Films, biographies, souvenir scarves and even umbrellas: what is the secret of Marie-Antoinette's continuing appeal, more than two hundred years after her death in the French Revolution, asks David Tresilian Whatever else it is that explains the present fascination with Marie-Antoinette, the last, Austrian- born queen of ancien régime France, it is not a lack of familiarity with her life. With more than two hundred years of historical writing on the French Revolution now behind them -- bicentennial celebrations took place in 1989 -- today's historians can have little hope of turning up anything new about Marie-Antoinette's short life and early death. There can be few people today who do not know that Marie- Antoinette died by the guillotine during the Reign of Terror that swept France in 1793, some three years after the Revolution. Probably there are many who still know, or think they know, Marie- Antoinette's words on being told of the starvation in France during the years leading up to the revolutionary year of 1789. If the people are hungry, she is supposed to have said, "let them eat cake," though modern historians have cast doubt on the story. Nevertheless, the fascination continues, and, following a 2006 Hollywood film which brought plaudits for its writer and director, Sophia Coppola, and a sympathetic, even definitive, biography of the queen by British historian Lady Antonia Fraser in 2001, the Grand Palais in Paris has now organised what must surely be the largest-ever exhibition devoted to Marie-Antoinette, running until June this year. Almost inevitably the exhibition includes a lot of padding, since there are simply not enough souvenirs of Marie-Antoinette's life to fill the vast spaces of the Grand Palais, and the curators have had to fill the gaps with contextual material. The overall conception seems to have been to excite the visitor's sympathy for the queen, presented, as she was in Coppola's film, as a young ingénue helplessly caught up in the protocols of ancien régime France, before becoming a victim of popular hatred and revolutionary violence. This means that the exhibition, never less than tastefully designed, is moving in its way, and, like a familiar tragic play, it has the advantage of a clear narrative line leading to the inevitable nemesis. There are also some fascinating portraits along the way, most of them produced to represent aspects of the French monarchy for public consumption, whether in the martial poses of Louis XVI, later sentenced to death by a revolutionary tribunal in early 1793, or in the maternal ones adopted by Marie- Antoinette herself in the famous portraits by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun that have been brought together for the occasion. Some of these images will be familiar, though rendered freshly poignant by their new setting, while others will be much less so. There is an imposing image of Marie-Antoinette's mother, the Austrian empress Maria Theresa, for example, that makes her look like a particularly severe 18th-century version of Queen Victoria, and there are doll-like portraits of Louis's brothers, the comtes de Provence and Artois, who were later crowned as Louis XVIII and Charles X, respectively, after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815, finely featured and with implausibly beautiful eyes. There is also an intriguing miniature of the Swedish soldier-diplomat Count Fersen, Marie-Antoinette's closest male friend and possibly also her lover, which has been brought from the family castle in Sweden for the exhibition. According to the comte de Saint-Prest, a courtier at Versailles, the queen first noticed Fersen in 1779 when he was detailed to the French court. "She was struck by how handsome he was: tall, lively, perfectly built, with beautiful eyes and a dark but animated complexion, he was made to give to the roving eye of a woman in search of striking impressions more than she had bargained for." All this is wonderfully diverting, but there is nevertheless a suspicion that, in wandering through the ample galleries, what is being presented overall is less history than "heritage", with all the meretricious connotations that this word has gained. No one visiting this exhibition will get much sense of the crisis that had dominated French politics, and particularly French finances, in the years before the Revolution, or of the incompetence of ancien régime rule, making at least its reform inevitable and perhaps also its violent removal. Instead, what is presented here is a nostalgic look at a lost, enchanted world, one that is made all the more affecting by passing the exquisite civilisation of 18th- century France under review, amply demonstrated by the pictures, furnishings and porcelain on display, when compared with the cruelty and violence that replaced it. Perhaps one needs to be reminded that this nostalgia is itself a cliché, and one that has been around for as long as the Revolution has been written about and in any case at least since Tocqueville. The presumption is that cruelty and violence were alien to ancien régime rule, when in fact they were a native part of it, though one that was generally not visible from the windows at Versailles. The exhibition starts with Marie-Antoinette's childhood and education in Austria, showing how she played a role in her family's dynastic schemes from a very young age by being married off to the heir to the French throne, whom she had never met, at the age of only 14. Once at Versailles, the reshaping of her life began in earnest, and Marie-Antoinette, instructed by her mother from afar, was remade as the future, and then the actual, French queen. The first of what was to become a stream of official portraits was commissioned, and Marie-Antoinette tried, at first with little success, to insinuate herself into her husband's affections. "My tastes are not the same as those of the king, who only thinks about hunting and mechanical toys," she wrote to a friend (Louis XVI was a keen hobbyist), and there were no children for an uncomfortably long time. Efforts were made, at first successfully, to shape the queen's image, both in the eyes of the court and of the Paris public. The exhibition explains all this in quite some detail in its early rooms, showing how the inspired choice of Vigée Le Brun, then a little-known painter, as Marie-Antoinette's official portraitist led to a series of immediately recognisable images, including a magnificent one of Marie-Antoinette as queen of France, packed off to her mother the Empress Maria Theresa in 1779. Things turned sour, of course, and as the political crisis deepened Marie-Antoinette became more and more unpopular, eventually being accused not only of wasting public money, as in the notorious affair of the "queen's diamond necklace," but also of acting as an agent of a foreign power. Though she was probably innocent of any involvement in the necklace affair, in which her name was used as collateral for a vastly expensive piece of jewelry (a replica is on display), accusations of frivolity and waste stuck. Efforts were made to redress the royal image by a new round of portraits, including one with her three children in maternal pose, again by Vigée Le Brun, and Marie-Antoinette started to carve out a private world for herself through her adoption of the fashionable cult of sensibility and her acting as a patron of the arts. She spent more and more time in her "domain" of the Petit Trianon in the grounds of Versailles, and the exhibition recreates this generally happy time through a room that has been set up as a kind of private idyll, Marie-Antoinette's furniture from her rooms at Versailles being arranged around the walls, together with pictures of her friends. From here, the visitor plunges downwards and into darkness for a review of Marie-Antoinette's final years and of her unhappy end. This part of the exhibition is designed to be the most affecting, and it includes some rarely seen items, such as the crude furniture put at Marie-Antoinette's disposal in the Temple prison during her final months, as well as some well-known images, such as the sketch, attributed to the celebrated painter of the Revolution, Jacques- Louis David, of Marie-Antoinette, her hands bound behind her back, on her way to the scaffold. There is a "bulletin of the health of Louis XVI" below the sinister- looking heading "Commune de Paris," and there are schoolroom writing exercises done by the young heir to the throne, before his early death in prison. There are also examples of the satirical cartoons at the queen's expense that appeared in the revolutionary newspapers of the time. These make an intriguing contrast to the grand portraits displayed earlier in the exhibition, showing how completely the regime had by then lost control of the image sphere. From the darkness of the final rooms the visitor emerges in the exhibition gift shop, a mix of the serious -- stacks of the late François Furet's heavyweight Penser la Révolution française -- and the souvenir -- Marie-Antoinette cushion covers, fridge magnets, and, perhaps surprisingly, umbrellas. Both can be looked at as uses of history, though scarcely as equal ones. In the visitors' book on the way out, members of the public have commented on the "hatred and cruelty" of the Revolution. "Should we look again at what we teach our children," someone asks. Whatever the answer to that might be, one could have wished for something from "the other side" in the exhibition, instead of its habit of giving all the best lines to the monarchists. In the absence of context or any opposing voices, this exhibition was a case of too little history and too much heritage. Marie-Antoinette, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, avenue du Général Eisenhower, Paris, until 30 June.
