marie antoinette and her children.

When most people hear the name Marie Antoinette, they automatically think of her excessive spending, her large outrageous hairdos, or her supposed liasons with both men and women. Very rarely do they consider the queen as a mother. At the moment, I'm working on a project on the late queen Marie Antoinette. Using her as a case study, I'm investigating motherhood (specifically nursing in the both a physical and metaphorical sense) within the larger context of 18th-century France. So therefore it should not be a surprise if you encounter her ghost - or other phantoms of French history - on this blog. 

In 1787, Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun painted a portrait of the queen and her children. With rosy cheeks and a calm expression, the Marie Antoinette in this painting does not appear to be the queen of France, but instead a mother of her children.

The veneration of the mother emerged during the French Enlightenment. Before, mothers rarely cared for their young children. As soon as a child was born, it was immediately sent to live with a wet nurse for the first few years of its life. This was either because the mother had to work, leaving no time to care for children, or the mother had no interest, choosing to wear fancy dresses and attending parties over suckling an infant. Authors like Jean-Jacques Rousseau chastised both these mothers, demanding that women restore their domestic roles in order to bring about a sense of morality in French society. He gives her advice on how to nurse and clothe her child, relishing the idea that a mother should take interest and love her children. The mother is no longer just an instrument to produce children, but also an influential figure in the development of the individual and the French nation as a whole. 

Marie Antoinette was highly influenced by what was “new” in French society. Always wearing the latest fashion or attending the most recent production at the opera, the queen was up-to-date on the hottest trends. However, she was not so knowledgeable on what was happening among the peasant classes, who were finding themselves without bread and rallying the streets against the government. Taking little interest in this issue, the queen was rumored to have said, “Let them eat cake.” (Yet, it is important to note that she never uttered this line, which instead comes from Rousseau’s Confessions, published several years before she even set foot on French soil.) Marie Antoinette became rather unpopular as the years passed. Historians have discussed that LeBrun's portrait of the queen and her children was an attempt to repair her negative image that was circulating throughout French society.

Whether it is true that Marie Antoinette actually commissioned this portrait to try to win the sympathy of the French people, it does portray her embracing the bourgeois ideals of motherhood as outlined by Rousseau. Yet it was not enough to save her from the blade of the guillotine. No matter how hard she tried to emulate what was expected from a mother, there were certain contradictions that existed in her role as queen, which in turn embodies the struggle over what is woman’s "role" in French society during the 18th century as well as during the centuries that were to follow.