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Carla Bruni accused of Marie-Antoinette ways
Magazine paints portrait of a First Lady totally out of touch with the French people
The French weekly magazine Point de Vue has produced an eight-page feature in which it accuses Carla Bruni, wife of President Nicolas Sarkozy, of being as out of touch with ordinary French people as Louis XVI's wife Marie Antoinette, who was guillotined in 1793 at the height of the French revolution.
"Same posture, same look, same smile," Point de Vue announced, before going on to show - complete with juxtaposed pictures - how Bruni and the former Queen of France share an obsession with clothes and their own physical appearance.
Just as Marie Antoinette pretended to be a shepherdess at her "play farm" at Le Petit Trianon, and relaxed by singing and playing the harpsichord, so Bruni likes to spend weekends at her home in Versailles, playing her guitar.
But the magazine appears to be most exercised by the recent TV appearance in which Bruni chatted about her psychotherapy. "At a time when an economic crisis is coming to a head, unemployment is rife, and there are government controversies, the wife of the president prefers to talk in front of a camera about her first psychoanalysis session."
This sort of behaviour has baffled traditional rural French people, according to Point de Vue, who expect their First Lady to be both self-effacing and hard-working. And yet the last official engagement in Bruni's diary was more than a month ago on September 25 - and that was a visit to the Andy Warhol Museum in New York. Hardly charity work.
The attack on Bruni's queenly habits will doubtless infuriate the Elysee Palace, where Sarkozy has been trying to dodge accusations of presiding over France in monarchical style. Earlier this month, he was humiliated when his son, 'Prince Jean', had to withdraw from an appointment as head of La Defense business park following public outrage at an unqualified 23-year-old being put forward for such an important role. ·
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So will this mean a cult of Carla in Japan to match the cult of Marie Antoinette?
Ouch, Point de Vue magazine displays a truly frightening ignorance of who Marie Antoinette really was. They seem to suggest she was, in fact, all that the rumours alleged - a dimwit playing at being a shepherdess etc, etc. She was just about the mirror opposite of all the caricatures: honest, honourable, a woman of unextravagant tastes (unlike the rest of the court), kind to friends, servants and the people alike, and devoted to her role as mother of the next generation of rulers of France. Virtually all of those rumous are known to be just that: complete falsegoods and propaganda emanating from low-lifes at Versailles - of which there were armies. For the French court was an astonishingly vile, gossip-ridden place with social practices as daft as they were arcane, from top to bottom. It was posh moral sewer, to be frank. Not least the scurrilous gossip ...
Marie Antoinette, coming from a far more 'normal' and open-minded court, namely the Hapsburg dynasty in Vienna, was in for a rude shock when she encountered the appalling snobbery, petty-mindedness and bitchiness of the French. They saw themselves as the pinnacle, as THE European court, yet they were in fact poisonously smug and insufferably introverted.
The so-called 'libellistes', the French gossip-mongers, who invented stories about everyone in a mix of satire and vindictiveness (the tabloids of their day), got to work on Marie Antoinette chiefly because she wasn't French and she wouldn't share the strange sexual tastes and moral turpitude of the court.
So by regurgitating old falsehoods about Louis XVII's Austrian wife, Point de Vue magazine shows nothing more than how glaringly ill-informed they are. And while their argument that Carla Bruni isn't being 'worthy' enough by suffering alongside the French people is fair enough so far as it goes, they destroy their own credibility by displaying a truly appalling ignorance of France's last queen. Back to school, you fools, and learn a few basic facts. May I recommend you start by reading Antonia Fraser's definitive biography on M-A? It's long, but extremely detailed and authoritative. You should hang your ignorant heads in shame.