People Who Are More Cool Than Marie Antoinette

In preparation for the completion and unveiling of the France Dress, I've been doing some research on and around 18th century France and 18th century European culture. Just wait until I get started on the tea! But first, a public service announcement.

One thing I really love about being a historical costumer is getting to make a connection with people who really lived. Feeling a deep and passionate connection to a fictional character is one thing, but a person who actually did great things that have shaped the world we live in? Nothing can compare!

This was part of my issue with the 18th century up until now, because to hear some people speak, you'd think no 18th century woman had done anything more exceptional than get her head cut off.

You Should Probably Know Who This Is

Marie Antoinette is incredibly famous for... well, what, exactly? Being pretty? Getting her head chopped off? Being a scapegoat - which she almost certainly was? Being the subject of some truly atrocious films with excellent costume direction? She had almost no political power during her entire life and on the rare occasions she did, spectacularly failed to do anything of worth with it. According to the evidence we have disproving many of the rumours (although, I must point out, I question how much of that 'evidence' there actually is), she didn't even manage to have a proper scandal in her life, which from my point of view is completely intolerable. If you can't be a good Queen, you might as well be a spectacular bad Queen.

Honestly, a whole century to choose from and the number one name on everyone's lips is a wet-blanket miss without a single notable accomplishment to her name.

Even Marie Antoinette's sister, Marie Christina, Duchess of Teschen, managed better --  she was known to be intelligent as well as beautiful, manipulated their mother into allowing her alone of all the siblings to marry the man she loved, and had a quiet life patroning the arts and governing the Austrian Netherlands

So without further ado, have a series of fabulous, brilliant, scandalous, dangerous, powerful women who deserve more recognition!

Louise Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, painter, Self Portrait In A Straw Hat

 Vigee Le Brun is not just one of my favourite painters - her self portraits in particular are incredibly touching, of which the one above is probably the most famous - but she was almost singlehandedly responsible for Marie Antoinette's public image, painted the King of Poland, members of the Russian royal family, and Lord Byron. Although she fled the Revolution with her daughter, she did eventually return to France under Napoleon I - although remaining a staunch royalist.

Adelaide Labille-Guiard, painter, Self Portrait with Two Pupils

A contemporary of Vigee Le Brun, so much so their work was often compared (I have to admit I like Le Brun better, but I think Labille-Guiard is more talented - there's such crispness in her work!) Adelaide Labille-Guiard remained in France throughout the Revolution and until her death, campaigning for women to have general admittance to the French Royal Academy. She painted members of the French royal family before the Revolution and members of the National Assembly, including Maximilien Robespierre, after.

Catherine II, Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias
Also known as Catherine The Great
Also known as BADASS

Born Sophia Augusta Frederica, daughter of a Prussian general and member of the Anhalt ruling family, she almost didn't marry the man who would become Peter III of of Russia. If she hadn't been so determined to make herself agreeable to the Russians - relentlessly drilling herself on the language and converting to Orthodoxy, taking the name 'Catherine', alienating her own parents and endearing herself to the current Empress of Russia in the process - she might never have pulled it off.

A damn good thing she did.

Peter III of Russia reigned for about six months before being disposed in a bloodless coup by supporters of his wife. Less than a week later he was dead, with no evidence to suggest Catherine had any hand in the assassination. Catherine had no technical claim to the throne of Russia and only the most tenuous legal standing for holding onto it - but hold onto it she did. For thirty four years.

Catherine the Great was a wise, capable and powerful ruler, revitalised her country and helped it be recognised as one of the Great Powers of Europe - as well as being fiercely sexually independent. Among her long string of lovers, the last was forty years her junior, and there were rumours her ex-lovers helped pick out candidates of suitable physical beauty and intellectual merit to warrant her attention.

Olympe de Gouges, playwright and political activist

Olympe de Gouges wrote political pamphlets and plays espousing abolition and the rights of women. During the Revolution she became deeply embroiled in refuting all kinds of inequality, became disillusioned when egalite was not extended to women also, challenged the Revolutionary government, and eventually maintained her conviction all the way to the guillotine. 

Her most famous work, Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, is an exceptional piece of writing and a key early text in feminist theory.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, poet and writer

Whether it was letters from Constantinople (described as “the very first example of a secular work by a woman about the Muslim Orient” and an inspiration to all later female travel writers) or the latest instalment in her attributed poetry feud with Alexander Pope (Which I can still only see as an 18th century rap-off of epic proportions), there's no doubting that Mary Wortley Montagu was a skilled writer and a passionate traveller.


What makes her even more awesome is that she brought back the Ottoman practice of smallpox inoculation to Britain and helped promote it's adoption despite the scepticism of the medical establishment.

Mary Wollstonecraft, writer, philosopher and feminist

 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the founding texts of feminism. For some people, that would be enough. But Mary Wollstonecraft also wrote educational works, novels, letters from travels, her other Vindication, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, and translated works from French and German. Her husband published a memoir after her death, detailing illegitimate children, affairs and suicide attempts, which lead many early scholars to discredit her work - I say if you can lead a life so full and so passionate and still write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, you must be some kind of super human being.

She died eleven days after the birth of her daughter, Mary Wollstonecroft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein

Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour

Intelligent, beautiful and refined, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson founded her own salon, became the King's Mistress (which was a proper role at court in France, or as good as), earned herself a title, and held on to all of it until her death. Despite being a commoner and having many enemies at court, and less than politically able (Or active), Poisson was accomplished, independent, a patron of the arts, and a master of dealing with people - a skill that is all too easily overlooked by the shallow.

I like this portrait of Reinette, as she was known, because I think it's the only one where she really looks her age instead of an 18th century photoshopped, airbrushed version. In almost all of her paintings, however, I think she looks like she's having fun!

Sarah Siddons, actress

One of the best known actresses of the 18th century, Sarah Siddons's fame was almost unbelievable in scope. She was the darling of Drury Lane for twenty years, and her power and skill was such that she left her leading men speechless and audiences believing she really had fallen dead on stage.

Her most famous role was Lady Macbeth, and in her final performance before retirement, the audience were so overwhelmed by her performance they didn't allow the play to continue beyond the sleepwalking scene.

The Chevalier d'Eon, diplomat, solider and spy

Charles-Genevieve-Louis-Auguste-Andre-Timothee d'Eon de Beaumont (blimey) is one of those wonderful people I think you can quite happily list under 'great women' or 'great men', having lived for the first half of their life as a man and the second half as a woman.

A spy for the French crown and an Ambassador to the British, d'Eon fought in the Seven Years War, effectively blackmailed the King of France, lived in London as an exile, demanded the French crown allow them to return and live as a woman, offered to lead female soldiers into battle, and fenced almost up until their death. I don't think I've ever encountered someone so fabulously scandalous.

Kitty Fisher, courtesan

Kitty Fisher was a bright, brilliant socialite with a flair for self-promotion. Her reputation was such that she belittled women of high social standing in public (and flaunted the rumours of her affairs with their husbands), dressed and lived with unbelievable extravagance, sat for Joshua Reynolds and half a dozen other portrait painters, and was rumour to have eaten a thousand-guinea note on bread and butter. Rather suitable then that she's been painted as Cleopatra, dissolving pearls in vinegar!

Although she died just four months after her prestigious marriage, if you've ever heard the rhyme - 'Lucy Locket lost her pocket...' - then now you know who found it.

Maria Theresa of Austria

And finally - Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina, Empress consort of the Holy Roman Empire, Queen consort of Germany, Queen of Hungary and Croatia, Archduchess of Austria, Queen of Bohemia, last of the Hapsburgs, who ruled for 40 years over the Hapsburg Dominions (the only woman to do so) while refusing to cede power to her husband or her son, the Holy Roman Emperors, reorganised the military, enacted financial and educational reforms, developed commerce and agriculture, and inspired respect and adoration from her subjects. She was also the mother of sixteen children including two Queens, two Holy Roman Emperors and the Duchess of Parma. The woman was incredible.

This is the very same Maria Theresa who oversaw the War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War. She's so cool, she has a cameo in Axis Powers Hetalia.

Yes, this is the same Maria Theresa

And guess what? She's also Marie Antoinette's mother. So the next time someone wants to talk to you about Marie Antoinette, feel totally justified in responding with "Your Mum!"