#Empress Marie

[disneyfemslash]

Growing old together in Paris.

[violaobanion]

PERIOD DRAMA + HANDS*:･ﾟ✧

Marie Antoinette (2006) dir. Sofia Coppola The Great Gatsby (2013) dir. Baz Luhrmann Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (2019) dir. Céline Sciamma Carol (2015) dir. Todd Haynes Titanic (1997) dir. James Cameron Die Kaiserin (2022-) dir. Florian Cossen & Katrin Gebbe War & Peace (2016) dir. Tom Harper Jane Eyre (2011) dir. Cary Joji  Fukunaga Atonement (2007) dir. Joe Wright

[diioonysus]

art + hair pieces

[where-our-stories-start]

Actors in period costume doing modern things, part 8 (part 1) (part 2) (part 3) (part 4) (part 5) (part 6) (part 7)

[queenfredegund]

Women in History Month (insp) | Week 1: Leading Women

[babydolllblogger]

made by me ୭ ˚.⁺⊹ .˚｡⊹ ࣪

[mediademon]

CORSAGE (2022) dir. Marie Kreutzer

[lake-lady]

Extremely niche, historically accurate mix and match tag game: which reviled European queen do you relate to most based on portraits, famous necklaces, hobbies, and favorite foods 🏰

[p1325]

Barbie Collector - Women of Royalty

Queen Elizabeth the First

Marie Antoinette

Sissi, the Empress

Joséphine de Beauharnais/Bonaparte

[empirearchives]

Marie Louise’s reaction to Napoleon’s death

“I am just now in great uncertainty. The Gazette of Piedmont has announced in such a positive manner the death of the Emperor Napoleon, that it is hardly possible to doubt it any longer. I confess I was extremely startled at it, though I have never had any deep feelings of any kind for him. I cannot forget that he is the father of my son and that, far from behaving badly to me, as every one believes, he always showed me every consideration—the only thing one can look for in a political marriage. I was therefore very grieved at it and, though one should be glad that he has ended his unhappy life in a Christian manner, I could still have wished him many more years of happiness and life—provided that it was far away from me. In the uncertainty about it I have settled myself at Sala, not wishing to go to the theater till I know something positive. My health has become so frail that I have felt this shock.”

— Marie Louise’s letter to Countess Victoire (1821)

Source: Compiled by Charles A. Shriner, Wit, Wisdom and Foibles of the Great: Together With Numerous Anecdotes Illustrative of the Characters of People and Their Rulers

Marie Louise, deeply upset at not being informed of the news by her family in Vienna:

“I confess that what gave me most sorrow, in these circumstances, was that I had not had any official news, nor any private, friendly letter from Vienna—the only way by which such could reach me in safety. I confess that I expected more interest and affection on that side, and it gave me a cruel blow by showing me how little one can count on all one’s own people, and this grief can only be cured by time.”

Source: Edith E. Cuthell, An Imperial Victim: Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria, Empress of the French, Duchess of Parma

[leonisandmurex]

The 𝑩𝑹𝑰𝑫𝑬 & 𝑮𝑹𝑶𝑶𝑴

of (current & future)

𝑲𝑰𝑵𝑮𝑺 & 𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑬𝑵𝑺

Carl Gustaf ♡ Silvia, Victoria ♡ Daniel, Abdullah ♡ Rania, Rajwa ♡ Hussein, Charles ♡ Camilla, Catherine ♡ William, Harold ♡ Sonja, Mette-Marit ♡ Haakon, Frederick ♡ Mary, Margrethe ♡ Henrik, Guillaume ♡ Stephanie, Maria Teresa ♡ Henri, Albert ♡ Charlene, Masako ♡ Naruhito, Willem ♡ Maxima, Mathilde ♡ Philippe, Jetsun Pema ♡ Jigme Khesar, Letizia ♡ Felipe

[th4simp]

Ahhhh my queen is so pretty.

Mary Kim:Empress of two seconds

[violaobanion]

MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) dir. Sofia Coppola DIE KAISERIN (2022-) created by Katharina Eyssen, Lena Stahl

[archduchessofnowhere]

The Wittelsbachs of the branch of dukes in Bavaria, of an independent and wild character, were too contemptuous of the conventions of the century. Among them, respect for their own freedom had the force of law and even bordered on insolence. My father [Albert I of the Belgians] often told me of his atonishment at seeing, during one of his stays in Possenhofen, the duke Karl-Theodor left for a horseback ride at the very moment his sister the empress Elisabeth of Austria, wife of Franz-Joseph, without even greeting her even though they hadn’t seen each other for months.

My mother [Queen Elisabeth, née Duchess in Bavaria] admired the empress, her aunt and godmother. A certain quality of emotion and aesthetic sensibility unite them. But when the empress said “When I move among people, I only use for them the part of myself that I have in common with them. They are surprised at our resemblance, but it is an old piece of clothing that from time to time I take out of the wardrobe to wear for a few hours”, my mother, for her part, could not have taken this attitude, because all her life, she shared the best of herself with others, and this with generosity and a total absence of condescension.

The pagan that was the empress, imbued with the beauties of ancient Greece, had passed on to her niece a certain number of hygienic advices: pluge no matter when into glacial water, walk indefinitely in all weathers, as well as number of other precepts that she cultivated until the end of her days. Let us add to this some principles of geriatrics kept jealously secret.

What my mother deplored about her aunt was her insubordination to the rigid etiquette of the Court of Vienna, insubordination which alienated the Austrian aristocracy. Besides, her prolonged absences from the capital and her costly wanderings earned her the reputation of being at least whimsical.

“…In our positions, we must avoid being given a label that we will never get rid of,” assured my mother. How many characters from history have had sad reputations, often undeserved, for this sole reason.

My father granted more indulgence to “this beautiful creature”, as he called her. Besides her beauty, he admired her deep intuitive sense of events and things. According to him, the Empress foresaw the imminent collapse of the heterogeneous amalgam that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had become. We have preserved some verses from her quite academic but very prophetic, written in 1893:

“How right you are, Habsburg, to cover [your head “How right you are to wring your hands “Think then of your departed race “Never again will your children reign over your lands!”

Powerless, Elisabeth of Austria fled from her cruel destiny without seeking to dominate it. She was freed by the knife of a fanatic on the banks of peaceful Lake Geneva. “I would like to escape from my body, like a little bird from its cage,” she frequently said to her relatives. Let's listen to Barres who summarizes in a few lines the wandering existence of this nihilistic sovereign, thirsty for the absolute: "… Her movements did not have the beautiful and reasonable regularity of the migrations of a traveling bird, it was rather the whirling of a a lost spirit which beats the air, which no longer finds shelter and which no discipline regulates.” In similar circumstances, my mother would certainly have overcome the adversities of life because, in her, confidence and energy dominated events through an instinctive sense of the mysterious laws of life and through a concrete vision of the responsibilities to be assumed.

Marie-José of Belgium (1971). Albert et Elisabeth de Belgique, Mes Parents

[queenaryastark]

Devrim Lingnau as Empress Elisabeth of Austria in The Empress

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

'Sisi' was a terrible empress. Her romanticization needs to STOP.

In more recent decades, Elisabeth has received a growing attention in pop culture: there are several series, films and even a musical paying tribute to her legend. Her beauty is admired, her trials and tribulations are pitied, her struggle to escape the chafing constraints of royal life is celebrated. There's a whiff of feminism surrounding her lately - a strong, intelligent woman, metaphorically, and if we take the film Corsage, even literally flipping off the patriarchy. She's galloping through forests barefoot, she's facing off her tyrannical mother in law, she's fighting for her freedom, for control over her own life. German writer Karen Duve goes as far as to call Elisabeth "an undiscovered feminist icon." 

But... was she? One of her ladies in waiting once said that Elisabeth will "live on in legend, not in history". And right she was. You see, Elisabeth has triumphed. When I look around, it seems as if we see her exactly as she would have wanted us to. A tragic heroine, a beautiful apparition, a nymph who somehow got trapped in the mortal realm, to her immense suffering. And for a modern woman,  there is much to empathize with in Elisabeth: her sublime sensitivity, her iron self-discipline, her headstrong character, her inborn thirst for freedom. But upon lifting the starry veil of this ethereal fairy-tale queen, one will find the face of a much more complex, flawed and ultimately human woman. Self-obsessed and narcissistic, monstrously selfish and possessive, cruelly indifferent to her empire (with one all-consuming exception), incessantly self-victimizing and deeply, deeply unhappy - overwhelmingly through her own fault.