September 6, 2017 • 27 mins
As Louis XVI's time as king was less and less stable in the face of the French Revolution, Léonard stepped away from the royal family and into his own business ventures. But his loyalty to the crown would forever tie his fate to that of the nobility.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Honley Frown and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And in
the first episode of this two parter we talked about
Leonard Autier, who was a young man from the French
countryside who strolled into Paris with nothing and he managed
(00:23):
to become the country's most celebrated hairdresser in a startlingly
short period of time. He quickly found himself styling the
hair of the Daufine of France, Marie Antoinette, and their
friendship and their business relationship continued and deepened when the
Austrian born princess transitioned into the role of queen. He
really reminds me of like kids making amazing makeup videos
on YouTube. You then get to become a spokes spokesbottom.
(00:46):
Yes uh. And as his time at Precise stretched on,
Leonard took on additional tasks as needed, but always had
a keen sense of what was in his best interest.
For example, he helped Marie Ane when it revived a
French fashion magazine called Journal d Dame, with the intent
that his own work would be featured in its pages.
(01:08):
Yeah it's no fool, but all is. He was creating
the next big thing, and often quite literally big in hairstyles.
After a style developed by Rose Boltent appeared in Journal
des Dame and became quite popular, Leonard was driven to
concoct the hairstyle that would surpass it. There was some
definite jealousy in the mix. There. Almost everyone has heard
(01:28):
of or seen drawings of Marie Antoinette's wild hairstyles that
had accessories such as miniature figures and bird's nest and
yards of fabric trims as part of the coiffure, and
those are examples of what Leonard came to call the
poof sentimental. As hoped, the poof Sentimental eclipsed the much
simpler Kazaco hairstyle that Bartown had created, and from there
(01:53):
Leonard continued to just invent flamboyant styles. One called a
hedgehog involves stacks of full curls, then a number of
ringlets falling around the wearer's neck. The Zephyr featured numerous
flowers that moved and shook like a garden in a breeze.
But of course, the most famous of all of Marie
Antoinette's hairstyles was the one that had a ship in it.
(02:16):
That was Leonard's work. That style was called the Kaffier
a la belle Pool, which was named for the ship
called the Bellpool, which had recently won a naval battle.
It's so famous. That's what everybody thinks of ship hair.
So when King Louis the fifteen died, Leonard was on
hand for the coronation preparations for Louis, and so was
(02:37):
Rosebert tom Once he became the queen's hairdresser, he delegated
more and more responsibility to his friend and business partner Fremmel,
running the hair school, and all the appointments for anyone
but the Queen were handled by Freml or one of
Leonard's brothers, sometimes calling themselves Leonard, so that Leonard himself
could be at her Royal Highness's beck and call at
(02:59):
any moment. Yeah, he had had his tendrils in so
many different business interests that kind of um Foster and
bolster his name. That then when he suddenly became hairdresser
of the queen, he was like, we gotta figure out
a delegate. Uh. And as the Queen's hairdresser Leonard's relationship
with Marie Antoinette really did deepen quite a great deal.
(03:21):
He allegedly knew her every secret, and even, for example,
in the late stages of her first pregnancy, when she
was confined to bed, Leonard was there. He would lie
in bed with her so that he can comb and
style her hair, and he would later joke that he
and the Queen had shared the same bed, but that
joke was often misinterpreted and used as evidence the Queen's
lass sevious lifestyle. In his memoir, he recounted all the
(03:44):
seedy gossip associated with Marie Antoinette of affairs and indulgent
in a complete disregard for the needs of the people
when spending money on herself. Even though he included all
that gossip, he also said it wasn't true. It comes
across as him wanting the fun of a rumor mill
while also defending his very important friend and also employer. Yeah,
(04:07):
I mean he was theoretically. We'll talk about the legitimacy
of his memoirs at the end of the episode. But
he had remained very loyal to Marie Antoinette until Louis sixteen.
Throughout and beyond their reign uh and after the Queen's
second pregnancy, which resulted in the birth of the Daufin
Luis Joseph in the fall of sev one, it became
(04:28):
apparent that the Queen was losing her hair. We talked
about in the first episode that even when she first
came to France, there was discussion about her hair growing badly,
which seemed to indicate it was quite thin. But at
this point she really was having a pretty significant hair loss.
And Leonard, ever the inventor and also incredibly fearful that
his fate was so closely tied to the hair that
(04:50):
Marie Antoinette was losing, suggested that she let him cut
her hair for an entirely new and less architectural style
called aquifer a LanFan. And this style was basically shorter
hair that was cut in layers and then curled and
arranged and stacked ringlets. This idea of cutting hair short
at this period of time was really breaking all of
(05:11):
the rules that had gone forth in style prior to it.
The Queen was really really nervous about having her hair
cut relatively short, but she eventually agreed, but her status
and Leonard's ability to just sell any style, as the
latest innovation led to the coiffier on la font being
adopted by most of the ladies of the court within
just a few weeks. Yeah, it's not quite as dramatic
(05:34):
as the stories of like women cutting their hair short
in the twenties, because there still was some length and
curl to it. But it really was a massive departure,
and it was this huge you know, after people had
kept their hair long and styled and elaborate styles for
so long, to just go, I'm cutting it all off
was huge and it caught on super quickly. But as
the unrest among the people of France grew during this time,
(05:56):
Leonard was certainly aware of it, though whether he was
self aware enough to recognize his own contribution to the
problem is unclear. Talked about in the first episode that
he created these expensive and lavish hairstyles from Marie Antoinette,
which were then imitated by other women, which made them
lose money that they didn't need to be spending. He
really sort of contributed to that whole kind of cult
(06:17):
of style that was irresponsible many ways. We don't know though,
whether he was really aware that that he was such
a key player in that He had at this point
made a great deal of money both styling hair and
by selling beauty products to the Queen through his beauty
school in the decade and a half that he had
been working at Versailles, and at a time, for example,
when a loaf of bread had reached the then exorbitant
(06:40):
sum of eight sus due to scarcity, Leonard was charging
as much as four thousand sous for creating a new hairstyle.
He was, after more than a decade and a half
of working with the nobility, a very, very rich man.
But as the people's dislike of Louis the sixteenth and
Marie Antoinette grew, Leonard became less less involved in their
(07:01):
everyday lives. He continued to do the Queen's here for
special occasions, but stopped being his everyday job, and for
other clients he would usually send one of his assistants.
In February of seventeen eighty eight, Lanard moved out of
Versailles to pursue other interests. With the Queen's blessing, he was, however,
still referred to as the coiffier to the Queen. But
(07:22):
before we dive into the business venture that Leonard next
decided to pursue We're going to take a brief break
and have a word from one of our fantastic sponsors,
even though he was no longer working every day with
the Queen. To honor Marie Antoinette's love of Italian opera, Monsieur,
(07:42):
Leonard decided to venture into theater production in partnership with
the director of the theater at Versailles, Mademoiselle Montansier, and
with permission from the King, Autier opened the Teatle de
Monsieur at the Tuileries Palace on January seventeen eighty nine.
He was quite good at managing his theater, and reviews
(08:02):
for the productions were also quite good, but it was
costly and the former hairdresser struggled to fund his operas.
That was why he ended up in partnership with Montensier,
but he and the recide director clashed over the nature
of the operas and the plays to be staged there.
Montensier tended towards the sorts of traditional fair that were
(08:22):
appropriate for Versailles, whereas Leonard wanted to expand into other
types of productions. Leonard eventually found an investor to buy
Mademoiselle Matansier's interest in the theater. Yeah, and that's actually
gonna come up again later. Um. Additionally, this theater was
a combination of two troops of actors, one that was
French and one that was Italian, and the two groups
(08:44):
did not mesh well and there was constant fighting, and
even with additional financial backers, by the end of the spring,
just like four months after they had opened, Leonard was
pretty much out of money. When King Louis the sixteenth
assembled the Estates General and early May of seventeen eighty nine,
Leonard was requested by Marie Antoinette to style her hair
(09:05):
for the gathering. He immediately saw that she was not
the woman he had served for so many years, and
she told her old friend that she had quote sad
thoughts followed by gloomy premonitions. Knowing that the public was
likely to jeer when she made her appearance, she wanted
to at least look her best and tasked Leonard with
achieving that wish and Leonard saw the queen pretty regularly
(09:28):
in the months leading up to the official start of
the revolution, and he undoubtedly witnessed many of the key
events that were involved, including the women's march on Versailles
and the royal family being captured and taken to Paris,
and he also engaged in a bit of spy work
for the king on occasion, which indicates he was deeply
trusted by Louis. The sixteenth, when the royal family fled
(09:49):
Paris for Verenne, Leonard's younger brother, Jean Francois, traveled with them,
although it appears that Leonard did not know that he
was part of the party that left at the time.
In the midst of all this evil, Leonard and his
wife Marie Louise were still adding to their family. They
had three daughters already, and then they welcomed his son
at the end of seventeen ninety. By the end of
(10:10):
seventeen nine one, though, the couple had ended their marriage,
and when the King and the Queen were arrested at
Varenne and returned to Paris in June of sevente Leonard
once again visited the Queen and uh he found her
to be so different from her normal self that it
really struck him and was very affecting. She was constantly
(10:31):
under guard, but in this case, instead of seeming gloomy,
she had almost achieved through all of this stress a
level of ease with the men who watched over her.
She would converse with them, and she abandoned the trappings
of court hierarchy to sort of just be a normal
human and have fairly common level relationships with these people
that were guarding her. In the meantime, Leonard Attier's name
(10:55):
had become a hindrance to the already struggling theater. His
ongoing associate Asian with Marie Antoinette, was basically poisoned to
the business. So first his name was removed and then
he was asked to step away by the investors. It
was renamed t afters. Marie Antoinette, finding her family in
desperate financial circumstances, asked Leonard to travel to London with
(11:18):
a collection of diamonds that had traveled with her to
France from Vienna when she was just a teenage girl.
This was important that she didn't want it to be
a diamond that was technically from France's money. It was
her own that she had had well before she was
part of the royal family in France. And Autier agreed
that he would do this, and he made his arrangements
and he went to England as requested, arriving there at
(11:40):
the end of December sevente Lanard was able to sell
the diamonds, and he was. He also set out to
see who might be sympathetic to Louis the sixteenth and
willing to help the French royals, which he did over
the course of the next year and a little beyond.
That was ultimately a disappointing exercise. He did manage to
connect with Duberry in England, and although she had been
(12:02):
exiled from Prassailles, she was still loyal to the crown,
especially as Louis the sixteenth had set her up with
a pension yeah, as the King's favorite. As the king
was nearing death, she basically was sent away because he
was having last rites and she could not be part
of that um. But Yeah, they set her up with
was really a pretty nice amount of money after that,
and she did remain loyal to the crown. She had
(12:24):
actually stayed in France when others had fled, and many
of the royals and members of the palace households had
appealed to her to send the money, as they had
fled with very little, and she had been unable to
really send anything because her home was under constant surveillance,
so she knew if she trying to get money out
to somebody else, it would immediately cause basically a raid
of her house, and eventually she decided that she would
(12:47):
leave France to assist the scattered Royals. She traveled to
London to find some diamonds that had been stolen from her.
At least that's what she told government officials. She actually
made several trips to London to look for these diamonds,
that this was the fourth and there had been a
robbery of Duberry's diamonds, but she had also traveled to
London to sell to others, with the intent that the
(13:09):
proceeds would be sent to parties working to fight for
the Royalist cause. Leonard suggested that they used the same
jeweler he had sold the queen's diamonds too, and this
plan was eventually agreed upon, although Leonard entered the shop alone,
and he really wanted to use his jeweler because when
he had sold may Antoinette's diamonds, he got a lot
more from for them than they had been assessed for
(13:30):
in France, so he thought, like this, we're going to
get more money if we go to my guy, And
so while he was in the shop alone, du Berry
wanted to avoid revealing that they were hers and consequently
exactly how much her time as the King's favorite had
earned her. Uh and so this entire setup led two problems. First,
a passer by recognized Duberry and chatted her up, even
(13:52):
after she curtly explained that Leonard was inside selling a
small diamond so she could settle her debts. Second, lay Nard,
who got more than they were expecting for the diamonds,
yelled an enormous some from the jeweler's door to do
Berry in her carriage, two point to million libra, which
at the time would have been worth around a hundred
(14:13):
and sixty five thousand pounds in English currency. Yeah. I
did one calculation, and we've talked about before how it's
really hard to do like historical money and what it's
worth today. So I don't know if this is accurate,
but it seemed like using calculators that I found online
from fairly reputable sources, it's like going, we got thirty
eight million dollars, which you wouldn't want to stand in
(14:34):
the street and yell why would you why would you
just yell that at the door to not not the
brightest move ever, but this huge number of and the
fact that it was the sale of diamonds was overheard
in the street and a rumor quickly arose that the
diamonds had been stolen, and by evening police came looking
for Leonard at the house where he was living, and Leonard,
(14:56):
assisted by a friend, jumped out the window to a
vade capture. Madame Duberry had heard of the misfortune. She
had you know, friends in London, and she was able
to clear the matter up by producing proof that the
diamonds were in fact hers. Mr Pitt, the Chancellor of
the Treasury, had already suspected that they were legitimately Duberry's diamonds,
and he was sympathetic actually to the woman and her cause.
(15:19):
He knew that she was probably trying to get money
to help the Royals reachieve their position in France. He
knew that she was probably trying to fund the efforts
to restore the French monarchy. But he had sent police
to arrest Leonard, but only as a matter of appearance,
uh and they had actually his His policeman had been
instructed to take this man to dinner and then just
(15:41):
let him go. So coming up, we will talk about
the serious downturn in the royal family's situation, but before
we get to that, we'll have one more quick sponsor break.
So after that little skirmish with the police was settled,
Duberry and Leonard were able to send a pretty significant
(16:02):
sum of money to the cause. But things in Paris,
they did not know yet, had already gotten much worse
for the royal family. On January one, before the money
that Leonard and DuBarry sent had gotten to its intended
Royalist recipients, King Louis the sixteenth was executed by guillotine.
Leonard continued to communicate and work with the princes of France,
(16:25):
who were living in exile and still plotting away for
the monarchy to regain its power, and he also during
this time received word that one of his brothers had
been executed, though there's actually some inconsistency in the account
of when he received the news and precisely who had
been put to death. For some time there was actually
confusion as to whether or not it had actually been
Leonard who was executed. So you will remember we mentioned
(16:48):
in the first episode that problem where Leonard recruited his
brothers as assistants and they all used the same name
for business purposes, and it appears that was the case
in this mix up over exactly who had been guillotine.
It said Ottier Leonard and then in parentheses Jean Francois,
but for a long time people just thought it was
Monsieur Leonard. In any case, it was clear that France
(17:09):
was not a safe place for one so closely associated
with the monarch who had been overthrown and executed, and
the bad news continued to come for Leonard. Marie Antoinette
was executed on in October sixteenth, seventeen ninety three. Du Barry,
who had returned to France despite Leonard begging her not to,
was also put to death on December eighth of the
(17:29):
same year. Yeah, she wanted to go back for her things, basically,
like she had left everything she had and he was like,
please don't, it's not worth it. She's like, that's all
I have. I gotta go get him. And that didn't
work out. So after spending a brief time in Verona,
where the French King Louis the eighteenth was set up
in an exiles court after the young King Louis the seventeenth,
(17:50):
the child of Marine Too and Lui the sixteenth, had
died in prison. Leonard next moved on to the German
Duchy of Brunswick, which he quite enjoyed, but he eventually
left there and he ended up St. Petersburg. In there,
at the age of fifty eight, he rebooted his career
as a hairdresser. Czar Paul the First greeted him warmly,
an Empress Maria employed Leonard at once. He established a
(18:13):
comfortable life for himself there, even though it was nothing
vaguely akin to the really lavish life that he had
had in Versailles. He worked in St. Petersburg for sixteen years,
and just three years into his stay he had been
asked to style the corpse of Czar Paul the First
after he was murdered for refusing to abdicate. After Leonard
applied makeup to the deceased and arranged his hair, it
(18:35):
was said that the man looked better in death than
he ever had alive. Yeah, he wasn't classically attractive man,
but Leonard really made him look quite good. Uh. And
while Leonard lived in St. Petersburg, a fire actually destroyed
all of his personal papers, so consequently we don't have
a whole lot of information on his personal life during
this time, though he clearly managed to keep himself very
(18:57):
busy styling the hair of Russian noble. When the French
monarchy was restored in eighteen fourteen, Leonard returned to France,
hoping that his years of loyal service and the great
amounts of money that he had lent various members of
the nobility in the early years of the revolution would
be rewarded and maybe he would get a title. He
was given a job as the doorkeeper of King Louis
(19:19):
the eighteenth apartments, obviously a position far below what he
had hoped for. Yeah, I thought maybe I'd be a
marquis from a door guy. Uh. Encouraged by a friend
who was a woman that had actually been his mistress
before the revolution and who he reconnected with. After returning
to Paris, Leonard petitioned to open another theater, but getting
(19:40):
a royal privilege to open the venue was bound up
in red tape and lack of interest. There were already
many theaters throughout the city, so adding yet another seemed
like an enterprise unlikely to take off with any real success.
But he also had supporters within the nobility who pointed
out that one more theater privilege granted by the King
was really not a particularly big risk, so it would
(20:02):
be better to grant a loyal servant of the royal
line such a privilege than someone who might not be
a loyalist, so Leonard persisted. He had been told to
drop up a petition for the opera comique for the
Minister of the Interior, with the assurance that the royal
family would support it. So Monsieur Leonard had a friend
helped write the petition, and that same friend promised to
(20:24):
have an acquaintance that worked within the ministry keep an
eye on it and report its progress. And Leonard's friends
even managed to have the petition put in a beautiful,
clean envelope and placed directly onto the desk of the
minister so it would not get lost in the flurry
of other petitions that were constantly being sent to the office,
but on his desk, it's sat and sat. It stayed
(20:45):
on the desk for four months while other petitions piled
up as well. When another of Leonard's friends went to
the minister to inquire about the status of the petition.
The minister pointed to his desk and said, I am
keeping Leonard's matter before me. Technically that was true, but
he had not touched it. Kind of a smarmy synarchyated
(21:05):
and the lip query. Eventually, one of the princes spoke
to Leonard on the matter, and when Leonard asked that
the king had signed his order, he thought, oh, he
wants to talk to me. This must be congratulations. He
was told, in fact, that he needed to let this
opera comique matter completely go, that he was not going
to be getting his theater, but that he was being
named Orderer General of State Funerals, which is a cushy
(21:30):
job that was more title than work, and it came
with an annual salary of twelve thousand francs. At first,
he thought this appointment was a joke, but he was
assured that it was not. While Leonard was sad to
let go of his theater plan, he thanked the prince
profusely and adjusted to the idea that he was now
a state funeral director. His installation ceremony was filled with formality,
(21:50):
as all of his staff appeared rank and file before
him that evening, though they all dined together and attended
the opera, and Leonard was pleased to discover that his
new staff was quite lively and fun, which he had
not expected given their profession. Yeah. Uh, it seems so
bizarre to me. Oh, you want to start another theater
(22:10):
and you're a hairdresser. Would you like to be a
funeral director? What? Uh? And While this turn of events,
though it did seem to be getting the seventy three
year olds life back on track, this was certainly better
than being a dorman h He was soon sued by
his former business partner in the Tatla de Maschieux, Madame Montasier,
for unpaid annuities that he owed her. The proceedings took
(22:32):
place in eighteen nineteen in the court found in her favor,
and Leonard suddenly found himself responsible for paying the woman
five hundred thousand francs money that he absolutely did not have,
but he died before he could pay it off. On
March twenty four of eighteen twenty. Leonard presided over only
one funeral procession on his job as Orderer of State funerals,
(22:56):
when the Prince de Conde died in eighteen eighteen. When
Leonard himself died, his staff laid him to rest. Although
it was a very small funeral with few in attendance.
Of Leonard's children, only two of his daughters survived. They
inherited seven hundred and sixteen francs and a in an
assortment of small jewels, including one tiny piece which had
(23:16):
been the property of Marie Antoinette. But at that point
Leonard owed his maid three hundred and seventy five francs
and his landlord two hundred and fifty francs. So other
than his famous shell comb, which had styled the most
famous and powerful heads of France, there really was not
much for his kids to keep. Leonard's memoir Souvenir to
(23:37):
Leonard Coiffio de la ram Ri Antoinette weren't published until
twenty years after his death, and their legitimacy has been questioned.
While the details of Monsieur Leonard's exploits are almost certainly exaggerated,
as the case with a lot of memoirs we talked
about on the show, many of the events in the
memoirs do align with events that were playing out in France,
(23:58):
Europe and Russia at the time these memoirs were reprinted.
In eighteen nineties. Yeah, and then they got an English
language printing in the nineteen teens. I think nineteen nineteen,
but I'm not sure. But the thing that makes Leonard
to me a really interesting figure is how his creative
and outlandish hair designs were, to some degree, as we said,
held responsible for the moral and fiscal downfall of many
(24:18):
of France's women in the country as a whole as
a consequence. And this is that thing we always talk about.
It serves as a perfect example of how one person,
in this case, one person who walked into Paris with
nothing but a COVID ambition and a serious case of confidence,
can make this really huge impact on world events. You
don't think, oh, I bet the queen's hairdresser really was
(24:39):
an important figure, But he really was in a lot
of ways. So yeah, to me, it kind of, you know,
uh fills that that constant uh litany that I'm always
chanting about. Every person is making history all the time,
even if they're they're just and I'm using the air
quotes because I don't think of it that way, just
you know, doing an update making hair. You have some
(25:02):
listener mail for us as well. I do. I have
two pieces of listener mail, though I'll be quick about it.
The first one is from our listener Jennifer and her dad.
They have sent us a variety of postcards as they've
traveled around, and this one is from the Victoria and
Albert Museum. High ladies, it's me again. Today. My dad
and I went to Victorian Albert. It's a huge place
and they had a special exhibit on clothing and fashion.
I know you both would have loved. Many people have
(25:24):
sent me stuff from that, and I do. I have
an exhibition catalog from friend of the show Brian Young
that he brought me back from when he went. She said, so,
I thought I would send you a card of this
lovely corset. My dad and I argued over this one
whether to send this one or address, but I won
since I write the cards. Cheers, tears, and thanks as
always for the lovely podcast. Uh. I love it and
I'm glad you went with the corset because I love
(25:46):
corset pictures. Like the architecture of course, it's is fascinating, yeah,
and it's got a really beautiful spoon busk and it's
just lovely. The second one is another gift we've been
any sewing great gifts lately from our listener Laura, and
she says, Hi, thank you so much for all the
hard work you do to present a well researched and
enjoyable podcast. I've always loved history, and you do an
incredible job of bringing knowledge and passion to subjects that
(26:07):
are too often overlooked or forgotten. I know a lot
of people think history is boring, and it breaks my
heart because they don't know what they're missing. If only
every teacher could bring history to life like you do,
that is so sweet, she says. I'm an artist with
a dull day job, and I listen to your show
during quiet moments at my desk and while working on
art at home. I recently completed the Enclosed Decks of Cards,
which are inspired by my love of medieval and early
(26:29):
modern history. I actually have a master's degree in medieval history.
Each face card represents a real historical figure from the
medieval early modern period, and there are even some post
show topics, including Tycho Brahy, Joan of Arc and Juanna
of Castile. I did a bit of research on Wuana
for my master's thesis and was very moved by her story.
I really appreciate your episode on her uh so, she
(26:51):
sent these amazing cards. They're absolutely beautiful. I think I've
said before on the show that I love decks of
cards like I collect them because I use them as
pattern weights. So I'm excited that i will have one
of these in my selling room when I'll get to
look at all the prettiness all the time. They are beautiful,
They're absolutely lovely. So thank you, thank you, thank you
so much, Laura. If you would like to write to
us about this episode or any other, you can do
so at History podcast. At how staff works dot com,
(27:13):
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. You can come and visit our
website missed in History dot com for all of our
episodes and show notes on anything Tracy and I have
worked on together. So come and visit us. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
(27:33):
works dot com.
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Honley Frown and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. And in
the first episode of this two parter we talked about
Leonard Autier, who was a young man from the French
countryside who strolled into Paris with nothing and he managed
(00:23):
to become the country's most celebrated hairdresser in a startlingly
short period of time. He quickly found himself styling the
hair of the Daufine of France, Marie Antoinette, and their
friendship and their business relationship continued and deepened when the
Austrian born princess transitioned into the role of queen. He
really reminds me of like kids making amazing makeup videos
on YouTube. You then get to become a spokes spokesbottom.
(00:46):
Yes uh. And as his time at Precise stretched on,
Leonard took on additional tasks as needed, but always had
a keen sense of what was in his best interest.
For example, he helped Marie Ane when it revived a
French fashion magazine called Journal d Dame, with the intent
that his own work would be featured in its pages.
(01:08):
Yeah it's no fool, but all is. He was creating
the next big thing, and often quite literally big in hairstyles.
After a style developed by Rose Boltent appeared in Journal
des Dame and became quite popular, Leonard was driven to
concoct the hairstyle that would surpass it. There was some
definite jealousy in the mix. There. Almost everyone has heard
(01:28):
of or seen drawings of Marie Antoinette's wild hairstyles that
had accessories such as miniature figures and bird's nest and
yards of fabric trims as part of the coiffure, and
those are examples of what Leonard came to call the
poof sentimental. As hoped, the poof Sentimental eclipsed the much
simpler Kazaco hairstyle that Bartown had created, and from there
(01:53):
Leonard continued to just invent flamboyant styles. One called a
hedgehog involves stacks of full curls, then a number of
ringlets falling around the wearer's neck. The Zephyr featured numerous
flowers that moved and shook like a garden in a breeze.
But of course, the most famous of all of Marie
Antoinette's hairstyles was the one that had a ship in it.
(02:16):
That was Leonard's work. That style was called the Kaffier
a la belle Pool, which was named for the ship
called the Bellpool, which had recently won a naval battle.
It's so famous. That's what everybody thinks of ship hair.
So when King Louis the fifteen died, Leonard was on
hand for the coronation preparations for Louis, and so was
(02:37):
Rosebert tom Once he became the queen's hairdresser, he delegated
more and more responsibility to his friend and business partner Fremmel,
running the hair school, and all the appointments for anyone
but the Queen were handled by Freml or one of
Leonard's brothers, sometimes calling themselves Leonard, so that Leonard himself
could be at her Royal Highness's beck and call at
(02:59):
any moment. Yeah, he had had his tendrils in so
many different business interests that kind of um Foster and
bolster his name. That then when he suddenly became hairdresser
of the queen, he was like, we gotta figure out
a delegate. Uh. And as the Queen's hairdresser Leonard's relationship
with Marie Antoinette really did deepen quite a great deal.
(03:21):
He allegedly knew her every secret, and even, for example,
in the late stages of her first pregnancy, when she
was confined to bed, Leonard was there. He would lie
in bed with her so that he can comb and
style her hair, and he would later joke that he
and the Queen had shared the same bed, but that
joke was often misinterpreted and used as evidence the Queen's
lass sevious lifestyle. In his memoir, he recounted all the
(03:44):
seedy gossip associated with Marie Antoinette of affairs and indulgent
in a complete disregard for the needs of the people
when spending money on herself. Even though he included all
that gossip, he also said it wasn't true. It comes
across as him wanting the fun of a rumor mill
while also defending his very important friend and also employer. Yeah,
(04:07):
I mean he was theoretically. We'll talk about the legitimacy
of his memoirs at the end of the episode. But
he had remained very loyal to Marie Antoinette until Louis sixteen.
Throughout and beyond their reign uh and after the Queen's
second pregnancy, which resulted in the birth of the Daufin
Luis Joseph in the fall of sev one, it became
(04:28):
apparent that the Queen was losing her hair. We talked
about in the first episode that even when she first
came to France, there was discussion about her hair growing badly,
which seemed to indicate it was quite thin. But at
this point she really was having a pretty significant hair loss.
And Leonard, ever the inventor and also incredibly fearful that
his fate was so closely tied to the hair that
(04:50):
Marie Antoinette was losing, suggested that she let him cut
her hair for an entirely new and less architectural style
called aquifer a LanFan. And this style was basically shorter
hair that was cut in layers and then curled and
arranged and stacked ringlets. This idea of cutting hair short
at this period of time was really breaking all of
(05:11):
the rules that had gone forth in style prior to it.
The Queen was really really nervous about having her hair
cut relatively short, but she eventually agreed, but her status
and Leonard's ability to just sell any style, as the
latest innovation led to the coiffier on la font being
adopted by most of the ladies of the court within
just a few weeks. Yeah, it's not quite as dramatic
(05:34):
as the stories of like women cutting their hair short
in the twenties, because there still was some length and
curl to it. But it really was a massive departure,
and it was this huge you know, after people had
kept their hair long and styled and elaborate styles for
so long, to just go, I'm cutting it all off
was huge and it caught on super quickly. But as
the unrest among the people of France grew during this time,
(05:56):
Leonard was certainly aware of it, though whether he was
self aware enough to recognize his own contribution to the
problem is unclear. Talked about in the first episode that
he created these expensive and lavish hairstyles from Marie Antoinette,
which were then imitated by other women, which made them
lose money that they didn't need to be spending. He
really sort of contributed to that whole kind of cult
(06:17):
of style that was irresponsible many ways. We don't know though,
whether he was really aware that that he was such
a key player in that He had at this point
made a great deal of money both styling hair and
by selling beauty products to the Queen through his beauty
school in the decade and a half that he had
been working at Versailles, and at a time, for example,
when a loaf of bread had reached the then exorbitant
(06:40):
sum of eight sus due to scarcity, Leonard was charging
as much as four thousand sous for creating a new hairstyle.
He was, after more than a decade and a half
of working with the nobility, a very, very rich man.
But as the people's dislike of Louis the sixteenth and
Marie Antoinette grew, Leonard became less less involved in their
(07:01):
everyday lives. He continued to do the Queen's here for
special occasions, but stopped being his everyday job, and for
other clients he would usually send one of his assistants.
In February of seventeen eighty eight, Lanard moved out of
Versailles to pursue other interests. With the Queen's blessing, he was, however,
still referred to as the coiffier to the Queen. But
(07:22):
before we dive into the business venture that Leonard next
decided to pursue We're going to take a brief break
and have a word from one of our fantastic sponsors,
even though he was no longer working every day with
the Queen. To honor Marie Antoinette's love of Italian opera, Monsieur,
(07:42):
Leonard decided to venture into theater production in partnership with
the director of the theater at Versailles, Mademoiselle Montansier, and
with permission from the King, Autier opened the Teatle de
Monsieur at the Tuileries Palace on January seventeen eighty nine.
He was quite good at managing his theater, and reviews
(08:02):
for the productions were also quite good, but it was
costly and the former hairdresser struggled to fund his operas.
That was why he ended up in partnership with Montensier,
but he and the recide director clashed over the nature
of the operas and the plays to be staged there.
Montensier tended towards the sorts of traditional fair that were
(08:22):
appropriate for Versailles, whereas Leonard wanted to expand into other
types of productions. Leonard eventually found an investor to buy
Mademoiselle Matansier's interest in the theater. Yeah, and that's actually
gonna come up again later. Um. Additionally, this theater was
a combination of two troops of actors, one that was
French and one that was Italian, and the two groups
(08:44):
did not mesh well and there was constant fighting, and
even with additional financial backers, by the end of the spring,
just like four months after they had opened, Leonard was
pretty much out of money. When King Louis the sixteenth
assembled the Estates General and early May of seventeen eighty nine,
Leonard was requested by Marie Antoinette to style her hair
(09:05):
for the gathering. He immediately saw that she was not
the woman he had served for so many years, and
she told her old friend that she had quote sad
thoughts followed by gloomy premonitions. Knowing that the public was
likely to jeer when she made her appearance, she wanted
to at least look her best and tasked Leonard with
achieving that wish and Leonard saw the queen pretty regularly
(09:28):
in the months leading up to the official start of
the revolution, and he undoubtedly witnessed many of the key
events that were involved, including the women's march on Versailles
and the royal family being captured and taken to Paris,
and he also engaged in a bit of spy work
for the king on occasion, which indicates he was deeply
trusted by Louis. The sixteenth, when the royal family fled
(09:49):
Paris for Verenne, Leonard's younger brother, Jean Francois, traveled with them,
although it appears that Leonard did not know that he
was part of the party that left at the time.
In the midst of all this evil, Leonard and his
wife Marie Louise were still adding to their family. They
had three daughters already, and then they welcomed his son
at the end of seventeen ninety. By the end of
(10:10):
seventeen nine one, though, the couple had ended their marriage,
and when the King and the Queen were arrested at
Varenne and returned to Paris in June of sevente Leonard
once again visited the Queen and uh he found her
to be so different from her normal self that it
really struck him and was very affecting. She was constantly
(10:31):
under guard, but in this case, instead of seeming gloomy,
she had almost achieved through all of this stress a
level of ease with the men who watched over her.
She would converse with them, and she abandoned the trappings
of court hierarchy to sort of just be a normal
human and have fairly common level relationships with these people
that were guarding her. In the meantime, Leonard Attier's name
(10:55):
had become a hindrance to the already struggling theater. His
ongoing associate Asian with Marie Antoinette, was basically poisoned to
the business. So first his name was removed and then
he was asked to step away by the investors. It
was renamed t afters. Marie Antoinette, finding her family in
desperate financial circumstances, asked Leonard to travel to London with
(11:18):
a collection of diamonds that had traveled with her to
France from Vienna when she was just a teenage girl.
This was important that she didn't want it to be
a diamond that was technically from France's money. It was
her own that she had had well before she was
part of the royal family in France. And Autier agreed
that he would do this, and he made his arrangements
and he went to England as requested, arriving there at
(11:40):
the end of December sevente Lanard was able to sell
the diamonds, and he was. He also set out to
see who might be sympathetic to Louis the sixteenth and
willing to help the French royals, which he did over
the course of the next year and a little beyond.
That was ultimately a disappointing exercise. He did manage to
connect with Duberry in England, and although she had been
(12:02):
exiled from Prassailles, she was still loyal to the crown,
especially as Louis the sixteenth had set her up with
a pension yeah, as the King's favorite. As the king
was nearing death, she basically was sent away because he
was having last rites and she could not be part
of that um. But Yeah, they set her up with
was really a pretty nice amount of money after that,
and she did remain loyal to the crown. She had
(12:24):
actually stayed in France when others had fled, and many
of the royals and members of the palace households had
appealed to her to send the money, as they had
fled with very little, and she had been unable to
really send anything because her home was under constant surveillance,
so she knew if she trying to get money out
to somebody else, it would immediately cause basically a raid
of her house, and eventually she decided that she would
(12:47):
leave France to assist the scattered Royals. She traveled to
London to find some diamonds that had been stolen from her.
At least that's what she told government officials. She actually
made several trips to London to look for these diamonds,
that this was the fourth and there had been a
robbery of Duberry's diamonds, but she had also traveled to
London to sell to others, with the intent that the
(13:09):
proceeds would be sent to parties working to fight for
the Royalist cause. Leonard suggested that they used the same
jeweler he had sold the queen's diamonds too, and this
plan was eventually agreed upon, although Leonard entered the shop alone,
and he really wanted to use his jeweler because when
he had sold may Antoinette's diamonds, he got a lot
more from for them than they had been assessed for
(13:30):
in France, so he thought, like this, we're going to
get more money if we go to my guy, And
so while he was in the shop alone, du Berry
wanted to avoid revealing that they were hers and consequently
exactly how much her time as the King's favorite had
earned her. Uh and so this entire setup led two problems. First,
a passer by recognized Duberry and chatted her up, even
(13:52):
after she curtly explained that Leonard was inside selling a
small diamond so she could settle her debts. Second, lay Nard,
who got more than they were expecting for the diamonds,
yelled an enormous some from the jeweler's door to do
Berry in her carriage, two point to million libra, which
at the time would have been worth around a hundred
(14:13):
and sixty five thousand pounds in English currency. Yeah. I
did one calculation, and we've talked about before how it's
really hard to do like historical money and what it's
worth today. So I don't know if this is accurate,
but it seemed like using calculators that I found online
from fairly reputable sources, it's like going, we got thirty
eight million dollars, which you wouldn't want to stand in
(14:34):
the street and yell why would you why would you
just yell that at the door to not not the
brightest move ever, but this huge number of and the
fact that it was the sale of diamonds was overheard
in the street and a rumor quickly arose that the
diamonds had been stolen, and by evening police came looking
for Leonard at the house where he was living, and Leonard,
(14:56):
assisted by a friend, jumped out the window to a
vade capture. Madame Duberry had heard of the misfortune. She
had you know, friends in London, and she was able
to clear the matter up by producing proof that the
diamonds were in fact hers. Mr Pitt, the Chancellor of
the Treasury, had already suspected that they were legitimately Duberry's diamonds,
and he was sympathetic actually to the woman and her cause.
(15:19):
He knew that she was probably trying to get money
to help the Royals reachieve their position in France. He
knew that she was probably trying to fund the efforts
to restore the French monarchy. But he had sent police
to arrest Leonard, but only as a matter of appearance,
uh and they had actually his His policeman had been
instructed to take this man to dinner and then just
(15:41):
let him go. So coming up, we will talk about
the serious downturn in the royal family's situation, but before
we get to that, we'll have one more quick sponsor break.
So after that little skirmish with the police was settled,
Duberry and Leonard were able to send a pretty significant
(16:02):
sum of money to the cause. But things in Paris,
they did not know yet, had already gotten much worse
for the royal family. On January one, before the money
that Leonard and DuBarry sent had gotten to its intended
Royalist recipients, King Louis the sixteenth was executed by guillotine.
Leonard continued to communicate and work with the princes of France,
(16:25):
who were living in exile and still plotting away for
the monarchy to regain its power, and he also during
this time received word that one of his brothers had
been executed, though there's actually some inconsistency in the account
of when he received the news and precisely who had
been put to death. For some time there was actually
confusion as to whether or not it had actually been
Leonard who was executed. So you will remember we mentioned
(16:48):
in the first episode that problem where Leonard recruited his
brothers as assistants and they all used the same name
for business purposes, and it appears that was the case
in this mix up over exactly who had been guillotine.
It said Ottier Leonard and then in parentheses Jean Francois,
but for a long time people just thought it was
Monsieur Leonard. In any case, it was clear that France
(17:09):
was not a safe place for one so closely associated
with the monarch who had been overthrown and executed, and
the bad news continued to come for Leonard. Marie Antoinette
was executed on in October sixteenth, seventeen ninety three. Du Barry,
who had returned to France despite Leonard begging her not to,
was also put to death on December eighth of the
(17:29):
same year. Yeah, she wanted to go back for her things, basically,
like she had left everything she had and he was like,
please don't, it's not worth it. She's like, that's all
I have. I gotta go get him. And that didn't
work out. So after spending a brief time in Verona,
where the French King Louis the eighteenth was set up
in an exiles court after the young King Louis the seventeenth,
(17:50):
the child of Marine Too and Lui the sixteenth, had
died in prison. Leonard next moved on to the German
Duchy of Brunswick, which he quite enjoyed, but he eventually
left there and he ended up St. Petersburg. In there,
at the age of fifty eight, he rebooted his career
as a hairdresser. Czar Paul the First greeted him warmly,
an Empress Maria employed Leonard at once. He established a
(18:13):
comfortable life for himself there, even though it was nothing
vaguely akin to the really lavish life that he had
had in Versailles. He worked in St. Petersburg for sixteen years,
and just three years into his stay he had been
asked to style the corpse of Czar Paul the First
after he was murdered for refusing to abdicate. After Leonard
applied makeup to the deceased and arranged his hair, it
(18:35):
was said that the man looked better in death than
he ever had alive. Yeah, he wasn't classically attractive man,
but Leonard really made him look quite good. Uh. And
while Leonard lived in St. Petersburg, a fire actually destroyed
all of his personal papers, so consequently we don't have
a whole lot of information on his personal life during
this time, though he clearly managed to keep himself very
(18:57):
busy styling the hair of Russian noble. When the French
monarchy was restored in eighteen fourteen, Leonard returned to France,
hoping that his years of loyal service and the great
amounts of money that he had lent various members of
the nobility in the early years of the revolution would
be rewarded and maybe he would get a title. He
was given a job as the doorkeeper of King Louis
(19:19):
the eighteenth apartments, obviously a position far below what he
had hoped for. Yeah, I thought maybe I'd be a
marquis from a door guy. Uh. Encouraged by a friend
who was a woman that had actually been his mistress
before the revolution and who he reconnected with. After returning
to Paris, Leonard petitioned to open another theater, but getting
(19:40):
a royal privilege to open the venue was bound up
in red tape and lack of interest. There were already
many theaters throughout the city, so adding yet another seemed
like an enterprise unlikely to take off with any real success.
But he also had supporters within the nobility who pointed
out that one more theater privilege granted by the King
was really not a particularly big risk, so it would
(20:02):
be better to grant a loyal servant of the royal
line such a privilege than someone who might not be
a loyalist, so Leonard persisted. He had been told to
drop up a petition for the opera comique for the
Minister of the Interior, with the assurance that the royal
family would support it. So Monsieur Leonard had a friend
helped write the petition, and that same friend promised to
(20:24):
have an acquaintance that worked within the ministry keep an
eye on it and report its progress. And Leonard's friends
even managed to have the petition put in a beautiful,
clean envelope and placed directly onto the desk of the
minister so it would not get lost in the flurry
of other petitions that were constantly being sent to the office,
but on his desk, it's sat and sat. It stayed
(20:45):
on the desk for four months while other petitions piled
up as well. When another of Leonard's friends went to
the minister to inquire about the status of the petition.
The minister pointed to his desk and said, I am
keeping Leonard's matter before me. Technically that was true, but
he had not touched it. Kind of a smarmy synarchyated
(21:05):
and the lip query. Eventually, one of the princes spoke
to Leonard on the matter, and when Leonard asked that
the king had signed his order, he thought, oh, he
wants to talk to me. This must be congratulations. He
was told, in fact, that he needed to let this
opera comique matter completely go, that he was not going
to be getting his theater, but that he was being
named Orderer General of State Funerals, which is a cushy
(21:30):
job that was more title than work, and it came
with an annual salary of twelve thousand francs. At first,
he thought this appointment was a joke, but he was
assured that it was not. While Leonard was sad to
let go of his theater plan, he thanked the prince
profusely and adjusted to the idea that he was now
a state funeral director. His installation ceremony was filled with formality,
(21:50):
as all of his staff appeared rank and file before
him that evening, though they all dined together and attended
the opera, and Leonard was pleased to discover that his
new staff was quite lively and fun, which he had
not expected given their profession. Yeah. Uh, it seems so
bizarre to me. Oh, you want to start another theater
(22:10):
and you're a hairdresser. Would you like to be a
funeral director? What? Uh? And While this turn of events,
though it did seem to be getting the seventy three
year olds life back on track, this was certainly better
than being a dorman h He was soon sued by
his former business partner in the Tatla de Maschieux, Madame Montasier,
for unpaid annuities that he owed her. The proceedings took
(22:32):
place in eighteen nineteen in the court found in her favor,
and Leonard suddenly found himself responsible for paying the woman
five hundred thousand francs money that he absolutely did not have,
but he died before he could pay it off. On
March twenty four of eighteen twenty. Leonard presided over only
one funeral procession on his job as Orderer of State funerals,
(22:56):
when the Prince de Conde died in eighteen eighteen. When
Leonard himself died, his staff laid him to rest. Although
it was a very small funeral with few in attendance.
Of Leonard's children, only two of his daughters survived. They
inherited seven hundred and sixteen francs and a in an
assortment of small jewels, including one tiny piece which had
(23:16):
been the property of Marie Antoinette. But at that point
Leonard owed his maid three hundred and seventy five francs
and his landlord two hundred and fifty francs. So other
than his famous shell comb, which had styled the most
famous and powerful heads of France, there really was not
much for his kids to keep. Leonard's memoir Souvenir to
(23:37):
Leonard Coiffio de la ram Ri Antoinette weren't published until
twenty years after his death, and their legitimacy has been questioned.
While the details of Monsieur Leonard's exploits are almost certainly exaggerated,
as the case with a lot of memoirs we talked
about on the show, many of the events in the
memoirs do align with events that were playing out in France,
(23:58):
Europe and Russia at the time these memoirs were reprinted.
In eighteen nineties. Yeah, and then they got an English
language printing in the nineteen teens. I think nineteen nineteen,
but I'm not sure. But the thing that makes Leonard
to me a really interesting figure is how his creative
and outlandish hair designs were, to some degree, as we said,
held responsible for the moral and fiscal downfall of many
(24:18):
of France's women in the country as a whole as
a consequence. And this is that thing we always talk about.
It serves as a perfect example of how one person,
in this case, one person who walked into Paris with
nothing but a COVID ambition and a serious case of confidence,
can make this really huge impact on world events. You
don't think, oh, I bet the queen's hairdresser really was
(24:39):
an important figure, But he really was in a lot
of ways. So yeah, to me, it kind of, you know,
uh fills that that constant uh litany that I'm always
chanting about. Every person is making history all the time,
even if they're they're just and I'm using the air
quotes because I don't think of it that way, just
you know, doing an update making hair. You have some
(25:02):
listener mail for us as well. I do. I have
two pieces of listener mail, though I'll be quick about it.
The first one is from our listener Jennifer and her dad.
They have sent us a variety of postcards as they've
traveled around, and this one is from the Victoria and
Albert Museum. High ladies, it's me again. Today. My dad
and I went to Victorian Albert. It's a huge place
and they had a special exhibit on clothing and fashion.
I know you both would have loved. Many people have
(25:24):
sent me stuff from that, and I do. I have
an exhibition catalog from friend of the show Brian Young
that he brought me back from when he went. She said, so,
I thought I would send you a card of this
lovely corset. My dad and I argued over this one
whether to send this one or address, but I won
since I write the cards. Cheers, tears, and thanks as
always for the lovely podcast. Uh. I love it and
I'm glad you went with the corset because I love
(25:46):
corset pictures. Like the architecture of course, it's is fascinating, yeah,
and it's got a really beautiful spoon busk and it's
just lovely. The second one is another gift we've been
any sewing great gifts lately from our listener Laura, and
she says, Hi, thank you so much for all the
hard work you do to present a well researched and
enjoyable podcast. I've always loved history, and you do an
incredible job of bringing knowledge and passion to subjects that
(26:07):
are too often overlooked or forgotten. I know a lot
of people think history is boring, and it breaks my
heart because they don't know what they're missing. If only
every teacher could bring history to life like you do,
that is so sweet, she says. I'm an artist with
a dull day job, and I listen to your show
during quiet moments at my desk and while working on
art at home. I recently completed the Enclosed Decks of Cards,
which are inspired by my love of medieval and early
(26:29):
modern history. I actually have a master's degree in medieval history.
Each face card represents a real historical figure from the
medieval early modern period, and there are even some post
show topics, including Tycho Brahy, Joan of Arc and Juanna
of Castile. I did a bit of research on Wuana
for my master's thesis and was very moved by her story.
I really appreciate your episode on her uh so, she
(26:51):
sent these amazing cards. They're absolutely beautiful. I think I've
said before on the show that I love decks of
cards like I collect them because I use them as
pattern weights. So I'm excited that i will have one
of these in my selling room when I'll get to
look at all the prettiness all the time. They are beautiful,
They're absolutely lovely. So thank you, thank you, thank you
so much, Laura. If you would like to write to
us about this episode or any other, you can do
so at History podcast. At how staff works dot com,
(27:13):
you can find us across the spectrum of social media
as Missed in History. You can come and visit our
website missed in History dot com for all of our
episodes and show notes on anything Tracy and I have
worked on together. So come and visit us. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, visit how staff
(27:33):
works dot com.
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