Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber is a tad out of AMTs time period, but I thought I'd recommend it just the same as it approached Marie Antoinette from an interestingly different perspective. I was particularly intrigued by the author's premise that since Louis XVI was one of the few French kings who lacked a maitresse en titre, & the French were used to reviling the king's mistresses (such as, for example, Madame du Pompadour) for their extravagance, trend-setting in fashion, & pillow-talk policy whispers into le roi's ear, they turned on Marie Antoinette because she acted more like a mistress than what the French had come to expect from their queens. She was being pilloried in the press almost from the beginning for her tenure as Dauphine & was never totally accepted by the French as other foreign queens had been, remaining the hated "l'Autrichienne" to her death. |
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