Prologue: Consorts and Fashionistas

Summary

Abstract

The prologue questions one of the central tenets of eighteenth-century French garden historiography, which holds that the English garden style was exported from Britain to France. Examining the marriage contracts of Queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine, Marie-Louise, and Eugénie reveals that each consort developed her gardens as a liminal zone within the parameters of court patronage. The prologue situates the picturesque as a design strategy rather than an aesthetic movement. The patrons are considered celebrities, who championed the picturesque as a signifier of their taste, a means to project their agency and a place to curate their legacies.

Keywords: Picturesque, Marie-Antoinette, Joséphine, Marie-Louise, Eugénie, gardens, consorts

French Consorts 1770–1867

During the ancien régime in France, women at the court moved unselfconsciously into the world of politics as they fulfilled their responsibilities as consorts, mothers, sisters, and widows. French absolutism dictated that queens could not rule autonomously and remained one of the king's subjects, beholden to him and dependent on his largesse. Queen consorts were implicated in high politics and statecraft because they enjoyed institutional ceremonial functions and were inexorably tied to political stability: procreation sustained the ruling family's bloodlines. Queens shared the sovereign's magnificence precisely because they enjoyed privileged access to the king's body, effectively occupying spaces at the interstices of public and private life.

When Fanny Cosandey published her masterly study of the history of French queenship, La reine de France: Symbole et pouvoir, XV–XVIIIe siècles (2000), she argued on the basis of her examination of judicial and ceremonial archives, that while the Salic Law (1328) prevented queens from assuming autonomous rule, their status was critical to the formulation of French absolutism.4 She theorized that French queenship, incarnated in ceremony and etiquette, established the dignity of the sovereign, which distinguished the queen from royal mistresses and other favorites.5 In the last decades of the ancien régime, political theory and contemporary exigencies of curial practice increasingly excluded queens from participating in institutional power structures, diminishing queenly regalia and focusing primarily on the queen's duty as a progenitor who served the crown.

Twenty years later, on the occasion of the exhibition Marie-Antoinette: Metamorphoses d’une image (2020), Cosandey expanded upon her earlier writings by suggesting that whatever the assessment of Marie-Antoinette's agency, the vulnerability of the institution of queenship itself exposed the fragility of monarchy.