Thank you for listening to the rest is history. For weekly bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club that is the restishory.com. tom, we've got brilliant news for the listeners, haven't we? Because although we are going on a tour to the United States in the autumn, we're a patriotic podcast. So we didn't want to leave people in our own beloved country feeling neglected. So we'll be going to two very different and diverse places in our United Kingdom, won't we, to meet the public?

We Antoinette would dominate the new king. So says John Hardman in his book, Marie Antoinette, the making of a french queen. Now, that idea that Louis XVI, who, of course, is a very ill fated king, because as most of our listeners will know, he ends up having an appointment with the guillotine. Is it fair to say, Tom, that he is merely her puppet? He is a weaker man, isn't he, the Marian Swinette. Let's talk about their relationship a bit. Do they anyway, he says good night. Thank you very much. All good. And they're not actually completing the necessary act. And basically they need doctors or courtiers or whoever to explain to them.Well, according to tradition, Joseph II makes that report after he's been on a trip to Versailles and he's spoken to both the king and the queen.Yeah.And the tradition is that he explains what needs to be done to Louis XVI with reference to a lock and a key.Right. Yeah, he would enjoy the lock analogy. I find the whole thing slightly implausible, but anyway.But there's no question that this makes him a kind of object of some contempt, which in many ways is unfair, because I think you're right. You know, he is dutiful, he is hardworking, he is conscientious. He does develop a reputation for kindness. Maybe cats. Accepted. So Chantal Thomas writes, for a sovereign, the line between goodness and imbecility was easily crossed. And I think that Louis XVI is on that line, that people can admire him as a good man while simultaneously despising him as someone who is incompetent or useless. As a sovereign.He's not an impressive man. He's not a charismatic or formidable mandeh. Inspire respect. He's probably quite a nice man, but a weak man. Is that fair, Tom?I think probably, yes. I think it's felt that he is not of royal material, really. But having said that, whether it's Joseph II or not, who manages to explain to him what he's got to do, they do finally get together and Marie Antoinette gives Louis four children, including, crucially, two sons. So a dauphin and a spare.Yeah.Which is obviously very important. And they end up, you know, quite a devoted couple.Yeah.Amazingly, he doesn't take a mistress. So on one level,this to Marie Antoinette. So now it's the queens, and she absolutely loves it. You know, we've talked about how resentful and hostile she is to the kind of stifling etiquette of Versailles. The Petit Trianon offers her a bolt hole and it gives her the perfect opportunity to vent all her, you know, qualities of spontaneity and simplicity and impulse that she loves.So on that you were saying about her not reading a book? Simon Sharma says in citizens like all adolescent girls of her generation, she drank deep at the well of center mental literature. Her library was full of Samuel Richardson, Rousseau, Mercier, restive de Breton, etcetera. Now, her library was full of them. Maybe she didn't necessarily read them, but as sharma says, she is steeped in the culture that is the most modern, fashionable, forward looking. She's not stuck in the mud, she's not a relic of the ancien regime. She's interested, particularly in the stuff that people associate with the philosopher, the thinker, which are virtue, simplicity, nature, a sort of, as you said, spontaneity.Yeah. And these are all qualities that will come to be seen in due course as features of the revolution.Yeah.But Marie Antoinette is a massive enthusiast for them. So much so that, amazingly, in 1782, she goes and visits Rousseau's grave outside Paris. So she's a kind of a pilgrim.You think she's picked up the ideas but not read the books, basically.I don't know. I mean, she's probably skimmed through.I think that's perfectly possible, too, by the way. I mean, that's how most people actually pick up fashionable ideas, isn't it, these days that you pick them up on facebook or in conversation, you don't necessarily read the wellspring.Yeah. And she is, for that reason, very, very fashionable, because her lack of enthusiasm for fashion as prescribed beauversaille itself, becomes the fashion and the enthusiasm for Rousseau, the idea that one should lead a simple, unadorned life and that this is the key to virtue. At the petit tree, the emphasis is on hiding the presence of servants. So in Versailles, it's all about having as many servants as possible. You know, every time Marie Antoinette gets dressed, hundreds of maids surround her to do it in. The petty trianor is different. And kind of famously, she commissions a landscape architect to design her an amouristique, a kind of a rustic hamlet, a rustic village that has cows with ribbons on alpine sheep, a water mill. And this, of course, becomes notorious. Yeah, because it's the idea of a queen pretending to be a shepherdess that strikes up all kinds of unfortunate resonances. But you know, she is the embodiment.Of fashion, but only notorious because the revolution happens.Yeah, I think so.You know, had Frances finances been in better shape and there's no revolution, people.Would be charmed by this.Yeah. People would say it was an entertaining quirk of 18th century, you know, monarchical life. They wouldn't think anything of it.Yeah. And far from kind of saying that the poor should eat cake, she's very worried about the poor.Okay.I mean, the poor as kind of represented by photogenic paupers who can be given charity by her.She's the Angelina Jolie of the 18th century, Tom.Yes. So, 1785, she lodges and feeds twelve poor families at the Petit Trianor. So she's very like a celebrity.Yeah.And there's a quality of the fact that I think she's very impressed by the sense she has of her own virtue.Right.And she wants people to know about it while simultaneously genuinely being worried about it. I mean, all of those things can be true, of course. And. And she wants to make sure that her children are raised in this. She's a very, very good mother, a very attentive mother. So 1784, the year before that, it's been a terrible winter, and she provides her wearing. It's not. They're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of french kind of hierarchical dress.Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette in a way invents modern fashion, and she does that because she is whatever the French say. She is the queen of France for that reason. She has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it. And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the french revolution. And Marie Antoinette to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's head by Will Bashaw, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard who will feature throughout the story. And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, you know, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser.And like Madame Bertin has ready access to her.So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

Antoinette would dominate the new king. So says John Hardman in his book, Marie Antoinette, the making of a french queen. Now, that idea that Louis XVI, who, of course, is a very ill fated king, because as most of our listeners will know, he ends up having an appointment with the guillotine. Is it fair to say, Tom, that he is merely her puppet? He is a weaker man, isn't he, the Marian Swinette. Let's talk about their relationship a bit. Do they anyway, he says good night. Thank you very much. All good. And they're not actually completing the necessary act. And basically they need doctors or courtiers or whoever to explain to them.Well, according to tradition, Joseph II makes that report after he's been on a trip to Versailles and he's spoken to both the king and the queen.Yeah.And the tradition is that he explains what needs to be done to Louis XVI with reference to a lock and a key.Right. Yeah, he would enjoy the lock analogy. I find the whole thing slightly implausible, but anyway.But there's no question that this makes him a kind of object of some contempt, which in many ways is unfair, because I think you're right. You know, he is dutiful, he is hardworking, he is conscientious. He does develop a reputation for kindness. Maybe cats. Accepted. So Chantal Thomas writes, for a sovereign, the line between goodness and imbecility was easily crossed. And I think that Louis XVI is on that line, that people can admire him as a good man while simultaneously despising him as someone who is incompetent or useless. As a sovereign.He's not an impressive man. He's not a charismatic or formidable mandeh. Inspire respect. He's probably quite a nice man, but a weak man. Is that fair, Tom?I think probably, yes. I think it's felt that he is not of royal material, really. But having said that, whether it's Joseph II or not, who manages to explain to him what he's got to do, they do finally get together and Marie Antoinette gives Louis four children, including, crucially, two sons. So a dauphin and a spare.Yeah.Which is obviously very important. And they end up, you know, quite a devoted couple.Yeah.Amazingly, he doesn't take a mistress. So on one level,this to Marie Antoinette. So now it's the queens, and she absolutely loves it. You know, we've talked about how resentful and hostile she is to the kind of stifling etiquette of Versailles. The Petit Trianon offers her a bolt hole and it gives her the perfect opportunity to vent all her, you know, qualities of spontaneity and simplicity and impulse that she loves.So on that you were saying about her not reading a book? Simon Sharma says in citizens like all adolescent girls of her generation, she drank deep at the well of center mental literature. Her library was full of Samuel Richardson, Rousseau, Mercier, restive de Breton, etcetera. Now, her library was full of them. Maybe she didn't necessarily read them, but as sharma says, she is steeped in the culture that is the most modern, fashionable, forward looking. She's not stuck in the mud, she's not a relic of the ancien regime. She's interested, particularly in the stuff that people associate with the philosopher, the thinker, which are virtue, simplicity, nature, a sort of, as you said, spontaneity.Yeah. And these are all qualities that will come to be seen in due course as features of the revolution.Yeah.But Marie Antoinette is a massive enthusiast for them. So much so that, amazingly, in 1782, she goes and visits Rousseau's grave outside Paris. So she's a kind of a pilgrim.You think she's picked up the ideas but not read the books, basically.I don't know. I mean, she's probably skimmed through.I think that's perfectly possible, too, by the way. I mean, that's how most people actually pick up fashionable ideas, isn't it, these days that you pick them up on facebook or in conversation, you don't necessarily read the wellspring.Yeah. And she is, for that reason, very, very fashionable, because her lack of enthusiasm for fashion as prescribed beauversaille itself, becomes the fashion and the enthusiasm for Rousseau, the idea that one should lead a simple, unadorned life and that this is the key to virtue. At the petit tree, the emphasis is on hiding the presence of servants. So in Versailles, it's all about having as many servants as possible. You know, every time Marie Antoinette gets dressed, hundreds of maids surround her to do it in. The petty trianor is different. And kind of famously, she commissions a landscape architect to design her an amouristique, a kind of a rustic hamlet, a rustic village that has cows with ribbons on alpine sheep, a water mill. And this, of course, becomes notorious. Yeah, because it's the idea of a queen pretending to be a shepherdess that strikes up all kinds of unfortunate resonances. But you know, she is the embodiment.Of fashion, but only notorious because the revolution happens.Yeah, I think so.You know, had Frances finances been in better shape and there's no revolution, people.Would be charmed by this.Yeah. People would say it was an entertaining quirk of 18th century, you know, monarchical life. They wouldn't think anything of it.Yeah. And far from kind of saying that the poor should eat cake, she's very worried about the poor.Okay.I mean, the poor as kind of represented by photogenic paupers who can be given charity by her.She's the Angelina Jolie of the 18th century, Tom.Yes. So, 1785, she lodges and feeds twelve poor families at the Petit Trianor. So she's very like a celebrity.Yeah.And there's a quality of the fact that I think she's very impressed by the sense she has of her own virtue.Right.And she wants people to know about it while simultaneously genuinely being worried about it. I mean, all of those things can be true, of course. And. And she wants to make sure that her children are raised in this. She's a very, very good mother, a very attentive mother. So 1784, the year before that, it's been a terrible winter, and she provides her wearing. It's not. They're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of french kind of hierarchical dress.Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette in a way invents modern fashion, and she does that because she is whatever the French say. She is the queen of France for that reason. She has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it. And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the french revolution. And Marie Antoinette to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's head by Will Bashaw, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard who will feature throughout the story. And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, you know, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser.And like Madame Bertin has ready access to her.So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

anyway, he says good night. Thank you very much. All good. And they're not actually completing the necessary act. And basically they need doctors or courtiers or whoever to explain to them.

Well, according to tradition, Joseph II makes that report after he's been on a trip to Versailles and he's spoken to both the king and the queen.

Yeah.

And the tradition is that he explains what needs to be done to Louis XVI with reference to a lock and a key.

Right. Yeah, he would enjoy the lock analogy. I find the whole thing slightly implausible, but anyway.

But there's no question that this makes him a kind of object of some contempt, which in many ways is unfair, because I think you're right. You know, he is dutiful, he is hardworking, he is conscientious. He does develop a reputation for kindness. Maybe cats. Accepted. So Chantal Thomas writes, for a sovereign, the line between goodness and imbecility was easily crossed. And I think that Louis XVI is on that line, that people can admire him as a good man while simultaneously despising him as someone who is incompetent or useless. As a sovereign.

He's not an impressive man. He's not a charismatic or formidable mandeh. Inspire respect. He's probably quite a nice man, but a weak man. Is that fair, Tom?

I think probably, yes. I think it's felt that he is not of royal material, really. But having said that, whether it's Joseph II or not, who manages to explain to him what he's got to do, they do finally get together and Marie Antoinette gives Louis four children, including, crucially, two sons. So a dauphin and a spare.

Yeah.

Which is obviously very important. And they end up, you know, quite a devoted couple.

Yeah.

Amazingly, he doesn't take a mistress. So on one level,this to Marie Antoinette. So now it's the queens, and she absolutely loves it. You know, we've talked about how resentful and hostile she is to the kind of stifling etiquette of Versailles. The Petit Trianon offers her a bolt hole and it gives her the perfect opportunity to vent all her, you know, qualities of spontaneity and simplicity and impulse that she loves.So on that you were saying about her not reading a book? Simon Sharma says in citizens like all adolescent girls of her generation, she drank deep at the well of center mental literature. Her library was full of Samuel Richardson, Rousseau, Mercier, restive de Breton, etcetera. Now, her library was full of them. Maybe she didn't necessarily read them, but as sharma says, she is steeped in the culture that is the most modern, fashionable, forward looking. She's not stuck in the mud, she's not a relic of the ancien regime. She's interested, particularly in the stuff that people associate with the philosopher, the thinker, which are virtue, simplicity, nature, a sort of, as you said, spontaneity.Yeah. And these are all qualities that will come to be seen in due course as features of the revolution.Yeah.But Marie Antoinette is a massive enthusiast for them. So much so that, amazingly, in 1782, she goes and visits Rousseau's grave outside Paris. So she's a kind of a pilgrim.You think she's picked up the ideas but not read the books, basically.I don't know. I mean, she's probably skimmed through.I think that's perfectly possible, too, by the way. I mean, that's how most people actually pick up fashionable ideas, isn't it, these days that you pick them up on facebook or in conversation, you don't necessarily read the wellspring.Yeah. And she is, for that reason, very, very fashionable, because her lack of enthusiasm for fashion as prescribed beauversaille itself, becomes the fashion and the enthusiasm for Rousseau, the idea that one should lead a simple, unadorned life and that this is the key to virtue. At the petit tree, the emphasis is on hiding the presence of servants. So in Versailles, it's all about having as many servants as possible. You know, every time Marie Antoinette gets dressed, hundreds of maids surround her to do it in. The petty trianor is different. And kind of famously, she commissions a landscape architect to design her an amouristique, a kind of a rustic hamlet, a rustic village that has cows with ribbons on alpine sheep, a water mill. And this, of course, becomes notorious. Yeah, because it's the idea of a queen pretending to be a shepherdess that strikes up all kinds of unfortunate resonances. But you know, she is the embodiment.Of fashion, but only notorious because the revolution happens.Yeah, I think so.You know, had Frances finances been in better shape and there's no revolution, people.Would be charmed by this.Yeah. People would say it was an entertaining quirk of 18th century, you know, monarchical life. They wouldn't think anything of it.Yeah. And far from kind of saying that the poor should eat cake, she's very worried about the poor.Okay.I mean, the poor as kind of represented by photogenic paupers who can be given charity by her.She's the Angelina Jolie of the 18th century, Tom.Yes. So, 1785, she lodges and feeds twelve poor families at the Petit Trianor. So she's very like a celebrity.Yeah.And there's a quality of the fact that I think she's very impressed by the sense she has of her own virtue.Right.And she wants people to know about it while simultaneously genuinely being worried about it. I mean, all of those things can be true, of course. And. And she wants to make sure that her children are raised in this. She's a very, very good mother, a very attentive mother. So 1784, the year before that, it's been a terrible winter, and she provides her wearing. It's not. They're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of french kind of hierarchical dress.Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette in a way invents modern fashion, and she does that because she is whatever the French say. She is the queen of France for that reason. She has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it. And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the french revolution. And Marie Antoinette to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's head by Will Bashaw, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard who will feature throughout the story. And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, you know, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser.And like Madame Bertin has ready access to her.So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

this to Marie Antoinette. So now it's the queens, and she absolutely loves it. You know, we've talked about how resentful and hostile she is to the kind of stifling etiquette of Versailles. The Petit Trianon offers her a bolt hole and it gives her the perfect opportunity to vent all her, you know, qualities of spontaneity and simplicity and impulse that she loves.

So on that you were saying about her not reading a book? Simon Sharma says in citizens like all adolescent girls of her generation, she drank deep at the well of center mental literature. Her library was full of Samuel Richardson, Rousseau, Mercier, restive de Breton, etcetera. Now, her library was full of them. Maybe she didn't necessarily read them, but as sharma says, she is steeped in the culture that is the most modern, fashionable, forward looking. She's not stuck in the mud, she's not a relic of the ancien regime. She's interested, particularly in the stuff that people associate with the philosopher, the thinker, which are virtue, simplicity, nature, a sort of, as you said, spontaneity.

Yeah. And these are all qualities that will come to be seen in due course as features of the revolution.

Yeah.

But Marie Antoinette is a massive enthusiast for them. So much so that, amazingly, in 1782, she goes and visits Rousseau's grave outside Paris. So she's a kind of a pilgrim.

You think she's picked up the ideas but not read the books, basically.

I don't know. I mean, she's probably skimmed through.

I think that's perfectly possible, too, by the way. I mean, that's how most people actually pick up fashionable ideas, isn't it, these days that you pick them up on facebook or in conversation, you don't necessarily read the wellspring.

Yeah. And she is, for that reason, very, very fashionable, because her lack of enthusiasm for fashion as prescribed beauversaille itself, becomes the fashion and the enthusiasm for Rousseau, the idea that one should lead a simple, unadorned life and that this is the key to virtue. At the petit tree, the emphasis is on hiding the presence of servants. So in Versailles, it's all about having as many servants as possible. You know, every time Marie Antoinette gets dressed, hundreds of maids surround her to do it in. The petty trianor is different. And kind of famously, she commissions a landscape architect to design her an amouristique, a kind of a rustic hamlet, a rustic village that has cows with ribbons on alpine sheep, a water mill. And this, of course, becomes notorious. Yeah, because it's the idea of a queen pretending to be a shepherdess that strikes up all kinds of unfortunate resonances. But you know, she is the embodiment.

Of fashion, but only notorious because the revolution happens.

Yeah, I think so.

You know, had Frances finances been in better shape and there's no revolution, people.

Would be charmed by this.

Yeah. People would say it was an entertaining quirk of 18th century, you know, monarchical life. They wouldn't think anything of it.

Yeah. And far from kind of saying that the poor should eat cake, she's very worried about the poor.

Okay.

I mean, the poor as kind of represented by photogenic paupers who can be given charity by her.

She's the Angelina Jolie of the 18th century, Tom.

Yes. So, 1785, she lodges and feeds twelve poor families at the Petit Trianor. So she's very like a celebrity.

Yeah.

And there's a quality of the fact that I think she's very impressed by the sense she has of her own virtue.

Right.

And she wants people to know about it while simultaneously genuinely being worried about it. I mean, all of those things can be true, of course. And. And she wants to make sure that her children are raised in this. She's a very, very good mother, a very attentive mother. So 1784, the year before that, it's been a terrible winter, and she provides her wearing. It's not. They're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of french kind of hierarchical dress.Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette in a way invents modern fashion, and she does that because she is whatever the French say. She is the queen of France for that reason. She has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it. And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the french revolution. And Marie Antoinette to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's head by Will Bashaw, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard who will feature throughout the story. And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, you know, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser.And like Madame Bertin has ready access to her.So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

wearing. It's not. They're wearing them earlier. They're wearing them at the same time. But she is breaking with the rules of french kind of hierarchical dress.

Absolutely. And, you know, I said that Marie Antoinette in a way invents modern fashion, and she does that because she is whatever the French say. She is the queen of France for that reason. She has the highest profile of any woman in Europe, but also because she's a genius at it. And the idea of waking up every morning and just deciding what you want to wear, you know, what clothes you're going to have, how you're going to do your hair rather than having it prescribed according to rigid structures is something revolutionary, you know, literally revolutionary, because this is the style of fashion that will come in during the french revolution. And Marie Antoinette to that extent, I think, is the godmother of France's modern reputation as the home of fashion. And we've talked about clothes. There is also hair. So there's an absolutely wonderful book with the great title Marie Antoinette's head by Will Bashaw, which is about her hairdresser, who is a man called Monsieur Leonard who will feature throughout the story. And again, this is very, very shocking that he's a male hairdresser, you know, not a lady's maid. He's a celebrity hairdresser.

And like Madame Bertin has ready access to her.So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

So that's kind of going back to nature there. And they're kind of curled to the tips and rising in tears. So it looks like an aeris or hedgehog. There's the zephyr, which is flowers woven into the hair. So again, there's the sense that you're moving from kind of stiff formality to nature. And then in 1781, Monsieur Leonard is summoned by Marion Tonnet, who's distraught because she feels that she's losing her hair and her hair is thinning. And Monsieur Leonard is devastated by this and he goes away and he thinks about it and then he comes back and he does something revolutionary. He cuts her hair, he gives her the cafe a l'enfant, a child's hairstyle. He starts to decorate it only with flowers, not with jewels. And it creates this fashion for natural hairstyles that spreads across versailles, spreads across Paris, spreads across France, spreads across Europe.

And she has people who are around her, doesn't she? You use the expression her squad, which makes was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.It'S not really in her character. You think?Yeah, it's not her style.Yeah.And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.Yeah.And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.Right.Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.Yeah.And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.Yeah.I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.Yeah.And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.The affair of the diamond necklace.It's an amazing story.It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.Thank you very much, Dominic.And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.

was a serious discussion, she never spoke, pretending to fall into a trance. Then she would suddenly appear to snap out of her reverie and repeat word for word as though it came from her what the person whose opinion she had decided to adopt had just said.

She affected great surprise when told someone had just said the same thing. She assured everyone she hadn't heard of it. So I think you get there a sense that Marie Antoinette likes these people precisely because they are not witty, they are not brilliant. She can enjoy their company. Inevitably, gossip will say that they're all lesbians, that they're all engaging in sapphic rites. The duchess de polignac in particular, who becomes widely, widely hated, but both of them are strongly disliked. There are also male guests going to the Petit Trianon, of whom the most notorious is a dashing swedish officer called Axel von de Fersen, who is the son of a field marshal and who had met Marie Antoinette at a masked ball at the opera in 1774, when she was still the dauphine and he hadn't recognized her, which is obviously a kind of great thrill for Marie Antoinette. And from that point on, the regular visits, the two indisputably become close again. It is taken for granted that they are sleeping. I think this is most unlikely because.

It'S not really in her character. You think?

Yeah, it's not her style.

Yeah.

And it would be mad for her to do that. But there is clearly a kind of heedlessness about this. I mean, to have these kind of very close, intimate relationships.

Yeah.

And to kind of thumb her nose at the formalities and the hierarchies of Versailles to bring down everything that the Comtesse de Neuilly had represented. I mean, she's building up trouble for herself.

She is. There's an amazing quotation, actually, from her brother Joseph II, who wrote their brother Leopold, and he said, she has no etiquette. She goes out and runs around alone or with a few people. Without the outward signs of her position, she looks a little improper. And while this would be all right for a private person, she is not doing her job. And that is the issue, isn't it, that she's not playing the part of a french queen as the french people expect.

No, she's not. And I think what is more and even more damaging for her is that she's actually playing the part of a mistress.

Right.

Because the petty trianor is where the mistress lives and queens are not supposed to live like mistresses. So over the course of Louis XVI's reign, going into the 1780s, she's coming to be hated as queens often are, hated as kind of, you know, the embodiment of royal arrogance and of kind of absolutism. But she's also being hated as favorites are. You know, she's being cast as a kind of a voracious, greedy, blood sucking nymphomaniac.

Yeah.

And the pair of these images are kind of being fused because a mistress is always being accused of extravagance.

Yeah. Comes to the territory. Right.

That's what they're there to do, yeah. And kind of amazingly, stories start to be repeated that Marie Antoinette is literally maintaining, at the expense of the state, a whole tank full of leeches, which is a kind of horrible idea.

Yeah, that's sort of metaphor. Yeah.

And also, of course, mistresses are sexually promiscuous. And so this is what. Why the stories that she's having, you know, sapphic affairs and sleeping with, you know, swedish officers and things like that. It's why they. They have such currency.

And the interesting thing about that, Tom, is that they start, I think it's. Robert Darnton makes this point that they start in 1774, so 15 years before the revolution, and when she's still only 1819 years old. So very early on these stories that she has this kind of voracious sexual appetite that her lock obsessed husband is not satisfied and that, you know, there's this kind of extravagance and depravity sucking the energy and the money out of France. They start very early, don't they? She's never able to shake them. Right.

And to reiterate, because I think this is so important, these stories are not coming from republican people who. Who hate the monarchy. It's coming from her rivals at the court. These are the people who are spreading it. And it reflects a character of libertinism that you get at the court that Louis Vuitton had exemplified and which you get in Leclo's great novel, dangerous liaisons as translated people who've seen the film.

Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing is about debauching people. The idea that the aristocracy are cruel and sexually predatory. And, of course, the writer who absolutely exemplifies this is the Marquis Dessard, who we did an episode on. And there's a sense in which the Marquis de Sade is reworking ideas that are very, very current in pornography at the time. And Marie Antoinette, who had refused to speak to Madame du Barry because, you know, she'd been a courtesan who had been so unsexually voracious that, you know, the marriage hadn't been consummated for seven years, she comes to be the kind of the protagonist of pornographic fantasies that are increasingly revolting and shocking in the way that the Marquis de Sard's writings are revolting and shocking.

Yeah.

And listeners may be wondering, well, does any of this matter? And it does matter matter because it comes to threaten the reputation not just of the queen, but of the king and of the monarchy itself. The thing is that in the early 1780s, all these rumors and stories and fantasies. They lack an obvious focus. They are underground. They are being percolated by kind of court rivalries. But then in 1784, there's an absolute catastrophe because Marie Antoinette finds herself engulfed in a complete firestorm of scandal. And actually, Dominic, it's not just a scandal, it's an affair.

The affair of the diamond necklace.

It's an amazing story.

It is an absolutely incredible story. And you'll be taking us through this tomorrow, actually, won't you? People don't have to wait. It's tomorrow? Yes, because we're going to be running this series over the next two weeks. Now, if you want to hear about the affair of the diamond necklace. And then we'll be getting into the corning of the states general, the fall of the Bastille, the course of the revolution, the ideas behind the revolution, and then the rising panic and terror of the king and queen and their decision to flee France, which obviously ends up going wrong. If you want to listen to all that right away, you can do so by being a member of the rest is history club. If you're not a member already, you can subscribe at the restish history.com. but Tom, thank you so much for that. I think there's only one expression, given that we are in 18th century France, that was a genuine tour de force.

Thank you very much, Dominic.

And on that bombshell, au revoir, everybody, and see you tomorrow. Bye bye. Adama.