We’ve got our teacup all set for the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Saturday, May 6, but what we’ve really been obsessing about is a distant relative of the king’s by way of another Charles — Charles I of England.
He was a direct ancestor of Louis XVI of France, whose marriage to a certain notorious Austrian archduchess is the subject of the revisionist, feminist “Marie Antoinette,” finishing its first season on PBS Sunday, May 7. Quite the royal weekend.
I know what you’re thinking, because I thought the same thing: Why him? Why her? Why them? Aren’t they the king and queen who went to the guillotine, coldly indifferent to the starvation of their people? Wasn’t the narcissistic isolation of Versailles — the magnificent palace built by Louis’ ancestor Louis XIV in homage to himself — encapsulated in Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake” remark when she was told the people had no bread?
She, of course, never said that. And even if she had, the correct translation is “Let them eat brioche,” which is a type of egg bread and could be interpreted to mean “give the people something better.”
That Marie Antoinette has come down through history as a kind of clueless airhead is an example of just how vicious narrative, in particular false narrative, can be. But then we know all about this, don’t we? Look at the brutal lies the far right has spun about its “enemies,” the latest example of which was the $787.5 million settlement Fox News Network paid to Dominion Voting Systems, barely acknowledging the false statements spun about Dominion aiding the “stolen” 2020 presidential election. What if Fox had been around to “report” on Marie Antoinette? She’d have gone to the guillotine twice.
What I’m getting at here is that neither she nor her husband were the monsters that the middle class minds who created the French Revolution invented to whip up the poor masses. (Revolutions are always created by the middle class. Rich people don’t need them. And poor people are too downtrodden to start them, whereas middle class people have just enough wherewithal and discontent to foment rebellion.) But neither would I call “Toinette” a feminist, as the series seeks to portray her.
The problem with revisionist history is that it often swings the pendulum too much in the other direction. Created by Deborah Davis— who gave us the loopy “The Favourite,” about the last of the Stuart rulers of England, Queen Anne, granddaughter of Charles I —”Marie Antoinette” streamlines the story and Louis’ corrosive Bourbon family, eliminating an interfering aunt here and a jealous brother and sister-in-law there as well as a loving sister, to concentrate on the marriage of Maria Antonia, the 15th of Austrian Empress Maria Theresa’s 16 children, and the Dauphin of France, Louis-Auguste, heir and grandson of Louis XV.
She was 14 and he 15 when they wed, a pair of scared, deeply religious, unsophisticated virgins who would not consummate their marriage for seven years. (It didn’t help that their two countries were longstanding enemies, and Louis was suspicious and thus cool to her.) “Complete fumblers,” her big brother, Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, said of the couple after he visited them at Versailles to give them the sex talk that did the trick. (His wry visit is the subject of Episode Six, the best of the seven I’ve seen so far.)
The series — and its stunning stars, Russian-born German actress Emilia Schüle and British actor Louis Cunningham, son of Princess Charlotte Phyllis Marie of Luxembourg — do a terrific job of painting a portrait of the disaster an arranged marriage can be when the couple have no chance to get to know each other and thus make the arrangement their own. I say can be, because I think Louis and Toinette ultimately loved each other.
And that’s the great flaw of Davis’ film. In an effort to create and sustain dramatic tension, she seesaws between a couple in love and one in loathing. They were indeed opposites, it’s true, with the musical, party-loving Toinette the night to her shy, serious, bookish, hunting husband’s day. But unlike the series Toinette, the real Marie Antoinette made a great effort to enter the world of her husband, who liked locks, clocks, animals and the sciences and was clearly on the spectrum. (Certainly, Cunningham portrays him as neurodivergent and that’s how Nancy Goldstone sees him in “In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters,” Back Bay Books, 2021).
Nor would Louis clumsily force himself on his wife, as the series would have it. She and he were devout Roman Catholics looking to redress the sexual excesses of the lecherous Louis XV’s court. Unlike the two previous Louises, Louis XVI saw his wife as wife and mistress. He gave her Le Petit Trianon, the palace reserved for the king’s favorite mistress, as her own, and would row himself there for morning trysts.
He was an idealistic king who wished to reform the antiquated, inequitable, financially ruinous French bureaucracy and funded the American Revolution, in part to get back at enemy England but also because he thought the Americans could win. (Les Américains arrive in Episode Eight, bringing their own special brand of chaos with them.) For her part, Marie Antoinette had been raised to give alms to the poor. They were hands-on parents to their four surviving children, unusual for their time, and adopted the children of servants who died. We’re not talking the Marquis de Sade or even “Les Liaisons Dangereuses” here.
But when revolution came to France, the king and his already unpopular wife could not counter the demonic narrative that others had created about them. They lacked the training and perhaps the temperament to lead and rule. He had always been a waffler, wanting to be liked and not wishing civil war to tear his country apart as had happened to England under Charles I. Now Toinette took the lead. (She wasn’t Maria Theresa’s baby girl for nothing.) Marie Antoinette doubled down on the monarchy and, when that didn’t work, orchestrated the family’s escape.
It wasn’t to be. And so Louis and Toinette suffered the same fate as Charles I, losing their heads for a kingdom they couldn’t hold. Had they been willing to lead a constitutional monarchy, like the one the hated England became, they might’ve lived. But Louis and Toinette belonged to an age of absolute rulers and absolute power that would have its last gasp with Napoleon and the Russian tsars —though today’s strongmen are giving them a run for their money.
Ultimately, Louis and Marie Antoinette were better than their press and the hypocritical revolutionaries whose desire for power was no less great and who suffered the same bloody end. — proving that just because you aren’t royal or rich and famous doesn’t make you noble.
There is, as Jesus noted, a difference between being poor and being “poor in spirit.”
But perhaps Louis and Marie Antoinette were better than Davis’ TV series, too — not that our ahistorical society would know or care. For those of us who do care about such things, history, like the truth, tends to lie somewhere in the middle and is indeed stranger than fiction.