Marie Antoinette

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The phrase was supposedly said by Marie Antoinette in 1789, during one of the famines in France during the reign of her husband, King Louis XVI. But it was not attributed to her until half a century later. Although anti-monarchists never cited the anecdote during the French Revolution, it acquired great symbolic importance in subsequent historical accounts when pro-revolutionary commentators employed the phrase to denounce the upper classes of the Ancien Régime as oblivious and rapacious. As one biographer of the Queen notes, it was a particularly powerful phrase because "the staple food of the French peasantry and the working class was bread, absorbing 50 percent of their income, as opposed to 5 percent on fuel; the whole topic of bread was therefore the result of obsessional national interest." [7] Shannon: There was a very “work hard, play hard” mentality. The studio got my family an apartment in the 15th arrondissement and I only had to work a couple scattered days over a month, so it kinda felt like having my maternity leave in Paris. Everybody lived in different neighbourhoods so we’d compare notes on the best restaurants and supermarkets. The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess": [5]

Coppola: Marie’s real bedroom was decorated with bright gold and turquoise fabric, so it wasn’t complete artistic license on my part. You never see those pops of color in period films, but I wanted to depict her world the way she saw it.

Timeline

Lever, Évelyne; Temerson, Catherine (2000). Marie-Antoinette: The Last Queen of France. St. Martin's Griffin. pp. 63–65. ISBN 978-0312283339. Having gotten her start as a child model at the age of three, Dunst was an industry veteran before she could legally drive. Shot between two Spider-Man sequels, Marie Antoinette signaled the type of auteur-driven material the then-23 year-old was interested in pursuing more.

Kate Mulleavy, Rodarte co-founder: Sofia has always made such personal films, and Marie Antoinette is one of our favorites. I remember seeing the film in a Paris theater and just being captivated by [Dunst’s] performance and the whole world Sofia created. I knew I had seen something completely iconic. Nighy: I was finishing my second year of literature studies at the time, so during shooting I was also preparing for a six-hour Chaucer exam. I got to stay in a very nice hotel and wear these gorgeous costumes everyday and then go home to read Chaucer every night. What a loser, right? Blahnik: Working on this film meant I got to fulfill my boyhood dream of making shoes for Marie Antoinette—even if it was three centuries later and for a film. It’s one of the great masterpieces of the last 20 years. And I’m not just saying that because I was involved.Campion-Vincent, Véronique & Shojaei Kawan, Christine, "Marie-Antoinette et son célèbre dire: deux scénographies et deux siècles de désordres, trois niveaux de communication et trois modes accusatoires", Annales historiques de la Révolution française, 2002, full text

Coppola: Lance understood that I wanted those scenes at the Trianon to have a really intimate, youthful feeling. Lance’s style doesn’t have that typical formality you expect from a period piece, there’s a certain looseness to it. I wanted to have a more intimate connection with how you see and connect to the character of Marie Antoinette. One of the many floral arrangements in the film incorporating pink peony buttercups. Photo: Leigh JohnsonAnother problem with the dates surrounding the attribution is that when the phrase first appeared, Marie Antoinette was not only too young to have said it, but living outside France as well. Although published in 1782, Rousseau's Confessions were finished thirteen years prior in 1769. Marie Antoinette, only fourteen years old at the time, would not arrive at Versailles from Austria until 1770. Since she was completely unknown to him at the time of writing, she could not have possibly been the "great princess" he mentioned. [14] Other attributions [ edit ] Kenneth Turan, The Los Angeles Times (in 2006 ): Hard as it is to believe in the US, a country whose citizens have a hard time getting upset about what happened last week, much less centuries ago, the French take their history very seriously. And the film’s undeniably sympathetic look at Marie Antoinette goes contrary to a fierce cultural bias against the queen that made her the most hated woman in France.

Rousseau does not name the "great princess", and he may have invented the anecdote altogether, as the Confessions is not considered entirely factual. [6] Attribution to Marie Antoinette [ edit ]Faithfull: I always thought Sofia’s film was a masterpiece. People are not always understood as the geniuses they are at the time—I don’t think I have been! But with time one gets proper recognition. People will only come to understand Sofia’s vision more as time goes by. I haven’t had much of an acting career so Marie Antoinette is something I’m very proud of.