Let Them Eat Macarons? Dissonant heritage of Marie Antoinette at Petit Trianon

Abstract

ABSTRACTThrough an analysis of the Petit Trianon, the historic house museum at the Château de Versailles associated with Marie Antoinette, the present article invites reflection over the topic of dissonant heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996) in connection with heritage commodification. The aim of this study is to heighten awareness of the difficulties which historic house legacies face in postmodern society through heritage analyses placed in the context of museology, art history and popular culture. This is achieved by building upon curatorial approaches and their reception by visitors, within an assessment of the 2008 restoration ethos of the Estate of Marie-Antoinette, and in parallel with a process of heritage commodification indirectly related to a twenty-first century Hollywood biopic of the last Queen of France - Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006). Competition surges between official and popular discourses of heritage (Groote and Haartsen 2008), all dealing, however, with the power of the same clichés engraved onto the French ‘collective memory’ (Halbwachs [1950]1980). This article highlights issues that arise when curatorial interpretation and visitor perceptions find themselves under the auspices of postmodern visual culture, thereby setting traps for heritage authenticity (Ashworth and Howard 1999).