I watched the Sofia Coppola movie last month and I am obsessed. There's so much that makes sense to me about her, and a lot that doesn't make sense to me about France. But the more I read about her life online the more gaps are filled in. I'd love to read something that gives a lot of information on her influence on dress and design, although despite being a poor history student I am able to follow a lot of the political and diplomatic events of her life -- really, because when her reasons are described I feel like I can relate. It's a twisted thing to say, in our age of wealth disparity reaching a critical point, but I can't change the circumstances of my birth and I know what it's like to be distracted from real issues by shiny bougie shit and petty social politics.
Anyway, yeah, a real girl's guide to Marie Antoinette would be so fantastic to read this summer, thanks. Especially when it's getting to be time for guillotines again.
You might find the AskHistorian podcast episode La Chemise a la Reine and Historical Costumery a good place to start. The history (and historiography) of Antoinette is, for better or worse, inextricably tied to her visual appearance and the podcast is a great discussion on how the Queen's fashion could be politicized and visa versa. It touches on France's West Indies colonialism, aesthetic movements of the period, and the contrast between the Queen's public and private personas and more.
The best pop history about Marie Antoinette is Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber. This is technically a biography, but it is framed through the lens of fashion, from her ritual redressing at the border of France and the Holy Roman Empire through her formal and informal dress at the French court to her widow's weeds at her execution. It's both fascinating and very readable.
Also, just a random question about Marie's life: She was promiscuous during the years she was bearing children. What happened in the 18th century when a noble or royal child was born that very much did not look like the husband of the mother? I know affairs were much better tolerated then than, say, turn of the millennium America, at least specifically among the nobility and royalty. But let's say a visiting diplomat caught Marie's eye but was of a starkly different complexion than the king and herself... If she bore a child who, going by skin tone, we would know to be not her husband's child, what would happen? Would they just ignore it? They didn't know about phenotypes back then like we do now. Would they even know that pale folks give birth to pale folks and dark folks give birth to dark folks? This could really be a question about color rather than ethnicity, because I'm asking about the visible qualities of the kid's skin.
Also I know this is a problem in the black community, that often babies born to two black parents come out looking white so I'm not really asking about the delivery room per se, but rather, like... Without knowledge of genetics, and without that diverse a population, would the skin color of a royal or noble baby have stuck out, if it had been a brown person who came through the palace? Or was France so gripped by its whiteness that they didn't even talk to brown people at court?