Le corps de la reine

Caricatured, mocked, and dragged through the mud, Marie-Antoinette no longer inspired respect on the eve of the Revolution. Prints, drawings, and pamphlets depicted a queen who had lost all dignity and sunk into dishonor. Printed and distributed, these caricatures circulated in the corridors of Versailles as well as in the capital's seedy streets. The obscenity and triviality of the remarks were of a rare violence. The queen's body, degraded and soiled, had become an object of mockery. Meanwhile, Louis XVI presented the image of a king gradually abdicating, weak before the Parliamentarians. The condemnation of the queen's body accompanied the noble and bourgeois criticism of the authority of King Louis XVI, who was far less prone to crude caricatures. What links can be made between the good health of power and the depiction of the queen's body? How, then, can we understand the political power of these women and their roles through the literary and artistic representations of their bodies? What do these reflections on the health and appearance of queens tell us about the vision of femininity under the Ancien Régime? If Marie-Antoinette's body is so disdained, is it because the queen's moral decadence is conveyed through the defilement of her body... or is it simply a matter of defiance, in a climate of protest, of flouting the unassailable? Stanis Perez is interviewed by Mari-Gwenn Carichon. Guest: Stanis Perez is an agrégé historian specializing in the Ancien Régime, the history of bodies and doctors (History of Doctors – Artisans and Artists of Health from Antiquity to the Present Day, (Perrin, 2015, €24.50). Stanis Perez has just published Le Corps de la Reine (Perrin, 2019, €25.00) following on from his work on Le Corps du Roi (Perrin, 2018, €25.00) published last year.