where the French émigrés who had fled the Revolution went, like Koblenz, and kept up her work there. She went to the Russian court and dressed the future Tsarina. Rose had time to pack up all her feathers and stuff, though, and some of her workers went with her, so it wasn’t a panicked run – and she came back and forth to Paris.
It was risky, though, because people were not thrilled with her role in stoking Marie Antoinette’s fashion excesses and things could have turned really bad for her. She did rebrand The Grand Mogol – which stayed open all through the Revolution – but instead of fancy feathers for court dresses, she sold red, white, and blue accessories. But. Rose allegedly also tried to help the royal family during their imprisonment.
Because she traveled abroad a lot, there was some suspicion – then and now – that Rose was taking messages to friendly foreign regimes, including to Austria. This isn’t confirmed, but is plausible. Rose did stick by the queen during her last years in Paris, and she made the black mourning dress that Marie Antoinette wore after the execution of Louis XVI. She left Paris again in 1793 – and ended up in London for a time but she was back again
a few years later, still at the fashion game, though it had changed dramatically . She still had famous clients, such as Napoleon’s Josephine – but it never was quite the same. People owed Rose a lot of money – and she didn’t get paid. Her nephews, who inherited her business, tried to collect from the 1260 creditors who had outstanding bills and they were not too successful. Rose never married or had children. She retired to Épinay-sur-Seine, just outside of Paris and died in 1813.
Her house is still there – a bit renovated, but there. As Marie Antoinette’s popularity faded – and then blew up spectacularly – in the lead up to and during the Revolution, so too did Rose and Léonard’s. The hair and the clothes were obvious symbols of the outrageous excess of Versailles – and Marie Antoinette in particular.
The queen took a lot of heat for her expenditures, but they really were only a small part of the overall spending of the crown and other court figures certainly spent their fair share on fashion, too – the real big ticket items were all the wars France was fighting, and people were mad about that too, but the clothes and the hair were top on people’s minds – and they are what we often think about today when we think about the excesses of Versailles.
A lot has changed about fashion, but this, it seems, is a constant. This has been Footnoting History. If you like the podcast, be sure to like and subscribe. Visit our website, Footnotinghistory.com to find links to Further Reading suggestions as well as a calendar of upcoming podcasts. Please help us keep Footnoting History open access by supporting us on Patreon, Ko-Fi, or by purchasing some Footnoting History merch.
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