A Lady-in-Waiting's Account of Marie Antoinette's Musical Politics: Women, Music, and the French Revolution
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A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account of Marie Antoinette’s
Musical Politics: Women, Music, and the French Revolution
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden
Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 21, 2017, pp.
72-100 (Article)
Published by University of Nebraska Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/wam.2017.0005
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/673630
[ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ]A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account of
Marie Antoinette’s Musical Politics
Women, Music, and the French Revolution
Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden
L
egend has it that Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Genet- Campan (1752–1822) first
encountered Marie Antoinette at a pianoforte in the Versailles royal apart-
ments, where Madame Campan accompanied the future queen as she sang
opéra comique tunes.1 Around 1774, Campan entered Marie Antoinette’s service as
a lady-in-waiting and ascended to the position of first lady-in-waiting on July 13,
1786, a role she held as late as 1792.2 After the queen’s execution in 1793, Campan
weathered a tumultuous political landscape. Under the revolutionary government
she founded a school for girls, becoming a renowned educator. Napoléon himself
took note, and by 1807 he had appointed her director of the school for daughters of
Legion of Honor recipients.3 At both schools Campan educated a cohort of young
1 “Souvent je l’y accompagnai sur la harpe ou sur le piano, quand elle voulait chanter les airs de Grétry.”
Campan quoted in Just-Jean-Étienne Roy, Soirées d’Écouen (par Mme Campan): Recueillies et publiées par
Stéphanie Ory (Tours: Alfred Mame et fils, 1859), 56–57. Subsequent editions attribute authorship to Ory
rather than Roy. Translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2 “Maison de la reine: Décision,” July 13, 1786, F-Pan, O1 3791–97. I have cited the Archives nationales,
Paris, according to the RISM library siglum, F-Pan, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, as F-
Pn. See also “Maison de la reine: Décision,” August 19, 1788; a letter from M. Villedeul to M. Augeart, March
13, 1789; and “Arriéré du 10 août 1792 aux personnes employées dans la maison de la ci- devant Reine,” n.d.,
F-Pan, O1 3791–97.
3 Napoléon Bonaparte’s future stepdaughter and sister-in-law, Hortense de Beauharnais, attended the
school in Saint- Germain- en-Laye when he first courted her mother, Joséphine, in 1795. Eventually he chose
to send his sisters Caroline and Pauline and his cousin Charlotte to be educated there as well. On Na-
poléon’s school for the daughters of the Legion of Honor, see Rebecca Rogers, Les demoiselles de la Légion
d’honneur: Les maisons d’éducation de la Légion d’honneur au XIXe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1992). On Madame
Campan as an educator, see Louis Bonneville de Marsagny, Madame Campan à Écouen: Étude historique et
biographique (Paris: H. Champion Libraire de la Société de l’histoire de Paris, 1879); Louis Chabaud, Les
précurseurs du féminisme: Mmes de Maintenon, de Genlis et Campan, leur rôle dans l’éducation chrétienne de
la femme (Paris: Plon-Nourrit and Co., 1901); Pierre Sabatier, “Une educatrice: Madame Campan, d’après
ses lettres inédites à son fils,” Le correspondant, January 25, 1929, 246–70; Gabrielle Réval, Madame Campan:
Assistante de Napoléon (Paris: Albin Michel, 1931); Yvan David and Monique Giot, Madame Campan (1752–women who became princesses and queens across nineteenth- century Europe.4
In 1822, during the Bourbon Restoration, Campan published her Mémoires sur la
vie privée de Marie-Antoinette, reine de France et de Navarre (Memoirs on the private
life of Marie Antoinette, queen of France and of Navarre), which appeared shortly
after her own death.5 Throughout these memoirs, musical and social performances
prove inextricably intertwined, revealing a public perception of Marie Antoinette’s
musical tastes and entertainments as imbued with politics.
A robust body of scholarly literature treats music and politics during the
French Revolution.6 During the revolutionary decade, the political and the per-
formative merged, as pastiche stage genres that included music came to be judged
through an aesthetic that blurred distinctions between fiction and reality—a phe-
nomenon Mark Darlow has termed “meta-theatricality.”7 Laura Mason has shown
how judgments about the virtue or immorality of female musicians during the
French Revolution tended to be formed on a case-by- case basis rather than on
clearly defined ideologies about music and femininity.8 Yet most scholarship on
women musicians in Enlightenment and revolutionary France has focused on
1822) (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1972); J. Terrie Quintana, “Educating Women
in the Arts: Madame Campan’s School,” in Eighteenth- Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick Keener
and Susan Lorsch (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 237–44; Catherine Montfort and J. Terrie Quintana,
“Mme. Campan’s Institute of Education: A Revolution in the Education of Women,” Australian Journal of
French Studies 33 (January–April 1996): 30–44; Rebecca Rogers, From the Salon to the Schoolroom: Educating
Bourgeois Girls in Nineteenth- Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005);
and Christina de Bellaigue, Educating Women: Schooling and Identity in England and France, 1800–1867 (Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
4 Madame Campan realized her students were destined for royalty at the time, according to Pierre
Maigne, Journal anecdotique de Madame Campan, ou souvenirs recueillis dans ses entretiens (Paris: Baudouin
frères, 1824), 8. While many of her students went on to become European nobility, the best-known exam-
ple is Hortense de Beauharnais, later queen of Holland and mother of Napoléon III, who was the second
emperor of France from 1848 until 1871.
5 Throughout the article I refer to the French first edition, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette,
reine de France et de Navarre, 2 vols. (Paris: Baudouin frères, 1822). Numerous subsequent editions followed
in both French and English, some of which included other writings by Campan, such as Madame Cam-
pan, Memoirs of Marie Antoinette: Queen of France and Wife of Louis XVI (New York: Collier, 1910).
6 Jean-Rémy Julien and Jean- Claude Klein, Orphée phrygien: Les musiques de la Révolution (Paris: Édi-
tions du May, 1989); Jean-Rémy Julien and Jean Mongrédien, Le tambour et la harpe: Œuvres, pratiques et
manifestations musicales sous la Révolution, 1788–1800 (Paris: Éditions du May, 1991); Malcolm Boyd, ed., Mu-
sic and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); James H. Johnson, Listening
in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Emmet Kennedy et al., Theatre,
Opera, and Audiences in Revolutionary Paris: Analysis and Repertory (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996);
Laura Mason, Singing the French Revolution: Popular Culture and Politics, 1787–1799 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996); Mark Darlow, “The Role of the Listener in the Musical Aesthetics of the Revo-
lution,” in Enlightenment and Tradition—Women’s Studies—Montesquieu, ed. Mark Darlow and Caroline
Warman, SVEC / Studies on Voltaire in the Eighteenth Century 6 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2007),
143–57; Darlow, Staging the French Revolution: Cultural Politics and the Paris Opéra, 1789–1794 (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2012).
7 Mark Darlow, “History and (Meta-)Theatricality: The French Revolution’s Paranoid Aesthetics,” Mod-
ern Language Review 105, no. 2 (April 2010): 385–400.
8 Laura Mason, “Angels and Furies: Women and Popular Song during the French Revolution,” in
Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines, ed. Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2005), 44–60.
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 73Table 1. A timeline of major events during the French Revolution and Napoleonic empire with key
dates from Madame Campan’s life in bold
October 1768 Madame Campan becomes lectrice to Louis XV’s daughters
1770 Madame Campan becomes lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette
May 11, 1774 Madame Campan marries
July 13, 1786 Madame Campan becomes first lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette
July 14, 1789 Storming of the Bastille
October 1, 1789 Flanders Regiment banquet at Versailles
June 4, 1790 Madame Campan divorces
June 20–21, 1791 Royal family flees to Varenne
September 3, 1791 Constitution of 1791 adopted
April 1792 France goes to war with Austria
August 10, 1792 Storming of the Tuileries Palace; Madame Campan takes refuge in
Saint-Rémy-les- Chevreuse
September 22, 1792 First French Republic begins
January 21, 1793 King Louis XVI executed
June 24, 1793 Constitution of 1793 adopted
September 1793 Reign of Terror begins
October 16, 1793 Queen Marie Antoinette executed
July 27–28, 1794 Fall of Robespierre; Reign of Terror ends
Summer 1794 Conservative Thermidorian Reaction
–summer 1795
July 31, 1794 Madame Campan opens pension at Saint- Germain- en-Laye
May 25, 1795 Madame Campan rents the Hôtel de Rohan in Saint- Germain- en-Laye
July 1, 1795 National Institute for Young Women founded at the Hôtel de Rohan
August 22, 1795 Constitution of 1795 adopted
November 2, 1795 Directory government begins
July 10, 1796 Napoléon Bonaparte visits Madame Campan’s school
July– October Madame Campan makes supply requests to the Directory government
1796
November 9–10, Coup by Napoléon Bonaparte; Consulate government begins
1799
December 24, 1799 Constitution of Year VIII begins
May 18, 1804 First French Empire begins under Napoléon Bonaparte
September 5, 1807 Madame Campan becomes directrice of Napoléon’s Legion of Honor
school at Écouen
May 24, 1814 Louis XVIII reclaims the château at Écouen
July 1815 Madame Campan obtains pension from Restoration governmentcomposition, leaving aside nonprofessional musiciennes.9 By focusing on how two
women negotiated musical practice and political meaning during the Old Regime,
Revolution, and Napoleonic empire, I elucidate the tangible consequences of mu-
sic in women’s lives during a watershed political moment.
Written after the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1814, Campan’s
memoirs are presumably an attempt to endear herself to the reinstated royal fami-
ly. This has led to questions regarding the work’s veracity, with an assault on Cam-
pan’s credibility as historical witness beginning as early as the Revolution itself.
She battled two fronts after the Terror ended in July 1794: one believed she had
been unfaithful to the queen during the Revolution by secretly aiding in the revo-
lutionary agenda, while the other accused her of royalism. Immediately following
the queen’s death in October 1793, critics also claimed that Campan was never
as close to Marie Antoinette as she would later assert.10 Nonetheless, archival evi-
dence corroborates the positions that Campan claims to have held in the queen’s
household, and Campan’s father-in-law, sister, and niece also served the royal fam-
ily.11 Regardless of this proof of proximity, the intimacy of Campan’s relationship
with Marie Antoinette is less important to my argument than how Campan chose
to address music, suggesting that Marie Antoinette failed to manage the public dis-
course that developed around her musical tastes and entertainments.12 Whether or
not the text was written to gain favor with the Restoration government, the mem-
oirs work toward political ends: asserting the innocence of Marie Antoinette’s mu-
sical choices and challenging past assaults on her character.
Long before Marie Antoinette arrived in Paris, the French court and Pari-
sian polite society had established the political implications of music. Although
sometimes mere entertainment, music served as a foil for political sparring in an
Old Regime society where politesse prevented outright disagreement. Hints of
subversion toward the monarchy could already be found in the incorporation of
Italianate music into tragédie lyrique during the reign of Louis XIV.13 By the mid-
eighteenth century, songs supplied a convenient medium for circulating court
gossip from Versailles to the streets of Paris and for performing political discon-
9 Julie A. Sadie, “Musiciennes of the Ancien Régime,” in Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition,
1150–1950, ed. Jane M. Bowers and Judith Tick (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 191–223; and
Robert Adelson and Jacqueline Letzter, Women Writing Opera: Creativity and Controversy in the Age of the
French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
10 Jules Flammermont details these claims in “Les mémoirs de Madame Campan,” in Études critiques
sur les sources de l’histoire du dix-huitième siècle (Paris: Alphonse-Picard, 1886), 1:5–43; and Réval, Madame
Campan.
11 “Arriéré du 10 août 1792.”
12 Furthermore, the Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la République des lettres en France, depuis
1762 jusqu’à nos jours (London: John Adamson, 1780–89), a contemporary chronicle of events in Paris from
1762 to 1783, corroborates many of Campan’s tales (see, e.g., 36:8), as does recent research on opéra comique
at court (see Julia Doe, “Marie Antoinette et la musique: Habsburg Patronage and French Operatic Cul-
ture,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 46, no. 1 (2017): 81–94. Several students document Campan’s
continued sympathies for the former queen from the Revolution through the Restoration.
13 Georgia Cowart, “Carnival in Venice or Protest in Paris? Louis XIV and the Politics of Subversion at
the Paris Opéra,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 54, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 265–302.
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 75tent.14 Although the Querelle des Bouffons from 1752 to 1754 ostensibly debated
the merits of French and Italian opera, the exchange masked a serious argument
regarding monarchical authority and religious freedom; and the operatic debates
of eighteenth- century Paris always included an undercurrent of anxiety about
foreignness.15
In midcentury Vienna, Marie Antoinette had enjoyed music as part of her
education. Upon her arrival in Paris, she failed to recognize the quite different
political context into which she brought her musical practices. Campan’s mem-
oirs recount widespread derision toward Marie Antoinette’s musical activities. The
queen’s interactions with men at concerts and balls aroused suspicions, while her
favorite male composers earned access to her intimate private circle. Moreover,
her enthusiasm for music was not properly balanced by the other pleasurable
arts considered suitable for a noble lady, such as painting, needlework, literature,
reading, and grammar.16 Worst of all, Marie Antoinette had been accused of poor
musicianship, performing as a result of her own vanity rather than with cultivated
skill for the virtuous pleasure of others. Campan’s account goes beyond critiques
commonly raised against women who performed: the queen’s musical tastes bred
bad politics because they underscored her foreignness, created a sense of alien-
ation through exclusivity, and flaunted luxury during a period of economic strife.
The musical-political mistakes raised in Campan’s memoirs are corrobo-
rated by historical research that identifies the queen’s three “major [political]
transgressions” in the eyes of the prerevolutionary public: Austrian loyalty, fiscal
irresponsibility, and influence over ministerial positions.17 Scholars have debated
the intensity of public derision toward Marie Antoinette before the Revolution,
and many myths about her unpopularity during the 1770s and 1780s have been
incorporated into scholarship as if they were fact.18 Outside of the court circles that
thrived upon gossip, the extent to which “bad talk” about the queen permeated
public opinion remains speculative. What is certain is that before 1789 (when the
French Revolution began), the public was primarily concerned with matters that
directly affected them, including the queen’s influence on policy, especially inter-
national relations, fiscal spending, and distribution of positions within the vast
14 Robert Darnton, Poetry and the Police: Communication Networks in Eighteenth- Century Paris (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Rebecca Dowd Geoffroy-Schwinden, “Rousseau and the
Revolutionary Repertoire,” Studies in Eighteenth- Century Culture 43 (2014): 89–110.
15 Elisabeth Cook, “Challenging the Ancien Régime: The Hidden Politics of the ‘Querelle des Bouf-
fons,’” in La ‘Querelle des Bouffons’ dans la vie culturelle française du XVIIIe siècle, ed. Andrea Fabiano (Paris:
CNRS editions / Sciences de la musique, 2005), 141–60.
16 Quintana’s publications detail this necessary balance in an eighteenth- century French woman’s
education.
17 Vivan R. Gruder, “The Question of Marie Antoinette: The Queen and Public Opinion before the
Revolution,” French History 16, no. 3 (2002): 292. Thomas Kaiser specifically lays out these issues in “Who’s
Afraid of Marie-Antoinette? Diplomacy, Austrophobia, and the Queen,” French History 14, no. 3 (2000): 261–
63. He also addresses the queen’s perceived foreignness in “From the Austrian Committee to the Foreign
Plot: Marie-Antoinette, Austrophobia, and the Terror,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 579–617.
18 On the conflation of myth and history around public opinion of Marie Antoinette, see Gruder, “The
Question of Marie Antoinette.”
76 Women & Music Volume 21Old Regime bureaucracy.19 The title of Campan’s memoirs emphasizes the private
life of Marie Antoinette, and indeed the former lady-in-waiting details the queen’s
inability to manage how public narratives usurped her private musical practices
for political ends. In 1802 Campan cautioned one of her students to avoid Marie
Antoinette’s detrimental “political” mistake, warning that “one of the great faults
of the queen was to serve only music.”20 The lives of Madame Campan and Marie
Antoinette offer a tale of two women’s political negotiation of music, one who
enjoyed success and the other who suffered deadly defeat. Unlike Marie Antoi-
nette, Campan crafted her own narratives around her musical practices, ultimately
rebuilding a post-Terror livelihood from the deceased queen’s musical ruins.
Foreign Taste
When Marie Antoinette arrived in France in 1770, some French subjects held high
hopes for her positive influence on government affairs. One faction of the French
court, however, targeted the dauphine as a symbol of their discontent with a 1756
treaty between Louis XV and Austria’s Maria Teresa.21 One of Campan’s students
recalled a song that circulated in Paris when Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette,
repeated by the headmistress during soirées with her favorite students:
Petite reine de vingt ans, Little queen of twenty years,
vous qui traitez si mal les gens, You who treat people so poorly,
Vous repasserez la frontière, Go back across the border,
Laire, laire, lan laire, laire lanla. Laire, laire, lan laire, laire lanla.22
The imperative to “go back” where she came from reveals the song’s underlying
assumption: nothing good could possibly come from Austria. Historian Thomas
Kaiser has shown how public perceptions of Marie Antoinette were affected by
her cultivation of foreign, specifically Austrian, tastes.23 It seems that music figured
among these controversial preferences. An intriguing passage penned by Jean-
Baptiste Leclerc in the late 1790s and often cited in the historiography of music and
the French Revolution demonstrates how Marie Antoinette’s foreign tastes eventu-
ally became entangled with rhetoric about music and politics: “Yielding to national
19 Gruder explains that in prerevolutionary pornographic libelles, “the queen, and even more so the
ministers, appear as guilty of political as well as moral misdeeds. These charges highlight problems of
policy, or of individual actions believed to influence government policy, that affected the public” (“The
Question of Marie Antoinette,” 291, emphasis added). See also Kaiser, “Who’s Afraid of Marie-Antoinette?,”
261–63.
20 “Louis XVI et Marie-Antoinette, les derniers, les plus infortunés de tous nos monarques, n’avaient
fait que des fautes politiques. . . . [L]eur vie privées les ferait toujours chérir par ceux qui les ont approchés.
Une des grandes fautes de la reine a été de ne servir que la musique, parce qu’elle l’aimait, et les modes,
parce qu’elle aimait la parue” (Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Genet- Campan, Correspondance inédite de Madame
Campan avec la reine Hortense, ed. J. A. C. Buchon [Paris: A. Levasseur, 1835], 1:199).
21 Kaiser convincingly lays out the details of this Austrophobia and its connection to the queen in
“Who’s Afraid of Marie-Anotinette?,” 247, and “From the Austrian Committee,” 580–84.
22 Roy, Soirées d’Écouen, 67.
23 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 586.
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 77pride, Antoinette attracted to France the famous German [Gluck] who created dra-
matic music for us; in this she was unwise. It is not an error to say that the revolu-
tion accomplished in music would have shaken the government. . . . [T]he throne
was shattered. And now the friends of liberty have used music in their turn.”24 At
face value, Leclerc constellates Marie Antoinette’s “unwise” foreign taste, the aes-
thetic “revolution” of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s (1714–87) reform operas, and the
political upheaval of the French Revolution.25 Though contemporaries (including
Campan) exaggerated the queen’s role in Gluck’s arrival in Paris in 1774, Marie An-
toinette welcomed him into the intimate circle of her toilette and championed the
composer at the Opéra.26 Campan wrote, “Within a few years [of Gluck’s arrival]
this art achieved a perfection that it had never had in France.”27
Darlow has recently elaborated how the import of foreign taste came to
be seen as the cause of abrupt changes in Parisian fashion.28 On the surface, the
queen imported a foreign musical style that abruptly changed Parisian taste and,
ultimately, the French musical tradition. It was well known at court that she nei-
ther appreciated nor enjoyed the tragédie lyrique of Jean-Baptiste Lully and Jean-
Philippe Rameau, whose mantle was taken up by none other than the Austrian
favorite, Gluck.29 Moreover, as circles formed around Gluck and his purported
rival, Italian composer Niccolò Piccinni (1728–1800), personal court vendettas
between Marie Antoinette and the king’s mistress, Madame du Barry, raised the
political stakes of choosing a side in this querelle.30 Contemporary accounts that
correlate musical and political revolution with Marie Antoinette’s patronage of
Gluck expose the complicated relationship among court politics, public opinion,
and music.
24 “Cédant à l’orgueil national, attire en France le célèbre Allemand qui créa chez nous la musique
dramatique; en cela elle fit une imprudence. Ce n’est point une erreur de dire que la révolution opérée par
Gluck dans la musique auroit dû faire trembler le gouvernement. . . . [L]e trône fut ébranlé. Les amis de la
liberté se servirent à leur tour de la musique” (Jean-Baptiste Leclerc, Essai sur la propagation de la musique
en France, sa conservation, et ses rapports avec le gouvernement [Paris: H. J. Jansen, an VI], 12). The translation
is adapted from those found in James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris, 98, and Mark Darlow, Dissonance in
the Republic of Letters: The Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes (London: Modern Humanities Research
Association and Maney, 2013), 178.
25 For an articulate explanation of the connection between music and revolution in late eighteenth-
century French writings, see Michael Fend, “An Instinct for Parody and a Spirit of Revolution: Parisian
Opera, 1752–1800,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth- Century Music, ed. Simon Keefe (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 296. See also Philippe Vendrix, “La notion de révolution dans les écrits
théoriques concernant la musique avant 1789,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
21, no. 1 (June 1990): 71–78; and the introduction to Darlow, Dissonance.
26 For a detailed explanation of Marie Antoinette’s role (and public perceptions of it) in Gluck’s ar-
rival in Paris, see Darlow, “From Iphigénie en Aulide to Orphée: A Court-Sponsored Reform?,” in Dissonance.
27 “En peu d’années cet art parvint à une perfection qu’il n’avait jamais eu en France” (Campan,
Mémoires, 1:153).
28 Darlow, Dissonance, 181.
29 M. Elizabeth C. Bartlet, “Grétry, Marie-Antoinette, and La rosière de Salency,” Proceedings of the Royal
Music Association 111 (1984–85): 92.
30 “There crystallized around anti- Gluck reaction an opposition party, centered on du Barry and
composed of at least two strands: hostility to the ‘Austrian’ Marie-Antoinette, and musical taste which
self- conceived as anti- elitist, binding cultural politics into musical reception” (Darlow, Dissonance, 77). See
also 75–78, 94.
78 Women & Music Volume 21But to claim that Marie Antoinette’s musical patronage “would have shaken
the government,” as Leclerc suggests, is a much more drastic charge than mere at-
tempts to influence court politics. After all, Leclerc attributes her choice of Gluck to
“national”—that is, Austro- Germanic—“vanity.” Such rhetoric originated among
Old Regime court circles in response to the 1756 treaty and continued to circulate
widely in popular revolutionary publications against the queen some forty years
later.31 Gluck’s arrival in Paris coincided with the death of Louis XV and thus the
ascension of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the throne; the ascension result-
ed in a purge of court ministers and a widespread belief that Marie Antoinette
was intervening in policy decisions for Austria’s benefit.32 French foreign ministry
documents from the Revolution claim that Austria’s influence in France, particu-
larly the wars that it provoked throughout the eighteenth century, had “often shak-
en France to its foundations.”33 Such language resonates strikingly with Leclerc.
Though largely untrue, a revolutionary “Austrian plot” was vigorously pursued and
invoked to prosecute citizens during the Terror from September 1793 until July
1794.34 Foreign ministry documents about the plot portray Marie Antoinette as
following in the footsteps of her mother, Maria Theresa, and manipulating her
husband in order to facilitate Vienna’s influence in France.35 The popular publi-
cations that fueled French Austrophobia characterized Austrian aggression as par-
ticularly feminine. Although lacking military power, the Habsburgs were believed
to maintain dominance in eighteenth- century Europe based on “corruption, ruse,
oaths, gifts, promises, intrigue, caresses, and of course, the marriage of daughters
to foreign princes.”36 The fabled Austrian aggression that “shook” France came to a
head in 1790 with rumors of an Austrian committee alleged to convene nightly in
the Bois de Boulogne in order to conspire against the revolutionary agenda.37 The
group’s purported leader was none other than Marie Antoinette herself.
By correlating Marie Antoinette’s musical imports with political revolution,
Leclerc roots Marie Antoinette’s patronage in former accusations that she had at-
tempted to promote Austrian influence and undermine the French government.
During the Revolution, supporters of the Opéra claimed the institution as a central
component of French national heritage and as a means of public instruction.38 The
triumph of a German, Gluck, as heir to Lully and Rameau’s institution, facilitat-
ed by an Autrichienne, symbolized nothing less than French political impotence.
31 Kaiser shows these origins in “From the Austrian Committee,” 590; and Elizabeth Colwill elucidates
their circulation during the Revolution in “Just Another ‘Citoyenne’? Marie-Antoinette on Trial, 1790–
1793,” History Workshop 28 (Autumn 1989): 73.
32 “It is surely significant that these complaints [about her patronage of Gluck] coincide with the first
two years of the reign, a period when Marie-Antoinette was suspected of attempting to wield political
influence at court in favour of Austrian interests” (Darlow, Dissonance, 77). See also 89–90.
33 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 582n14. Kaiser quotes documents from the Archives du
Ministère des affaires étrangères, mémoires et documents autriche 29, fol. 33.
34 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 608–9.
35 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 590.
36 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 590.
37 Kaiser, “From the Austrian Committee,” 587.
38 Darlow, Staging the French Revolution.
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 79Relating patronage and influence provided Leclerc with a convenient rhetorical
strategy to argue that music was a matter of national concern, furthering his own
campaign to obtain government funding for a system of national music educa-
tion. Some musicians affiliated with the newly formed Paris Conservatory shared
Leclerc’s resolve to eradicate foreign influence from French music. In a letter to
his colleague Honoré Langlé, composer Jean-François Lesueur asserted, “Foreign
genius should not be found in [the French] Conservatoire but for surpassing.”39
Leclerc likely chose this approach because the French had already adopted a view
of Marie Antoinette as a conduit for Viennese control via “feminine” political
strategies—such as musical patronage. Campan’s memoirs uncover the path by
which Marie Antoinette’s musical tastes and entertainments became intertwined
with politics in the prerevolutionary Parisian imagination.
Exclusivity
During her pregnancy in 1778, Marie Antoinette began taking evening walks
to enjoy the fresh air after long days spent indoors. This activity complied with
eighteenth- century French literature suggesting that women connect to the out-
doors and to a simple country life in order to recapture virtue and become healthy
mothers. In an economic publication about the deterioration of agriculture in
France, the marquis de Mirabeau described the ill effects of city life on women,
particularly venues for music such as theaters and salons, where the stuffy air of
enclosed urban spaces served as bastions for sickly female bodies, incapable of
reproduction.40 Marie Antoinette could spare no precaution in such matters, since
eight long years of marriage had passed before she succeeded in conceiving. Yet her
bold embodiment of a Rousseauean maternal comportment conflicted with the
behavior expected of a queen.41
Campan claims that it was the queen’s request for musical accompaniment
in the gardens that eventually led to public derision: “These walks at first caused
no sensation; but we had the idea to enjoy, during these beautiful summer nights,
the effect of wind music. The chapel musicians were ordered to perform pieces of
this genre on a terrace which was constructed in the middle of the parterre.”42 She
39 “Lettre de Jean-François Lesueur à Honoré-François-Marie Langlé,” January 22, 1800 [2 pluviôse an
VIII], F-Pn, Mus. L.A. 67.
40 Comte de Mirabeau, L’ami des hommes (Paris, 1756), quoted in Meredith Martin, Dairy Queens:
The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie Antoinette (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2011), and elaborated and translated in Michael Kwass, “Consumption and the World of
Ideas: Consumer Revolution and the Moral Economy of the Marquis de Mirabeau,” in “Spaces of Enlight-
enment,” special issue, Eighteenth- Century Studies 37, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 187–213.
41 Melissa Hyde, “Watching Her Step: Marie Antoinette and the Art of Walking,” in Body Narratives:
Motion and Emotion in the French Enlightenment, ed. Susanna Caviglia (Chicago: Brepols Publishers, forth-
coming). Hyde argues that the queen’s promenades and her maternal comportment were viewed as un-
becoming to a queen. I am grateful to Melissa Hyde for sharing her forthcoming work with me, which
resonates deeply with the arguments set forth in the present article.
42 “Ces promenades ne firent d’abord aucune sensation; mais on eut l’idée de jouir, pendant ces belles
nuits d’été, de l’effet d’une musique à vent. Les musiciens de la chapelle eurent l’ordre d’exécuter des
morceaux de ce genre, sur un gradin que l’on fit construire au milieu du parterre” (Campan, Mémoires, 1:193).
80 Women & Music Volume 21identifies the “princesses and [queen’s] brothers” as the culprits who initially “had
the idea” to request the wind music; the king remained conspicuously absent, re-
fusing to alter his strict bedtime.43 In letters to the queen’s mother, Maria Theresa,
in Vienna, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau expressed concerns about the walks and
Marie Antoinette’s reputation. He particularly blamed the king’s brother, the com-
te d’Artois, for instigating the musical entertainments.44 Campan confirms the dire
effects of the wind music that both she and Mercy-Argenteau had feared: “Soon
Paris, France, and even Europe were occupied with Marie Antoinette’s character in
the most insulting manner . . . [because] all the inhabitants of Versailles wanted to
enjoy these serenades, and soon there was a crowd from eleven in the evening until
two and three in the morning.”45
Because the wind music attracted a crowd of listeners, the lively atmosphere
and suspicious attendees proved unbecoming, particularly during the queen’s
pregnancy.46 Campan cites two specific evening walks that fueled false rumors.
While believing herself incognito, the queen spoke with a gentleman during one
of the serenades about the “pleasurable effect of the music.”47 On another evening,
a bodyguard approached the queen to beseech her kindness, which he claimed
to have solicited at court as well.48 Though maintaining Marie Antoinette’s inno-
cent behavior, Campan blames these two encounters for subsequent slanderous
publications: “The most scandalous stories were created and circulated in the li-
bels of the time about these two very insignificant events.”49 Indeed, pornographic
pamphlets against the queen began to proliferate in 1778.50 Campan mentions two
critics by name: Monsieur Champcenetz de Ricquebourg composed and circulat-
43 Campan, Mémoires, 1:193. Campan is likely referring to the queen’s brothers-in-law, particularly the
comte d’Artois, because the visit of Marie Antoinette’s brother, Joseph II, to Versailles occurred from April
until August 1777, before her pregnancy.
44 Comte F.- C. Mercy-Argenteau and Maria Teresa of Austria, Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse
et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau, ed. A. D’Ardenth and M. A. Geoffroy (Paris: Firmin-Didot frères, fils, et cie,
1874), 1:403. Pornographic propaganda placed Marie Antoinette in the arms of her brother-in-law, the
comte d’Artois. See Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette: Political Pornography and the
Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution,” in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Bal-
timore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 108–30.
45 “Bientôt Paris, France, et même Europe furent occupés de la manière la plus offensante pour le car-
actère de Marie-Antoinette. Il est vrais que tous les habitants de Versailles voulurent jouir de ces sérénades
et que bientôt il y eut foule depuis onze heures du soir, jusqu’à deux et trois heures du matin” (Campan,
Mémoires, 1:194).
46 Melissa Hyde, “Marie-Antoinette, Wertmüller, and Scandal of the Garden Variety: Portraying the
Queen at Petit Trianon,” in “Disciples of Flora”: Gardens in History and Culture, ed. Victoria Emma Pagan,
Judith W. Page, and Brigitte Weltman-Aron (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015),
69.
47 Campan, Mémoires, 1:195.
48 Campan, Mémoires, 1:195.
49 “Les contes les plus scandaleux ont été faits et imprimés dans les libelles du temps, sur les deux
événemens très-insignifians que je viens de détailler avec une scrupuleuse exactitude” (Campan, Mémoires,
1:196).
50 Gruder, “The Question of Marie Antoinette,” 273. Later pornographic libelles about the queen pro-
liferated by the end of the 1780s, particularly around the homosocial and, by extrapolation, homosexual
exclusivity of her private quarters. See Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origin of the Myth of Marie
Antoinette (New York: Zone, 1999).
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 81ed insulting couplets about Marie Antoinette and her ladies in reaction to the ser-
enades, and Jean-Louis Giraud Soulavie, in his Mémoires historiques et politiques du
règne de Louis XVI depuis son mariage jusqu’à sa mort (Historical and political mem-
oirs of the reign of Louis XVI from his marriage until his death, 1801), criticized
the walks as antithetical to the sovereignty that a queen should have projected.51
Campan cited Soulavie repeatedly in an attempt to discredit his unflattering depic-
tion of Marie Antoinette, and she bemoaned his work’s ubiquity across respectable
European libraries.52 Elsewhere in his hefty six-volume work, Soulavie highlights
the queen’s encouragement and protection of musicians.53
Marie Antoinette attempted to mitigate the damage brought on by the
wind concerts by admitting people to the performances by invitation and ticket
only. Although this tactic may have prevented unwelcome guests from tarnishing
her reputation, the exclusive atmosphere incited even more retaliation.54 Campan
describes the results of the first private performance as “disastrous,” because “the
curious crowd, kept away by the sentries who guarded the center of the colonnade,
left very unhappy, and the most revolting calumnies about this particular concert
circulated.”55 Marie Antoinette’s public promenades alone may have raised eye-
brows, but Campan emphasizes wind music as the tipping point toward negative
public perception of the queen. Later the clandestine concerts alienated French
subjects who thrived on physical access to the monarchy. Campan shows that Ma-
rie Antoinette failed to realize the extent to which her musical choices concerned
the public and gravely misjudged how privatizing such performances would be
perceived as a political statement.
Extravagance
Campan claims that Marie Antoinette decided to reserve her artistic influence for
matters concerning composers rather than librettists, since music was her favorite
51 Campan, Mémoires, 1:199. Gruder also mentions songs in her discussion of the pornographic libelles
that circulated about Marie Antoinette (“The Question of Marie Antoinette”). According to Soulavie, “Elle
substitua au ceremonial des reines de France, qui était gênant, mais non point despotique, le ton et la lib-
erté des familles bourgeoises, pour se livrer à une vie libre et dissipée, au point qu’elle sortait, promenait,
rendait des visites, suivie d’une ou deux dames de son choix, plutôt que de ses dames chargées par l’état de
l’accompagner” (She substituted for the ceremonials of the queens of France, which were troublesome but
not despotic, the tone and the liberty of bourgeois families, to surrender herself to a free and removed life,
to the point that she went out, walked, visited, followed by one or two women of her choice, instead of her
women charged by the state to accompany her) (Jean-Louis Soulavie, Mémoires historiques et politiques du
règne de Louis XVI depuis son mariage jusqu’à sa mort [Paris: Treuttel et Würtz, 1801], 1:9).
52 Campan, Mémoires, 1:197–98n.
53 “Marie-Antoinette encourageait et protégeait les musiciens” (Marie Antoinette encouraged and
protected musicians) (Soulavie, Mémoires historiques, 2:64).
54 Marie Antoinette endured ridicule because her gardens were the only ones locked on the grounds
of Versailles (Martin, Dairy Queens, 202).
55 Campan, Mémoires, 1:198. “La foule des curieux, éloignée par les factionnaires qui gardaient l’en-
ceinte de la colonnade, se retire très-mécontente, et les plus révoltantes calomnies circulèrent au sujet de
ce concert particulier” (1:197).
82 Women & Music Volume 21art.56 The queen loved both French
and Italian opera, particularly opéra
comique and the music of André-
Ernest-Modeste Grétry (1741–1813).57
She was even godmother to the
composer’s youngest daughter.
While her love of Italian opera fig-
ures into the memoirs’ depiction of
her deteriorating musical politics
because that love revealed foreign
tastes, the French genres that Marie
Antoinette continued to patron-
ize required increasingly exorbi-
tant funding. From 1775 through
1781, during stays at the Château
de Choisy, Marie Antoinette some-
times attended two spectacles per
day, grand opéra among them, “and
at eleven in the evening would re-
treat into the salle des spectacles to
assist with the performance of par-
odies where the leading actors from
the Opéra displayed themselves in
dresses and under the most bizarre
costumes.”58 During the winter
months of this period, Marie Antoi- Fig. 1. A rendering of Marie Antoinette’s inappro-
nette disguised herself for masked priate interactions with men at a ball. Unattribut-
balls and ballet-pantomimes at the ed print, L’attouchement de Dilon à Marie Antoinette
au bal (1789). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque
Opéra, thinking she went unrecog- nationale de France.
nized, while in fact everyone knew
her true identity. A particularly
56 Campan, Correspondance inédite, 1:199. In the Mémoires, Madame Campan recounts that following a
performance at Fontainebleau of Grétry and Marmontel’s Zémir et Azor, Marie Antoinette passed the two
men in the gallery and stopped to compliment Grétry specifically on his accomplishment, saying nothing
to Marmontel (1:155).
57 Marie Antoinette’s love of “lighter” genres is explained in Bartlet, “Grétry,” and expanded in recent
scholarship, especially in Doe, “Marie Antoinette et la musique,” which argues that while opéra comique
indeed reigned in the court of Marie Antoinette, it came to represent a modernized monarchy in oppo-
sition to the older tragédie lyrique rather than a “revolution” in music that degraded monarchical control.
58 “Il y a avait souvent, dans les petits voyages de Choisy, spectacle deux fois dans une même journée:
grand opéra, comédie française, ou italienne à l’heure ordinaire, et à onze heures du soir on rentrait dans
la salle de spectacles, pour assister à des répresentations de parodies où les premiers acteurs de l’Opéra se
montraient dans les robes et sous les costumes les plus bizarres” (Campan, Mémoires, 1:161). With the term
“grand opéra,” Madame Campan refers not to the genre as it would come to be known as such during the
1820s and 1830s but rather to any serious opera production, that is to say, not comic or Italian-influenced, in
French, and requiring a larger cast and elaborate set design and costuming. See Bartlet, “Grétry.”
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 83scandalous moment was published in one of the many libelles penned against the
queen during these years (fig. 1). Even when the queen’s entertainments at court
did not favor the foreign, Italian style, they still inevitably required excessive stag-
ing and costuming and encouraged indulgent behavior.
The entertainments at Choisy inspired Marie Antoinette in 1777 to request
a personal theater, which was built under the direction of architect Richard Mique
in the Petit Trianon, her small château on the grounds of Versailles.59 Mercy-
Argenteau reported to the empress Maria Theresa in August 1780, “The [Trianon]
performances will put an end to the evening walks.”60 The performances at Tri-
anon only occurred during brief periods: in August and September 1780, during
the summers of 1782 and 1783, and then for a few weeks in August 1785. Accord-
ing to Adolphe Jullien, the presence of female peers, the comtesses de Provence
and d’Artois, encouraged Marie Antoinette to enjoy music more socially: “Love
of music brought the queen to love theater, which became the greatest pleasure
for Marie Antoinette and her mind’s dearest distraction.”61 Here, music acts as a
gateway to the more immoral activity—acting. Additionally, the change of venue
from the gardens to the Trianon, even further removed from the eyes and ears
of the court, exacerbated the jealousy that had begun to develop around the ex-
clusivity of the queen’s evening musical entertainments. Only an intimate group
attended and performed in productions at the Trianon. Campan claims to have
warned Marie Antoinette about the potential treachery of this choice, and Mercy-
Argenteau complained in his letters that Marie Antoinette’s actions bred a sense
of “alienation.”62 The empress agreed that the secret performances must stop. Marie
Antoinette promised Mercy-Argenteau that she would solve the problem by in-
viting more guests to make the performances less exclusive. The balance between
private and public performance shifted once again, and increased attendance only
fed gossip, which “spread from the court to town.” The public ultimately opined
that although the comte d’Artois was admittedly quite talented, the queen had
absolutely no theatrical abilities, and her acting was “royally bad.”63
As early as 1780, the king attempted to cut the queen’s household budget
for music and entertainment.64 During her pregnancies in subsequent years, the
59 Gustave Desjardins, Le Petit Trianon: Histoire et description (Versailles: L. Bernard, 1885), 107.
60 “Les répresentations [à Trianon] mettront obstacle aux promenades du soir” (Mercy-Argenteau
quoted in Adolphe Jullien, La comédie à la cour: Les théâtres de société royale pendant le siècle dernier [Paris:
Fermin-Didot, 1885], 278).
61 “L’amour de la musique avait mené la Reine à l’amour du théâtre, qui devint la plus grand plaisir de
Marie-Antoinette et la plus chère distraction de son esprit” (Jullien, La comédie à la cour, 268).
62 Madame Campan recounts her warnings: “J’osai representer à la reine. . . . [M]es avis furent inutile”
(I dared to explain [the dangers of these meetings] to the queen. . . . [M]y advice was useless) (Mémoires,
1:196). On Mercy-Argenteau’s concern about alienation, see Jullien, La comédie à la cour, 288.
63 “Transpira de la cour à la ville . . . et [Marie Antoinette] jouait royalement mal” (Jullien, La comédie
à la cour, 290).
64 “Édit du Roi, concernant le corps de la musique du roi,” May 1782, Musique du Roi, F-Pan, O1 842.
Julia Doe shared in a personal correspondence by e-mail on January 15, 2016, that Papillion de la Ferté,
administrator of the Menus-Plaisirs du Roi, compiled budgets to combat these cuts and to argue that opéra
comique productions would in fact save money for the household budget.
84 Women & Music Volume 21Fig. 2. Jean Marie Mixelle, engraver, print, Harpie femelle, monstre amphibie
(Chez Mixelle, Paris, 1784). Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de
France.
queen receded from her brief role as actrice, as Adolphe Jullien interprets, to be-
come a spectatrice.65 This change coincided with her continued efforts to appear
more maternal.66 As she spent increasing amounts of time at the royal residence in
Saint- Cloud, the productions at Trianon ended, and Marie Antoinette channeled
her energy toward directing productions—from the choice of repertoire, to de-
tails of scenery, to special effects. Thus, her responsibility for the cost and content
of performances became even more pronounced. Soon, Marie Antoinette’s lavish
spending on luxurious musical productions riled not only nobles who felt they
were the target of her private antics (she notoriously supported Pierre Beaumar-
chais’s Le mariage de Figaro, even when Louis XVI banned the play during the early
1780s because he believed that the plot mocked the aristocracy) but also Parisians
who feared famine and poverty. During the 1780s, France found itself in a fiscal and
65 Jullien, La comédie à la cour, 269.
66 According to Martin, Dairy Queens, Marie Antoinette added dairies to her Hamlet in 1785 to sym-
bolize maternal nurture and virtue.
Geoffroy-Schwinden, A Lady-in-Waiting’s Account 85monetary crisis, the result of a century of spending on wars, of tax exemption for
the First and Second Estates, and of excessive expenditures to keep up the royal res-
idences and expanding court. This crisis served as the main incentive for the king
to call the Estates General to Paris at the end of the decade, which snowballed into
the French Revolution.67 The effort to reign in the queen’s consumption coincided
with the publication of satires depicting her as a Harpy, the mythological female
monster that stole food from the hungry (fig. 2).
On the brink of Revolution, a pornographic pamphlet featuring Marie An-
toinette and the comte d’Artois appeared in Paris. L’Autrichienne en goguettes, ou
L’orgie royale (The Austrian out for a good time, or The royal orgy, 1789), labeled
an “opera proverb” on its title page, synthesized the musical critiques of Marie
Antoinette that Campan notes throughout the memoirs. The first footnote of the
opera reads:
The queen, student of the late Sacchini and protector of any ultramontane composer,
has the firm belief that she is a good musician because she mangles a few sonatas
on her harpsichord, and she sings out of tune in the concerts that she gives in secret,
where she takes care to admit only vile adulterers. As for Louis XVI, we might get
an idea of his taste for harmony in learning that the discordant and insupportable
sounds of smooth silver candlesticks scraping with force against a marble table has an
appeal to his antimusical ears.68
Marie Antoinette’s protection of composers from beyond the Alps, her poor
musicianship, and her exclusive performances had become not just a metaphor
for but proof of a bad character and bad politics.69 Even the king becomes impli-
cated in her musical debauchery: his appreciation for the noise of material wealth
represents both his attachment to finery and the deaf ear he turned toward his
wife’s decadent lifestyle. By 1789 Marie Antoinette’s love of music, which began as
innocent private performances in the apartments of Versailles, had become a pub-
lic spectacle of immorality. Campan’s memoirs remind the reader, however, that it
was not music alone that politically tarnished Marie Antoinette but her failure to
gauge its reception.
67 Timothy Tackett, Becoming a Revolutionary: The Deputies of the French National Assembly and the
Emergence of a Revolutionary Culture (1789–1790) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
68 “La Reine, élève de feu Sacchini, et protectrice de tout ce qui est compositeur ultramontain, a la
ferme persuasion qu’elle est bonne musicienne, parce qu’elle estropie quelques sonates sur son clavecin,
et qu’elle chante faux dans les concerts qu’elle donne in petto, et oû elle a soin de ne laisser entrer que de
vils adulateurs. Quant à Louis XVI, on peut se faire une idée de son goût pour l’harmonie en apprenant
que les sons discordants et insupportables de doux flambeaux d’argent frottés avec force sur une table de
marbre, ont des attraits pour son oreille anti-musicale” (L’Autrichienne en goguettes, ou L’orgie royale [n.p.,
n.d., 1789], 1n1).
69 In her research on the pornographic pamphlets featuring Marie Antoinette published in revolu-
tionary France, Jenna Harmon similarly concludes that “bad” music and musicianship came to symbolize
the queen’s immorality and poor character. Jenna Harmon, “Silent Songs, Royal Orgies: Listening to the
Political Pornography of the French Revolution” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American
Musicological Society, Vancouver, BC, November 2016).
86 Women & Music Volume 21Reality and Revolution
L’Autrichienne en goguettes was prescient. During the Revolution, Marie Antoinette
no longer had the freedom to willfully participate in fanciful musical performances
of her choice but was instead required to attend performances in order to demon-
strate her compliance with the new power structure. In an important sense, the
fictive world of stage performance and the reality of revolutionary politics merged,
although scholars have debated the precise process by which this amalgamation
took place. Paul Friedland asserts that a revolutionary, antitheatrical aesthetic was
the realization of Diderot’s concept of absorption: an illusion by which spectators
suspend their grounding in the “real world” to immerse themselves in the world
of a performance.70 Thus Friedland views audiences as abstracted from the perfor-
mance. Susan Maslan, on the other hand, considers the revolutionary theatrical
aesthetic as an embodied practice that responded to the “print- centered Haberma-
sian public sphere” of Old Regime political life by involving the spectator within
the performance.71 Central to both interpretations, as Darlow has recently pointed
out, is an ideology of transparency.72 Darlow argues that transparency constituted
a meta-theatricality that blurred the boundaries between the fiction of the diegesis
and the reality of the outside world, particularly through musical pastiche.73 The
expectation for transparency contrasted sharply with the alienation engendered by
Marie Antoinette’s musical performances during the 1770s and 1780s. In her mem-
oirs, Campan foregrounds revolutionary performances in which Marie Antoinette
herself became the protagonist of conflated fictional plotlines and political re-
alities. Two anecdotes are particularly illuminating: the 1789 Flanders Regiment
banquet at Versailles and a 1791 performance of Grétry’s Les événemens imprévus
(1779) at the Théâtre Italien. Campan attempts to reframe the narrative of both
performances in favor of the musically immoral queen.
Once Louis XVI realized that his guards had permitted the storming of the
Bastille, he decided to recruit more dependable protection, summoning to Paris
the Flanders Regiment of the royal army. A banquet to welcome the new troops
to Versailles on October 1, 1789, became legendary for its rowdy royalist behavior
and for its unexpected guests: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the dauphin. Con-
temporaneous accounts claimed that after rousing rounds of toasts and singing,
the banquet guests accompanied the royal family back to their apartments, and as
alcohol and joy mingled together, soldiers danced below the king’s windows into
the early morning hours. One unfortunate soldier, enthusiastic from the evening’s
professions of loyalty, committed suicide out of guilt for his previous revolution-
ary sympathies.74 In the memoirs, Campan claims that in the hope of avoiding
70 Paul Friedland, Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolu-
tion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).
71 Susan Maslan, Revolutionary Acts: Theater, Democracy and the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 13–14, quoted in Darlow, “(Meta-)Theatricality,” 387.
72 Darlow, “(Meta-)Theatricality,” 388.
73 Darlow, “(Meta-)Theatricality,” 390.
74 Campan, Mémoires, 2:72.
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