August 17, 2024 • 48 mins
This 2017 episode was originally a two-parter about Marie Antoinette's hairdresser, Léonard Autié. Léonard set the styles of France during King Louis XVI's reign, and his story and his fate was tied to that of the nobility.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hello and Happy Saturday. Since Leonard Ottier got a name
drop in our episode on Permanent Waves this week, Today's
Saturday Classic is going to be on him. This originally
came out as a two part episode on September fourth
and six, twenty seventeen, so we're combining it all into
one episode today, so as we just did recently. If
(00:24):
you hear something about next time or last time, just
roll with it. It'll be fine. There's so much French hair.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:46):
Holly from and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Leonard Ottier
became so much a part of French court in the
eighteenth century that many people actually believe that he was
a member of the nobility. He was not, but as
coiffure to Marie Antoinette, he was afforded access to her
that even most nobles would not have had, and after
her ladies in waiting, for example, would complete the long
(01:08):
codified ritual of dressing the Queen, Leonard would enter Marie
Antoinette's apartment and create the hairstyle masterpieces that have really
become a hallmark of the young ruler's iconic image. I
think most of us when we think of Marie Antoinette,
we think of her giant, stacked hair going with a
ship in it. Yeah, which we're gonna talk about a
little bit. And that is all because of this one person,
and that iconic hair is very, very tied as well
(01:30):
to the image of debauchery and corruption that Marie Antoinette
was associated with. As the French monarchy came under attack,
her hairstyles to many not only looked ridiculous, but they
were also very expensive and they were dangerous. Their sheer
size made them difficult to manage. There is story after
story of them just having to take things out and
(01:50):
change hair to get in and out of carriages, and
in a time when candles provided all illumination, they were
huge fire hazards. There are also many stories of people
getting hair ignited or catching on chandeliers as they walked around.
Like basically, they were just a problem. And not only
was Louis the sixteenth Queen spending massive sums of money
(02:11):
to keep her hairstyle. This way, we're going to talk
a little bit about how much Leonard was able to
charge for some of these, but other women of France
were of course following her lead to try to keep
up with trends. So Marie Antoinette was skewered in the
press not only for her own loose purse strings when
it came to pursuing fashion and style, but also for
the financial irresponsibility that her style choices inspired in other
(02:32):
women of the country. And the man with the comb
who created all of that furor is the topic of
today's episode and the next it is a two parter.
Before we get into this, we have to talk about
the term hairdresser because it's one of those things that
in the modern parlance, I think most people that do
hair would like to be called stylists. Okay, hairdresser has
(02:55):
in some salons, not all. Hairdresser has become more like
the person who does it's almost like the assistant who
handles rinsing prep, you know that kind of stuff, whereas
stylist is the person that actually decides what your hair
is gonna look like, you know, color. There's it's varied,
there's a whole different hierarchy of words. It's not consistent,
even salon to salon. Some stylists don't even care. Just
(03:18):
let me do. Let me do hair, and I'm good.
But just in case anyone is wondering about that, because
you may go to someone who says, I'm not a hairdresser,
I'm a stylist. In this context, hairdresser was pretty much
the term, and we're going to use that, so don't
think that we're in any way demeaning anyone who designs colors,
et cetera. Hair. But Leonard called himself a hairdresser, and
(03:40):
as we'll learn, his call to hairdressing was not because
he thought he was, you know, an artiste that needed
to do it. He thought, stupid people can do this
and make a ton of money, so I'm gonna do it.
So we're gonna talk about Leonard Attier. Leonard Alexis Attier
(04:00):
was born somewhere in the five year span between seventeen
forty six and seventeen fifty one in the southwest of France,
in a town called Pamier. His parents made their living
as domestic servants, but even from a very young age,
Leonard longed for more than life in a rural town
could really offer him, and he learned his trade in
(04:20):
styling hair as an apprentice in Marseilles and Toulouse, and
then he spent time in Bordeaux crafting the latest hairstyles.
But his work never really caught on with the upper
class there, and he was unwilling to style the hair
of women farther down the social hierarchy. So he decided
that he was going to leave Bordeaux and he set
his eyes on Paris. He moved to Paris in seventeen
(04:41):
sixty nine, when Louis the fifteenth was still king, and
when the popular hairstyle for women consisted of curls arranged
close to the head called a tete de mouton or
sheep's head. Autier settled into lodgings in a less than
stellar part of town at number fifteen Rue des Noyer.
He paid for two weeks worth of lodging and then
(05:01):
set out the next morning to try to make his
way as a gentleman of Paris. I sort of love
this because in the beginning this was definitely a fake
it till you make it situation. He had walked into
Paris with basically nothing but was in his pockets and
a comb. He couldn't afford wig powder, so he used
some baking flower, some leftover baking flower to whiten his hair,
(05:22):
and he carefully prepared these garments that were secondhand, so
that they would look really clean and tidy and artfully assembled.
There's even discussion of how he very carefully tied his
cravat so that all of the pleats were perfect and
that he looked completely assembled. And he put on a sword,
which was common for French noblemen at the time, and
he went out to seek his fortune, and according to
(05:42):
his account, and we're going to talk about his memoirs
a little bit later, people in the street just stopped
and commented on what an attractive and fine looking gentleman
he was. He made his way to the business of
a monsieur Le Grolle, was a well known hairdresser in
Paris at the time, looking for job. Legreaux had written
a book on hairstyling called The Art of Hairdressing, which
(06:06):
Leonard had read, and in fact it was one of
the things that inspired the young man from the country
to start pursuing a career in coiffure. But this was
not a case of admiration. This argons back to what
I said earlier. Autier felt that if someone such as Legreaux,
who was obviously, in his mind a buffoon, could cultivate
a successful career for himself based on dressing hair and
(06:28):
complimenting rich women, then certainly he could do the same thing,
and he managed to establish an industry contact in Lgreau.
They talked about him possibly working there, and that was
thanks in part to a friend of Ottier's named Fremont,
who was already working for the established hairdresser. Leonard felt
that he would quickly surpass Ligreau, and he told Fremont
that he believed he would be quote the foremost hairdresser
(06:51):
in the universe within three years. This was a bold
most for anyone, but particularly someone who had arrived in
the city the day before with almost nothing, but it
evidenced the boastful and often overconfident personality that he would
really become famous for. Yeah, this was a man that
did not lack for confidence, like to the point that
(07:11):
as I read his memoirs and the biography that I
read of him, I was really quite envious. I was like, man,
it must be like a delight to walk through the
world with like absolutely no self doubt. And with the
help of Fremont, Leonard quickly made additional friends, and he
started doing the hair of one of the actresses at
Nicolette's theater for a role as a fairy. And this
(07:34):
was initially sort of a fun thing where he was like, oh,
let me do your hair, it'll be fun. But his concoction,
which made use of jewelry and flowers and stars as
accent pieces in this really lavish hairdoo that also involved
a little bit of architecture to defy gravity, won the actress,
who had been doing okay but not exactly having a
breakout star moment won her a great deal of attention
(07:56):
quite quickly, and in turn, Leonard also was given a
lot of attention. The young hairdresser moved immediately out of
his lodgings and the more dodgy part of town so
he could live nearer to the theatre's performers than Within
just a few days, he had become such a sensation
that he gained the attention of Etienne Francois, Duke dischoise Oi.
(08:16):
While Leonard was glad to make a connection so closely
tied to the king, he also knew that court politics
could easily shift, and any given connection could just fall
out of favor, so he also sought to expand his
connections to the nobility, and his posthumously published memoirs he
wrote during this time quote greedy for gold and fame,
I may very well decide the destiny of my whole
(08:39):
life within just a single stroke of my calm. Yeah,
he was very astute in realizing that he needed to
He couldn't count on any one stroke of luck to
propel him into the life that he wanted, so he
really had sort of cast his net very wide. He
was really quite shrewd as a businessman. Leonard had a
rapidly growing clientele in the theater. Numerous actresses and dancers
(09:02):
demanded to have him perform the same magic on them
that he had done on the actress who played the
faery at Nicolette's, and incidentally, he seems to have also
had a romantic involvement with that actress as well. And
he was well aware that part of his appeal was
that he was handsome and charming, and that some of
the women who were seeking his services were also interested
in him as a potential romantic interest. But even as
(09:24):
he shot to fame, inside just a couple of weeks
in Paris, There was also a bit of jealous sabotage afoot. Legroux,
the established hairdresser whom Leonard had visited his first full
day in the city, was jealous of all the attention
that this new upstart was getting. Le grou attempted to
launch a smear campaign against Leonard's morals, suggesting it seems
(09:49):
a tendency to engage in impropriety with his patrons. But
it seems like, at least to some, this rumor only
made the handsome Leonard more appealing. They're like, oh, really,
I could get my hair done and maybe have a
little action. I would like to book an appointment please,
So he really, I mean, it was insane how quickly
he became super super popular, and one of his new
(10:11):
patrons during this time was the Marquise de Lanjacques, who
was to be a part of Marie Antoinette's arranged social circle.
When the new Dauphine arrived from Vienna, Lanjacques made clear
to Leonard that she was interested in introducing him to
the French court and promoting him as a hairdresser there,
but on the condition that he really couldn't be dallying
with dancers and actresses if he wished to move into
(10:33):
higher society. But there's really a pretty strong suggestion that
what she was really indicating was that she would like
to sort of be his patron and have a romantic
relationship with him. But if that were going to be
the case, he could not be involved with other people.
Latier's memoirs indicate that the two of them began a
sexual relationship almost immediately. He did, not, however, sever tize
(10:57):
with his actress paramour. The Marquis seem to need constant
appointments with Leonard, but as described in Wilbashore's biography of
Leonard quote, according to one onlooker, her hair never seemed
so badly arranged. Yeah, she was having sometimes two appointments
a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Hmm,
and yet her hair didn't never look very good. La
(11:20):
Jacques introduced Leonard to Madame Duberry, the King's favorite, and
it was actually an invitation from Duberry that first granted
Leonard an opportunity to visit Versailles, and at their meeting
she made an appointment with him to visit her at
her home the next day. During that appointment, du Berry,
who had just exited her bath, explained to Leonard what
(11:40):
a massage was and asked that he give her one,
a request that he obliged. When he later told the
Marquise de Lanjacques about it, though she became quite jealous
and told him never to go to Duberry again. Yeah,
apparently this is a time when massage was not like
a thing yet it was so though this is a
new thing from the Orient I've heard about. Would you
(12:01):
like to try giving me a massage? It's unclear whether
there was sexual activity or not. It's entirely possible, but
we just don't know sure. Leonard, however, had already made
his Versaye contact, and with the imminent arrival of the
new Dauphine Marie Antoinette, he was not about to let
that go. So when he first saw the young Austrian
not long after she had arrived in France, It's funny
(12:22):
because he was not exactly bowled over by her. He
didn't find her especially attractive, although he thought that she
had potential. Her hair, which had been styled by arrival
to Monsieur Autier named Larsigneur, was especially disappointing, and, according
to accounts of other royals, who had been involved in
negotiating the marriage of the Austrian princess to the future
(12:44):
King of France. There was definitely going to be a
need for a good hairdresser. R Antoinette had a very
high forehead and her hair grew quote badly, which probably
means it was then. I'm glad you clarified that, Holly
in the outline that you wrote, because in my head
just imagine it being full of calyx. Regardless, this was
(13:05):
considered a defect. Yeah, she definitely had a high forehead,
and yeah, it's unclear what badly means, but it seems
like probably she just didn't have like a really lush
head of hair, and there will be some hair loss
later in the story, so that to me links up
a little bit. And as the new Dauphine became integrated
into life at Versailles, Leonard's friend and paramore, the Marquise
(13:29):
de Lanjacques, became one of the princess's favorites. As Lady
in waiting, Lanjacques had much closer access to the future
Queen than most people, and Lanjacques and others, including Madame Duberry,
had mentioned Leonard's skills at coaffuir to Marie Antoinette, but
initially she retained Larsigneur as her hairdresser for a time. Eventually,
the princess decided that she would indeed retire Lasigneur with
(13:53):
a lovely pension and instead take on Leonard as her hairdresser.
She received him for their first appointment and her bedchamber,
which was outside of palace etiquette. Only ladies were supposed
to attend the princess a place of such privacy. The
Dauphin insisted, however, but also ensured that a number of
her lady attendants remained with them to appease members of
(14:15):
the household who were concerned with scandal. Yeah, as most
people that have read much on Marie Tooinette know, she
was really put out by all of the really codified
rules of existence, particularly for a high ranking royal at Versailles,
which she can think Louis the fourteenth for he kind
of put all those in place. But she would just
(14:35):
just like, I just want to talk to a person
in my room. We just do that. But Leonard won
the heart of the future Queen almost immediately by addressing
one of her concerns. So she did not like wearing bonnets.
She thought she looked better without something covering her face,
and that it was important because of her status for
people to be able to see her face when she
went walking around. But as this was late autumn, if
(14:57):
she wanted to go for a walk in the gardens,
which was one of her favorite activities, she would need
to wear a hat to ward off chill. And at
this point the hairdresser came up with a novel approach
to solving this problem. So he decided he would incorporate
bits of sheer, lightweight fabric into the hairstyle itself to
give her hair a little bit of covering and warmth
without hiding her face. The style delighted Marie Antoinette, and
(15:20):
it became a common request for her to make of Leonard. Incidentally,
it was actually this use of fabric and trim interwoven
with the hair that put previous podcast subject Rose Bertant
in front of the princess. Leonard suggested her as a
supplier of such adornments so that the Dauphine's style stayed
fresh and new, and having pleased the future Queen so greatly,
(15:44):
really cemented Autier's position at Versailles. The Dauphine assured him
his position was secure, and she soon came to rely
on him for his opinion, not just on her hair,
but on anything involving style. He was named Valet Deuchambre
for the princess, which expanded his already impressive reputation. Finding
himself in constant demand, Leonard decided to extend his good
(16:05):
fortune to his friend Framon. We took on as an assistant,
but he called him his lieutenant. When two men knew
that the favor of the royal could have an abrupt end,
but together they thought that one of them could bolster
the other one. And it was shortly after this partnership
was struck that Leonard called suddenly to style the Dauphine's
hair for a trip to Paris, found himself needing to
(16:27):
sober up for the job. He and Fremont apparently had
concocted this plan where Fremont was going to be his assistant,
and they had this long dinner where they talked about
the future, and they had a lot of drinks, which
apparently Leonard was not normally a big drinker, so he
was suddenly like, I gotta go do some hair, so
he rapidly drank several cups of coffee, and it was
(16:48):
at that appointment that he went to that he allegedly
created one of the fashion trends that is now commonly
associated with late eighteenth century style, and that is the
use of ostrich plumes to accent very, very tall hairstyle.
Leonard claimed that the coaffure he gave Marie Antoinette that
evening was more than a yard high from her chin
to the top of the hair. And while this was
(17:08):
a gamble, in fact, when he told fray Mom about it,
he was like, what did you do, We're going to
get fired already. The daffine actually loved it, and soon
sky high hair covered in feathers was all the rage,
which had an effect on ostriches. While Leonard was happy
to have found himself in the unique circumstance of having
(17:30):
achieved success so rapidly, he wanted more, and he remained
ever aware that fortunes linked to Versailles could, as we've
said a couple of times, now, change in an instant.
So his next step in becoming the dominant name in
hair in Paris was actually to open a school for
hairdressing with his friend Fremont, and not only would taking
students earn additional income, but becoming the teacher of the
(17:52):
latest hairstyles in Paris and Versailles added yet another new
level to his fame and status. The school enabled Leonard
to have help himself out, along with two of his brothers,
Pierre and Jean Francois, as well as a cousin named
villaneaut He sent for his siblings and cousin to move
from the country to Paris to assist him, and, through
(18:12):
the Academy de Cuoiffure, to become hairdressers themselves. He was
also able to use his connections to get them regular
jobs and the households of Versailles. And while this habit
of using his success to help others in his circle,
and particularly his brothers and bring them along is admirable,
it also causes problems in the historical record, and here
(18:34):
is why all of the Autier brothers began to use
the name Leonard at various times, presumably to capitalize on
the popularity of the name and to manage multiple bookings.
So Leonard could just send one of his brothers and
they would show up and say hello, I'm Leonard, I'm
here to do your hair, which is great business sense.
(18:54):
It's like franchising your siblings. But of course this makes
the movements of the true life Leonard Autier a little
bit tricky to pin down, and that's actually going to
come up in the second episode in terms of a
death notice. So it is well documented the Dauphine Marie
Antoinette loved defertismo. One of the activities she became interested
(19:15):
in attending was a masked ball. She first learned of
them through her brother in law, Charles Felippe, the Count
of Artois, and she got the idea that the Count
and Leonard should plan such an event secret from her
husband and the rest of the court, so that she
could attend one in disguise and experience anonymity. And Leonard,
of course he anticipated this did the Lion's share of
(19:38):
the planning. But the ball came together and the Count
of Artois, the Marquise de Lanjacques, and the Dauphine all
attended together, and this actually ended up being an occasion
where Leonard further ingratiated himself to the future queen, aside
from simply having thrown the party in the first place
and having become really one of her trusted friends. One
of the other men that was in attendance at this
(19:59):
mass ball had figured out who Marie Antoinette was. Many
people did not, but this one man did, and he
was being a little bit aggressive in his attempts to
woo her. Leslie was taking liberties in terms of putting
his arm around her waist and pulling her very close
to him. But Leonard witnessed this and stepped in, and
this actually got him into a brief fisticuffs with the
(20:21):
man's friends. So these two men came at the hairdresser
with clubs, and according to Leonard's account, which we will
mention again, he was very confident, and his memoirs really
talk up what a great dude he was. But according
to his account, he disarmed one of these men and
he used the club that he took from them to
fend off the attack, and the original offender, who turned
out to be the Duke of Chautre, fled after jumping
(20:43):
from a window. It might come as a surprise that,
in the midst of all of his appointments and romantic dalliances,
Leonard actually married one of the kitchen assistants of Versailles
named Marie Luise Jackalbie. The couple had a daughter together,
but it seems that the marriage itself was more of
a convenient and security situation for both of them. Lanard
(21:03):
established one more tigh to Versailles, even if it was
on the lower end of the social hierarchy there, and
Marie Luise got the financial security of having a rich husband,
even if they lived very separate lives. For the most part. Yeah,
they would go on to have more children, but initially
they had one very quickly. And Leonard really continued to
be incredibly shrewd about bolstering his position in a variety
(21:26):
of ways. So, for example, comment talk was all the rage.
In seventeen seventy three. There had been a warning that
a comment was going to hit France, and it was
a big discussion. There was fear and excitement, and while
no comment hit France, there was a comment observed in
October of that year. But all of that sort of
commet furor inspired Leonard to create a comet hairstyle for
(21:48):
the Dauphine, and she loved it so much she wore
it to the opera that night, and it was a
huge hit. It garnered just a plethora of compliments, and
it launched an obsession with comment themed merchandise Paris. And
it turned out that in something akin to a pre
internet social network marketing scheme, though Leonard had masterminded this
whole thing, he had paid people at the opera to
(22:11):
talk up Marie Antoinette's outlandish hairstyle and create good buzz
around it. I cannot stress what a shrewd businessman he wants.
So yeah, he found a new way. It seems like
almost every day to be like, I need to solidify
my position even more. I know I'm getting super rich
and I'm very busy, but I want to be super
richer and even busier. So on that note, we are
(22:33):
going to pause here with Leonard truly at the top
of his game. Obviously, he did not stay it or
side forever. So in the next episode we're going to
talk about how his career as the Queen's hairdresser wound
down and his other business ventures and the ways in
which his life changed in the face of the French Revolution.
(23:01):
In the first episode of this two parter, we talked
about Leonard Attier, who was a young man from the
French countryside who strolled into Paris with nothing, and he
managed to become the country's most celebrated hairdresser in a
startlingly short period of time. He quickly found himself styling
the hair of the Dauphine of France, Marie Antoinette, and
their friendship and their business relationship continued and deepened when
(23:21):
the Austrian born princess transitioned into the role of queen.
He really reminds me of like kids making amazing makeup
videos on YouTube who then get to become a spokesmodeus.
And as his time adversise 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
(23:43):
helped Marianne when it revive a French fashion magazine called
Journal de Dames, with the intent that his own work
would be featured in its pages. Yeah, he's no fool,
but always he was creating the next big thing, and
often quite literally big hairstyles. After a style developed by
Rose Bertin appeared in jeanalde Dames and became quite popular,
(24:06):
Leonard was driven to concoct a hairstyle that would surpass it.
There was some definite jealousy in the mix. There Almost
everyone has heard of or seen drawings of Marie Antoinette's
wild hairstyles that had accessories such as miniature figures and
birds nest and yards of fabric trims as part of
the coiffure, and those are examples of what Leonard came
(24:27):
to call the pouf sentimental. As hoped, the poof Sentimental
eclipsed the much simpler Kazako hairstyle that Bartanne had created,
and from there Leonard continued to just invent flamboyant styles.
One called a hedgehog involved stacks of full curls, then
(24:47):
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. Yep, that was Leanard's work.
That style was called the coiffure a la belle Pool,
which was named for the ship called the Bellpool, which
(25:09):
had recently won a naval battle. It's so famous, that's
what everybody thinks of ship hair. So when King Louis
the fifteenth died. Lanard was on hand for the coronation
preparations for Louis the sixteenth, and so was rose ber Town.
Once he became the queen's hairdresser, he delegated more and
more responsibility to his friend and business partner Frammel, running
(25:32):
the hair school, and all the appointments for anyone but
the Queen were handled by Fremmel or one of Leanard's brothers,
sometimes calling themselves Leonard, so that Leonard himself could be
at her Royal Highness's beck and call at any moment. Yeah,
he had had his tendrils in so many different business
interests to kind of foster and bolster his name that
(25:52):
then when he suddenly became hairdresser to the Queen, he
was like, oh, we gotta figure out how to delegate
and as the Queen's hairdresser, Leonard's relationship with Marie Antoinette
really did deepen quite a great deal. He allegedly knew
her every secret and even for example, in the late
stages of her first pregnancy, when she was confined to bed,
(26:13):
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 of the Queen's lascivious lifestyle. In
his memoir, he recounted all the seedy gossip associated with
Marie Antoinette, of affairs and indulgent and a complete disregard
(26:35):
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, I mean he was theoretically.
We'll talk about the legitimacy of his memoirs at the
(26:58):
end of the episode, but he had remained very loyal
to Marie Antoinette until Louis the sixteenth. Throughout and beyond
their rain and after the Queen's second pregnancy, which resulted
in the birth of the Dauphin Luis Joseph in the
fall of seventeen eighty one, it became apparent that the
Queen was losing her hair. We talked about in the
first episode that even when she first came to France.
(27:20):
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 mari Antoinette
was losing, suggested that she let him cut her hair
(27:40):
for an entirely new and less architectural style called a
coiffure a l'enfand. And this style was basically shorter hair
that was cut in layers and then curled and arranged
in stacked ringlets. This idea of cutting hair short at
this period in time was really breaking all of the
rules that had gone forth in style prior to it.
(28:00):
The Queen was really really nervous about having her haircut
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 coaffirra on L'En font being adopted
by most of the ladies of the court within just
a few weeks. Yeah, it's not quite as dramatic as
the stories of women cutting their hair short in the
(28:23):
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 in 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, Leonard was
certainly aware of it, though whether he was self aware
(28:45):
enough to recognize his own contribution to the problem is unclear.
We 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 of style
that was irresponsible. Anyways, We don't know though, whether he
(29:07):
was really aware 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 sum of eight sous.
Due to scarcity, Leonard was charging as much as four
(29:30):
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,
Lanard became less and less involved in their everyday lives.
He continued to do the Queen's hair for special occasions,
(29:51):
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 to pursue
other interests. With the Queen's blessing, he was, however, still
referred to as the coaffair to the Queen, even though
he was no longer working every day with the queen.
To honor Marie Antoinette's love of Italian opera, Monsieur Leonard
(30:15):
decided to venture into theater production. In partnership with the
director of the theater at Versailles, Mademoiselle Montanesier, and with
permission from the King, Outier opened the Teatle de Monsieur
at the Tulirise Palace on January twenty sixth, seventeen eighty nine.
He was quite good at managing his theater, and reviews
for the productions were also quite good, but it was
(30:38):
costly and the former hairdresser struggled to fund his operas.
That was why he ended up in partnership with Montenesier,
but he and the verside director clashed over the nature
of the operas and the plays to be staged there.
Montansier tended toward the sorts of traditional fair that were
appropriate for Versailles, whereas Leonard wanted to expand into other
(30:59):
types of reductions. Leonard eventually found an investor to buy
Mademoiselle Mattansier's interest in the theater. Yeah, and that's actually
gonna come up again later. Additionally, this theater was a
combination of two troops of actors, one that was French
and one that was Italian, and the two groups did
not mesh well and there was constant fighting, and even
(31:21):
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 in early May of seventeen eighty nine.
Lanard was requested by Marie Antoinette to style her hair
for the gathering. He immediately saw that she was not
the woman he had served for so many years, and
(31:43):
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
in the months leading up to the official start of
the revolution, and he undoubtedly witnessed many of the key
(32:06):
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
Paris for Verennes, Leonard's younger brother, Jean Francois, traveled with them.
Although it appears that Leonard did not know that he
(32:28):
was part of the party that left. At the time,
in the midst of all this upheaval, Leonard and his
wife Marie Louise, were still adding to their family. They
had three daughters already, and then they welcomed a son
at the end of seventeen ninety By the end of
seventeen ninety one, though, the couple had ended their marriage,
and when the king and the Queen were arrested at
Verennes and returned to Paris in June of seventeen ninety one,
(32:52):
Leonard once again visited the queen, and he found her
to be so different from her normal self that it
really him and was very affecting. She was constantly 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
(33:13):
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 Atier's name had become
a hindrance to the already struggling theater. His ongoing association
with Marie Antoinette was basically poisoned to the business, so
(33:36):
first his name was removed and then he was asked
to step away by the investors. It was renamed teaftra Fasse.
Marie Antoinette, finding her family in desperate financial circumstances, asked
Leonard to travel to London with a collection of diamonds
that had traveled with her to France from Vienna when
she was just a teenage girl. This was important that
(33:57):
she didn't want it to be a diamond that was
a tech 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 the end of
December seventeen ninety one. Leonard was able to sell the diamonds,
and he also set out to see who might be
(34:19):
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 dubery in England,
and although she had been exiled from Versilles, she was
still loyal to the crown, especially as Louis the sixteenth
had set her up with a pension, yeah, as the
(34:41):
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. 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 actually stayed in France when others
had fled, and many of the royals and members of
(35:01):
the palace households had appealed to her to send the
money as they had fled with very little. She had
been unable to really send anything because her home was
under constant surveillance, so she knew if she tried to
get money out to somebody else, it would immediately cause
basically a raid of her house, and eventually she decided
that she would leave France to assist the scattered royals.
(35:23):
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, but 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 proceeds would be sent to parties
(35:43):
working to fight for the Royalist cause. Leonard suggested that
they use the same jeweler he had sold the queen's
diamonds to, 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 Marie Antoinette's diamonds,
he got a lot more for them than they had
been assessed for in France, so he thought, like this,
(36:03):
we're going to get more money if we go to
my guy. And so while he was in the shop alone,
Duberry wanted to avoid revealing that they were hers and
consequently exactly how much her time as the King's favorite
had earned her, and so this entire setup led to problems. First,
a passerby recognized Duberry and chatted her up, even after
(36:25):
she curtly explained that Leonard was inside selling a small
diamond so she could settle her debts. Second, Leonard, who
got more than they were expecting for the diamonds, yelled
an enormous sum from the jeweler's door to Duberry in
her carriage, two point two million livre, so the time
would have been worth around one hundred and sixty five
(36:46):
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 the street and yell ye,
(37:08):
why would you just yell that out the door? Yeah,
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, assisted by a friend, jumped out the window
(37:31):
to evade capture. Madame du Berry 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. Mister 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. He knew that she was probably
(37:53):
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, and they had actually his policeman
had been instructed to take this man to dinner and
(38:13):
then just let him go. So coming up, we will
talk about the serious downturn in the royal family situation,
but before we get to that, we'll have one more
quick sponsor break. So after that little skirmish with the
(38:35):
police was settled, Duberry and Leonard were able to send
a pretty significant 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 twenty first,
seventeen ninety three, before the money that Leonard and Duberry
sent had gotten to its intended Royalist recipients, King Louis
(38:55):
the sixteenth was executed by guillotine. Leonard continue to communicate
and work with the princes of France 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.
(39:18):
For some time there was actually confusion as to whether
or not it had actually been Leonard who was executed.
So you remember we mentioned in the first episode that
problem where Leonard recruited his brothers as assistance 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 guillotined. It said Eutier Leonard and
(39:38):
then in parentheses Jean Francois, But for a long time
people just thought it was Monsieur Leonard. And in any case,
it was clear that France 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 on October sixteenth,
(39:58):
seventeen ninety three. Duberry, who had returned to France despite
Leonard begging her not to, was also put to death
on December eighth of the 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 was like, that's all I have.
I gotta go get them. And that did not work out.
So after spending a brief time in Verona, where the
(40:20):
French King Louis the eighteenth was set up in an
exile's court after the young King Louis the seventeenth, the
child of Mari Antoinette Louis 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 in Saint Petersburg in seventeen ninety eight. There,
at the age of fifty eight, he rebooted his career
(40:42):
as a hairdresser, Czar Paul the First greeted him warmly,
and Empress Maria employed Leonard at once. He established a
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 Saint Petersburg for sixteen years,
and just three years into his stay he had been
asked to style the corpse of Zarpaul the First after
(41:06):
he was murdered for refusing to advocate. After Leonard applied
makeup to the deceased and arranged his hair, it was
said that the man looked better in death than he
ever had alive. Yeah, he wasn't a classically attractive man,
but Leonard really made him look quite good. And while
Lanard lived in Saint Petersburg, a fire actually destroyed all
(41:26):
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 busy styling
the hair of Russian nobles. When the French monarchy was
restored in eighteen fourteen, Lanard 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
(41:48):
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 the eighteenth apartments,
obviously a position far below what he had hoped for. Yeah,
I thought maybe I'd be a marquis. I'm a door guy.
Encouraged by a friend who was a woman that had
actually been his mistress before the revolution and who he
(42:11):
reconnected with after returning to Paris, Leonard petitioned to open
another theater, but getting 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
(42:32):
the nobility who pointed out that one more theater privilege
granted by the king was really not a particularly big risk,
so it would be better to grant a loyal servant
of the royal line such a privilege than someone who
might not be a loyalist, So Lanard persisted. He had
been told to draw up a petition for the opera
comique for the Minister of the Interior, with the assurance
(42:54):
that the royal family would support it. So Monsieur Leonard
had a friend help write the patient, and that same
friend promised to 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
(43:16):
in the flurry of other petitions that were constantly being
sent to the office. But on his desk it sat
and sat. It stayed 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
(43:38):
that was true, but he had not touched it. Kind
of a smarmy snarkuated and the query. Eventually, one of
the princes spoke to Leonard on the matter, and when
Leonard asked if 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
(43:59):
going to be his theater, but that he was being
named Orderer General of State Funerals, which is a cushy
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
(44:20):
profusely and adjusted to the idea that he was now
a state funeral director. His installation ceremony was filled with formality,
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
(44:40):
given their profession. Yeah, it seems so bizarre to me. Oh,
you want to start another theater and you're a hairdresser.
Would you like to be a funeral director? What? And
While this turn of events, though, it did seem to
be getting the seventy three year old's life back on track.
This was certainly better than being a dorman. He was
soon sued by his former business partner in the Teatre
(45:03):
de Monsieux, Madame Montenesier, for unpaid annuities that he owed her.
The proceedings took 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
(45:23):
could pay it off on March twenty fourth of eighteen twenty.
Leonard presided over only one funeral procession on his job
as orderer of state funerals, 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 attendants. Of Leonard's children, only two
(45:45):
of his daughters survived. They inherited seven hundred and sixteen
francs in an assortment of small jewels, including one tiny
piece which had 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
(46:08):
was not much for his kids to keep. Leonard's memoir
Souvenir de Leonard coiffior de la rem 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 is the case with a
lot of memoirs we talk about on the show, many
(46:31):
of the events in the memoirs do align with events
that were playing out in France, Europe and Russia at
the time. These memoirs were reprinted in the eighteen nineties. Yeah,
and then they got an English language printing in the nineteeneens.
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
(46:54):
and fiscal downfall of many 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 cove
and ambition and a serious case of confidence, can make
this really huge impact on world events. Yeah. I don't think, oh,
(47:15):
I bet the Queen's hairdresser really was an important figure,
but he really was in a lot of ways. So yeah,
to me, it kind of you know, fills that that
constant litany that I'm always chanting about. Every person is
making history all the time. Yeah, even if they're they're
just and am using the air quotes because I don't
think of it that way, just you know, doing an
(47:36):
updo makeing hair. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
(47:58):
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over social media at missed indistory, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
(48:19):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hello and Happy Saturday. Since Leonard Ottier got a name
drop in our episode on Permanent Waves this week, Today's
Saturday Classic is going to be on him. This originally
came out as a two part episode on September fourth
and six, twenty seventeen, so we're combining it all into
one episode today, so as we just did recently. If
(00:24):
you hear something about next time or last time, just
roll with it. It'll be fine. There's so much French hair.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm
(00:46):
Holly from and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Leonard Ottier
became so much a part of French court in the
eighteenth century that many people actually believe that he was
a member of the nobility. He was not, but as
coiffure to Marie Antoinette, he was afforded access to her
that even most nobles would not have had, and after
her ladies in waiting, for example, would complete the long
(01:08):
codified ritual of dressing the Queen, Leonard would enter Marie
Antoinette's apartment and create the hairstyle masterpieces that have really
become a hallmark of the young ruler's iconic image. I
think most of us when we think of Marie Antoinette,
we think of her giant, stacked hair going with a
ship in it. Yeah, which we're gonna talk about a
little bit. And that is all because of this one person,
and that iconic hair is very, very tied as well
(01:30):
to the image of debauchery and corruption that Marie Antoinette
was associated with. As the French monarchy came under attack,
her hairstyles to many not only looked ridiculous, but they
were also very expensive and they were dangerous. Their sheer
size made them difficult to manage. There is story after
story of them just having to take things out and
(01:50):
change hair to get in and out of carriages, and
in a time when candles provided all illumination, they were
huge fire hazards. There are also many stories of people
getting hair ignited or catching on chandeliers as they walked around.
Like basically, they were just a problem. And not only
was Louis the sixteenth Queen spending massive sums of money
(02:11):
to keep her hairstyle. This way, we're going to talk
a little bit about how much Leonard was able to
charge for some of these, but other women of France
were of course following her lead to try to keep
up with trends. So Marie Antoinette was skewered in the
press not only for her own loose purse strings when
it came to pursuing fashion and style, but also for
the financial irresponsibility that her style choices inspired in other
(02:32):
women of the country. And the man with the comb
who created all of that furor is the topic of
today's episode and the next it is a two parter.
Before we get into this, we have to talk about
the term hairdresser because it's one of those things that
in the modern parlance, I think most people that do
hair would like to be called stylists. Okay, hairdresser has
(02:55):
in some salons, not all. Hairdresser has become more like
the person who does it's almost like the assistant who
handles rinsing prep, you know that kind of stuff, whereas
stylist is the person that actually decides what your hair
is gonna look like, you know, color. There's it's varied,
there's a whole different hierarchy of words. It's not consistent,
even salon to salon. Some stylists don't even care. Just
(03:18):
let me do. Let me do hair, and I'm good.
But just in case anyone is wondering about that, because
you may go to someone who says, I'm not a hairdresser,
I'm a stylist. In this context, hairdresser was pretty much
the term, and we're going to use that, so don't
think that we're in any way demeaning anyone who designs colors,
et cetera. Hair. But Leonard called himself a hairdresser, and
(03:40):
as we'll learn, his call to hairdressing was not because
he thought he was, you know, an artiste that needed
to do it. He thought, stupid people can do this
and make a ton of money, so I'm gonna do it.
So we're gonna talk about Leonard Attier. Leonard Alexis Attier
(04:00):
was born somewhere in the five year span between seventeen
forty six and seventeen fifty one in the southwest of France,
in a town called Pamier. His parents made their living
as domestic servants, but even from a very young age,
Leonard longed for more than life in a rural town
could really offer him, and he learned his trade in
(04:20):
styling hair as an apprentice in Marseilles and Toulouse, and
then he spent time in Bordeaux crafting the latest hairstyles.
But his work never really caught on with the upper
class there, and he was unwilling to style the hair
of women farther down the social hierarchy. So he decided
that he was going to leave Bordeaux and he set
his eyes on Paris. He moved to Paris in seventeen
(04:41):
sixty nine, when Louis the fifteenth was still king, and
when the popular hairstyle for women consisted of curls arranged
close to the head called a tete de mouton or
sheep's head. Autier settled into lodgings in a less than
stellar part of town at number fifteen Rue des Noyer.
He paid for two weeks worth of lodging and then
(05:01):
set out the next morning to try to make his
way as a gentleman of Paris. I sort of love
this because in the beginning this was definitely a fake
it till you make it situation. He had walked into
Paris with basically nothing but was in his pockets and
a comb. He couldn't afford wig powder, so he used
some baking flower, some leftover baking flower to whiten his hair,
(05:22):
and he carefully prepared these garments that were secondhand, so
that they would look really clean and tidy and artfully assembled.
There's even discussion of how he very carefully tied his
cravat so that all of the pleats were perfect and
that he looked completely assembled. And he put on a sword,
which was common for French noblemen at the time, and
he went out to seek his fortune, and according to
(05:42):
his account, and we're going to talk about his memoirs
a little bit later, people in the street just stopped
and commented on what an attractive and fine looking gentleman
he was. He made his way to the business of
a monsieur Le Grolle, was a well known hairdresser in
Paris at the time, looking for job. Legreaux had written
a book on hairstyling called The Art of Hairdressing, which
(06:06):
Leonard had read, and in fact it was one of
the things that inspired the young man from the country
to start pursuing a career in coiffure. But this was
not a case of admiration. This argons back to what
I said earlier. Autier felt that if someone such as Legreaux,
who was obviously, in his mind a buffoon, could cultivate
a successful career for himself based on dressing hair and
(06:28):
complimenting rich women, then certainly he could do the same thing,
and he managed to establish an industry contact in Lgreau.
They talked about him possibly working there, and that was
thanks in part to a friend of Ottier's named Fremont,
who was already working for the established hairdresser. Leonard felt
that he would quickly surpass Ligreau, and he told Fremont
that he believed he would be quote the foremost hairdresser
(06:51):
in the universe within three years. This was a bold
most for anyone, but particularly someone who had arrived in
the city the day before with almost nothing, but it
evidenced the boastful and often overconfident personality that he would
really become famous for. Yeah, this was a man that
did not lack for confidence, like to the point that
(07:11):
as I read his memoirs and the biography that I
read of him, I was really quite envious. I was like, man,
it must be like a delight to walk through the
world with like absolutely no self doubt. And with the
help of Fremont, Leonard quickly made additional friends, and he
started doing the hair of one of the actresses at
Nicolette's theater for a role as a fairy. And this
(07:34):
was initially sort of a fun thing where he was like, oh,
let me do your hair, it'll be fun. But his concoction,
which made use of jewelry and flowers and stars as
accent pieces in this really lavish hairdoo that also involved
a little bit of architecture to defy gravity, won the actress,
who had been doing okay but not exactly having a
breakout star moment won her a great deal of attention
(07:56):
quite quickly, and in turn, Leonard also was given a
lot of attention. The young hairdresser moved immediately out of
his lodgings and the more dodgy part of town so
he could live nearer to the theatre's performers than Within
just a few days, he had become such a sensation
that he gained the attention of Etienne Francois, Duke dischoise Oi.
(08:16):
While Leonard was glad to make a connection so closely
tied to the king, he also knew that court politics
could easily shift, and any given connection could just fall
out of favor, so he also sought to expand his
connections to the nobility, and his posthumously published memoirs he
wrote during this time quote greedy for gold and fame,
I may very well decide the destiny of my whole
(08:39):
life within just a single stroke of my calm. Yeah,
he was very astute in realizing that he needed to
He couldn't count on any one stroke of luck to
propel him into the life that he wanted, so he
really had sort of cast his net very wide. He
was really quite shrewd as a businessman. Leonard had a
rapidly growing clientele in the theater. Numerous actresses and dancers
(09:02):
demanded to have him perform the same magic on them
that he had done on the actress who played the
faery at Nicolette's, and incidentally, he seems to have also
had a romantic involvement with that actress as well. And
he was well aware that part of his appeal was
that he was handsome and charming, and that some of
the women who were seeking his services were also interested
in him as a potential romantic interest. But even as
(09:24):
he shot to fame, inside just a couple of weeks
in Paris, There was also a bit of jealous sabotage afoot. Legroux,
the established hairdresser whom Leonard had visited his first full
day in the city, was jealous of all the attention
that this new upstart was getting. Le grou attempted to
launch a smear campaign against Leonard's morals, suggesting it seems
(09:49):
a tendency to engage in impropriety with his patrons. But
it seems like, at least to some, this rumor only
made the handsome Leonard more appealing. They're like, oh, really,
I could get my hair done and maybe have a
little action. I would like to book an appointment please,
So he really, I mean, it was insane how quickly
he became super super popular, and one of his new
(10:11):
patrons during this time was the Marquise de Lanjacques, who
was to be a part of Marie Antoinette's arranged social circle.
When the new Dauphine arrived from Vienna, Lanjacques made clear
to Leonard that she was interested in introducing him to
the French court and promoting him as a hairdresser there,
but on the condition that he really couldn't be dallying
with dancers and actresses if he wished to move into
(10:33):
higher society. But there's really a pretty strong suggestion that
what she was really indicating was that she would like
to sort of be his patron and have a romantic
relationship with him. But if that were going to be
the case, he could not be involved with other people.
Latier's memoirs indicate that the two of them began a
sexual relationship almost immediately. He did, not, however, sever tize
(10:57):
with his actress paramour. The Marquis seem to need constant
appointments with Leonard, but as described in Wilbashore's biography of
Leonard quote, according to one onlooker, her hair never seemed
so badly arranged. Yeah, she was having sometimes two appointments
a day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Hmm,
and yet her hair didn't never look very good. La
(11:20):
Jacques introduced Leonard to Madame Duberry, the King's favorite, and
it was actually an invitation from Duberry that first granted
Leonard an opportunity to visit Versailles, and at their meeting
she made an appointment with him to visit her at
her home the next day. During that appointment, du Berry,
who had just exited her bath, explained to Leonard what
(11:40):
a massage was and asked that he give her one,
a request that he obliged. When he later told the
Marquise de Lanjacques about it, though she became quite jealous
and told him never to go to Duberry again. Yeah,
apparently this is a time when massage was not like
a thing yet it was so though this is a
new thing from the Orient I've heard about. Would you
(12:01):
like to try giving me a massage? It's unclear whether
there was sexual activity or not. It's entirely possible, but
we just don't know sure. Leonard, however, had already made
his Versaye contact, and with the imminent arrival of the
new Dauphine Marie Antoinette, he was not about to let
that go. So when he first saw the young Austrian
not long after she had arrived in France, It's funny
(12:22):
because he was not exactly bowled over by her. He
didn't find her especially attractive, although he thought that she
had potential. Her hair, which had been styled by arrival
to Monsieur Autier named Larsigneur, was especially disappointing, and, according
to accounts of other royals, who had been involved in
negotiating the marriage of the Austrian princess to the future
(12:44):
King of France. There was definitely going to be a
need for a good hairdresser. R Antoinette had a very
high forehead and her hair grew quote badly, which probably
means it was then. I'm glad you clarified that, Holly
in the outline that you wrote, because in my head
just imagine it being full of calyx. Regardless, this was
(13:05):
considered a defect. Yeah, she definitely had a high forehead,
and yeah, it's unclear what badly means, but it seems
like probably she just didn't have like a really lush
head of hair, and there will be some hair loss
later in the story, so that to me links up
a little bit. And as the new Dauphine became integrated
into life at Versailles, Leonard's friend and paramore, the Marquise
(13:29):
de Lanjacques, became one of the princess's favorites. As Lady
in waiting, Lanjacques had much closer access to the future
Queen than most people, and Lanjacques and others, including Madame Duberry,
had mentioned Leonard's skills at coaffuir to Marie Antoinette, but
initially she retained Larsigneur as her hairdresser for a time. Eventually,
the princess decided that she would indeed retire Lasigneur with
(13:53):
a lovely pension and instead take on Leonard as her hairdresser.
She received him for their first appointment and her bedchamber,
which was outside of palace etiquette. Only ladies were supposed
to attend the princess a place of such privacy. The
Dauphin insisted, however, but also ensured that a number of
her lady attendants remained with them to appease members of
(14:15):
the household who were concerned with scandal. Yeah, as most
people that have read much on Marie Tooinette know, she
was really put out by all of the really codified
rules of existence, particularly for a high ranking royal at Versailles,
which she can think Louis the fourteenth for he kind
of put all those in place. But she would just
(14:35):
just like, I just want to talk to a person
in my room. We just do that. But Leonard won
the heart of the future Queen almost immediately by addressing
one of her concerns. So she did not like wearing bonnets.
She thought she looked better without something covering her face,
and that it was important because of her status for
people to be able to see her face when she
went walking around. But as this was late autumn, if
(14:57):
she wanted to go for a walk in the gardens,
which was one of her favorite activities, she would need
to wear a hat to ward off chill. And at
this point the hairdresser came up with a novel approach
to solving this problem. So he decided he would incorporate
bits of sheer, lightweight fabric into the hairstyle itself to
give her hair a little bit of covering and warmth
without hiding her face. The style delighted Marie Antoinette, and
(15:20):
it became a common request for her to make of Leonard. Incidentally,
it was actually this use of fabric and trim interwoven
with the hair that put previous podcast subject Rose Bertant
in front of the princess. Leonard suggested her as a
supplier of such adornments so that the Dauphine's style stayed
fresh and new, and having pleased the future Queen so greatly,
(15:44):
really cemented Autier's position at Versailles. The Dauphine assured him
his position was secure, and she soon came to rely
on him for his opinion, not just on her hair,
but on anything involving style. He was named Valet Deuchambre
for the princess, which expanded his already impressive reputation. Finding
himself in constant demand, Leonard decided to extend his good
(16:05):
fortune to his friend Framon. We took on as an assistant,
but he called him his lieutenant. When two men knew
that the favor of the royal could have an abrupt end,
but together they thought that one of them could bolster
the other one. And it was shortly after this partnership
was struck that Leonard called suddenly to style the Dauphine's
hair for a trip to Paris, found himself needing to
(16:27):
sober up for the job. He and Fremont apparently had
concocted this plan where Fremont was going to be his assistant,
and they had this long dinner where they talked about
the future, and they had a lot of drinks, which
apparently Leonard was not normally a big drinker, so he
was suddenly like, I gotta go do some hair, so
he rapidly drank several cups of coffee, and it was
(16:48):
at that appointment that he went to that he allegedly
created one of the fashion trends that is now commonly
associated with late eighteenth century style, and that is the
use of ostrich plumes to accent very, very tall hairstyle.
Leonard claimed that the coaffure he gave Marie Antoinette that
evening was more than a yard high from her chin
to the top of the hair. And while this was
(17:08):
a gamble, in fact, when he told fray Mom about it,
he was like, what did you do, We're going to
get fired already. The daffine actually loved it, and soon
sky high hair covered in feathers was all the rage,
which had an effect on ostriches. While Leonard was happy
to have found himself in the unique circumstance of having
(17:30):
achieved success so rapidly, he wanted more, and he remained
ever aware that fortunes linked to Versailles could, as we've
said a couple of times, now, change in an instant.
So his next step in becoming the dominant name in
hair in Paris was actually to open a school for
hairdressing with his friend Fremont, and not only would taking
students earn additional income, but becoming the teacher of the
(17:52):
latest hairstyles in Paris and Versailles added yet another new
level to his fame and status. The school enabled Leonard
to have help himself out, along with two of his brothers,
Pierre and Jean Francois, as well as a cousin named
villaneaut He sent for his siblings and cousin to move
from the country to Paris to assist him, and, through
(18:12):
the Academy de Cuoiffure, to become hairdressers themselves. He was
also able to use his connections to get them regular
jobs and the households of Versailles. And while this habit
of using his success to help others in his circle,
and particularly his brothers and bring them along is admirable,
it also causes problems in the historical record, and here
(18:34):
is why all of the Autier brothers began to use
the name Leonard at various times, presumably to capitalize on
the popularity of the name and to manage multiple bookings.
So Leonard could just send one of his brothers and
they would show up and say hello, I'm Leonard, I'm
here to do your hair, which is great business sense.
(18:54):
It's like franchising your siblings. But of course this makes
the movements of the true life Leonard Autier a little
bit tricky to pin down, and that's actually going to
come up in the second episode in terms of a
death notice. So it is well documented the Dauphine Marie
Antoinette loved defertismo. One of the activities she became interested
(19:15):
in attending was a masked ball. She first learned of
them through her brother in law, Charles Felippe, the Count
of Artois, and she got the idea that the Count
and Leonard should plan such an event secret from her
husband and the rest of the court, so that she
could attend one in disguise and experience anonymity. And Leonard,
of course he anticipated this did the Lion's share of
(19:38):
the planning. But the ball came together and the Count
of Artois, the Marquise de Lanjacques, and the Dauphine all
attended together, and this actually ended up being an occasion
where Leonard further ingratiated himself to the future queen, aside
from simply having thrown the party in the first place
and having become really one of her trusted friends. One
of the other men that was in attendance at this
(19:59):
mass ball had figured out who Marie Antoinette was. Many
people did not, but this one man did, and he
was being a little bit aggressive in his attempts to
woo her. Leslie was taking liberties in terms of putting
his arm around her waist and pulling her very close
to him. But Leonard witnessed this and stepped in, and
this actually got him into a brief fisticuffs with the
(20:21):
man's friends. So these two men came at the hairdresser
with clubs, and according to Leonard's account, which we will
mention again, he was very confident, and his memoirs really
talk up what a great dude he was. But according
to his account, he disarmed one of these men and
he used the club that he took from them to
fend off the attack, and the original offender, who turned
out to be the Duke of Chautre, fled after jumping
(20:43):
from a window. It might come as a surprise that,
in the midst of all of his appointments and romantic dalliances,
Leonard actually married one of the kitchen assistants of Versailles
named Marie Luise Jackalbie. The couple had a daughter together,
but it seems that the marriage itself was more of
a convenient and security situation for both of them. Lanard
(21:03):
established one more tigh to Versailles, even if it was
on the lower end of the social hierarchy there, and
Marie Luise got the financial security of having a rich husband,
even if they lived very separate lives. For the most part. Yeah,
they would go on to have more children, but initially
they had one very quickly. And Leonard really continued to
be incredibly shrewd about bolstering his position in a variety
(21:26):
of ways. So, for example, comment talk was all the rage.
In seventeen seventy three. There had been a warning that
a comment was going to hit France, and it was
a big discussion. There was fear and excitement, and while
no comment hit France, there was a comment observed in
October of that year. But all of that sort of
commet furor inspired Leonard to create a comet hairstyle for
(21:48):
the Dauphine, and she loved it so much she wore
it to the opera that night, and it was a
huge hit. It garnered just a plethora of compliments, and
it launched an obsession with comment themed merchandise Paris. And
it turned out that in something akin to a pre
internet social network marketing scheme, though Leonard had masterminded this
whole thing, he had paid people at the opera to
(22:11):
talk up Marie Antoinette's outlandish hairstyle and create good buzz
around it. I cannot stress what a shrewd businessman he wants.
So yeah, he found a new way. It seems like
almost every day to be like, I need to solidify
my position even more. I know I'm getting super rich
and I'm very busy, but I want to be super
richer and even busier. So on that note, we are
(22:33):
going to pause here with Leonard truly at the top
of his game. Obviously, he did not stay it or
side forever. So in the next episode we're going to
talk about how his career as the Queen's hairdresser wound
down and his other business ventures and the ways in
which his life changed in the face of the French Revolution.
(23:01):
In the first episode of this two parter, we talked
about Leonard Attier, who was a young man from the
French countryside who strolled into Paris with nothing, and he
managed to become the country's most celebrated hairdresser in a
startlingly short period of time. He quickly found himself styling
the hair of the Dauphine of France, Marie Antoinette, and
their friendship and their business relationship continued and deepened when
(23:21):
the Austrian born princess transitioned into the role of queen.
He really reminds me of like kids making amazing makeup
videos on YouTube who then get to become a spokesmodeus.
And as his time adversise 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
(23:43):
helped Marianne when it revive a French fashion magazine called
Journal de Dames, with the intent that his own work
would be featured in its pages. Yeah, he's no fool,
but always he was creating the next big thing, and
often quite literally big hairstyles. After a style developed by
Rose Bertin appeared in jeanalde Dames and became quite popular,
(24:06):
Leonard was driven to concoct a hairstyle that would surpass it.
There was some definite jealousy in the mix. There Almost
everyone has heard of or seen drawings of Marie Antoinette's
wild hairstyles that had accessories such as miniature figures and
birds nest and yards of fabric trims as part of
the coiffure, and those are examples of what Leonard came
(24:27):
to call the pouf sentimental. As hoped, the poof Sentimental
eclipsed the much simpler Kazako hairstyle that Bartanne had created,
and from there Leonard continued to just invent flamboyant styles.
One called a hedgehog involved stacks of full curls, then
(24:47):
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. Yep, that was Leanard's work.
That style was called the coiffure a la belle Pool,
which was named for the ship called the Bellpool, which
(25:09):
had recently won a naval battle. It's so famous, that's
what everybody thinks of ship hair. So when King Louis
the fifteenth died. Lanard was on hand for the coronation
preparations for Louis the sixteenth, and so was rose ber Town.
Once he became the queen's hairdresser, he delegated more and
more responsibility to his friend and business partner Frammel, running
(25:32):
the hair school, and all the appointments for anyone but
the Queen were handled by Fremmel or one of Leanard's brothers,
sometimes calling themselves Leonard, so that Leonard himself could be
at her Royal Highness's beck and call at any moment. Yeah,
he had had his tendrils in so many different business
interests to kind of foster and bolster his name that
(25:52):
then when he suddenly became hairdresser to the Queen, he
was like, oh, we gotta figure out how to delegate
and as the Queen's hairdresser, Leonard's relationship with Marie Antoinette
really did deepen quite a great deal. He allegedly knew
her every secret and even for example, in the late
stages of her first pregnancy, when she was confined to bed,
(26:13):
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 of the Queen's lascivious lifestyle. In
his memoir, he recounted all the seedy gossip associated with
Marie Antoinette, of affairs and indulgent and a complete disregard
(26:35):
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, I mean he was theoretically.
We'll talk about the legitimacy of his memoirs at the
(26:58):
end of the episode, but he had remained very loyal
to Marie Antoinette until Louis the sixteenth. Throughout and beyond
their rain and after the Queen's second pregnancy, which resulted
in the birth of the Dauphin Luis Joseph in the
fall of seventeen eighty one, it became apparent that the
Queen was losing her hair. We talked about in the
first episode that even when she first came to France.
(27:20):
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 mari Antoinette
was losing, suggested that she let him cut her hair
(27:40):
for an entirely new and less architectural style called a
coiffure a l'enfand. And this style was basically shorter hair
that was cut in layers and then curled and arranged
in stacked ringlets. This idea of cutting hair short at
this period in time was really breaking all of the
rules that had gone forth in style prior to it.
(28:00):
The Queen was really really nervous about having her haircut
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 coaffirra on L'En font being adopted
by most of the ladies of the court within just
a few weeks. Yeah, it's not quite as dramatic as
the stories of women cutting their hair short in the
(28:23):
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 in 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, Leonard was
certainly aware of it, though whether he was self aware
(28:45):
enough to recognize his own contribution to the problem is unclear.
We 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 of style
that was irresponsible. Anyways, We don't know though, whether he
(29:07):
was really aware 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 sum of eight sous.
Due to scarcity, Leonard was charging as much as four
(29:30):
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,
Lanard became less and less involved in their everyday lives.
He continued to do the Queen's hair for special occasions,
(29:51):
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 to pursue
other interests. With the Queen's blessing, he was, however, still
referred to as the coaffair to the Queen, even though
he was no longer working every day with the queen.
To honor Marie Antoinette's love of Italian opera, Monsieur Leonard
(30:15):
decided to venture into theater production. In partnership with the
director of the theater at Versailles, Mademoiselle Montanesier, and with
permission from the King, Outier opened the Teatle de Monsieur
at the Tulirise Palace on January twenty sixth, seventeen eighty nine.
He was quite good at managing his theater, and reviews
for the productions were also quite good, but it was
(30:38):
costly and the former hairdresser struggled to fund his operas.
That was why he ended up in partnership with Montenesier,
but he and the verside director clashed over the nature
of the operas and the plays to be staged there.
Montansier tended toward the sorts of traditional fair that were
appropriate for Versailles, whereas Leonard wanted to expand into other
(30:59):
types of reductions. Leonard eventually found an investor to buy
Mademoiselle Mattansier's interest in the theater. Yeah, and that's actually
gonna come up again later. Additionally, this theater was a
combination of two troops of actors, one that was French
and one that was Italian, and the two groups did
not mesh well and there was constant fighting, and even
(31:21):
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 in early May of seventeen eighty nine.
Lanard was requested by Marie Antoinette to style her hair
for the gathering. He immediately saw that she was not
the woman he had served for so many years, and
(31:43):
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
in the months leading up to the official start of
the revolution, and he undoubtedly witnessed many of the key
(32:06):
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
Paris for Verennes, Leonard's younger brother, Jean Francois, traveled with them.
Although it appears that Leonard did not know that he
(32:28):
was part of the party that left. At the time,
in the midst of all this upheaval, Leonard and his
wife Marie Louise, were still adding to their family. They
had three daughters already, and then they welcomed a son
at the end of seventeen ninety By the end of
seventeen ninety one, though, the couple had ended their marriage,
and when the king and the Queen were arrested at
Verennes and returned to Paris in June of seventeen ninety one,
(32:52):
Leonard once again visited the queen, and he found her
to be so different from her normal self that it
really him and was very affecting. She was constantly 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
(33:13):
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 Atier's name had become
a hindrance to the already struggling theater. His ongoing association
with Marie Antoinette was basically poisoned to the business, so
(33:36):
first his name was removed and then he was asked
to step away by the investors. It was renamed teaftra Fasse.
Marie Antoinette, finding her family in desperate financial circumstances, asked
Leonard to travel to London with a collection of diamonds
that had traveled with her to France from Vienna when
she was just a teenage girl. This was important that
(33:57):
she didn't want it to be a diamond that was
a tech 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 the end of
December seventeen ninety one. Leonard was able to sell the diamonds,
and he also set out to see who might be
(34:19):
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 dubery in England,
and although she had been exiled from Versilles, she was
still loyal to the crown, especially as Louis the sixteenth
had set her up with a pension, yeah, as the
(34:41):
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. 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 actually stayed in France when others
had fled, and many of the royals and members of
(35:01):
the palace households had appealed to her to send the
money as they had fled with very little. She had
been unable to really send anything because her home was
under constant surveillance, so she knew if she tried to
get money out to somebody else, it would immediately cause
basically a raid of her house, and eventually she decided
that she would leave France to assist the scattered royals.
(35:23):
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, but 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 proceeds would be sent to parties
(35:43):
working to fight for the Royalist cause. Leonard suggested that
they use the same jeweler he had sold the queen's
diamonds to, 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 Marie Antoinette's diamonds,
he got a lot more for them than they had
been assessed for in France, so he thought, like this,
(36:03):
we're going to get more money if we go to
my guy. And so while he was in the shop alone,
Duberry wanted to avoid revealing that they were hers and
consequently exactly how much her time as the King's favorite
had earned her, and so this entire setup led to problems. First,
a passerby recognized Duberry and chatted her up, even after
(36:25):
she curtly explained that Leonard was inside selling a small
diamond so she could settle her debts. Second, Leonard, who
got more than they were expecting for the diamonds, yelled
an enormous sum from the jeweler's door to Duberry in
her carriage, two point two million livre, so the time
would have been worth around one hundred and sixty five
(36:46):
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 the street and yell ye,
(37:08):
why would you just yell that out the door? Yeah,
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, assisted by a friend, jumped out the window
(37:31):
to evade capture. Madame du Berry 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. Mister 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. He knew that she was probably
(37:53):
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, and they had actually his policeman
had been instructed to take this man to dinner and
(38:13):
then just let him go. So coming up, we will
talk about the serious downturn in the royal family situation,
but before we get to that, we'll have one more
quick sponsor break. So after that little skirmish with the
(38:35):
police was settled, Duberry and Leonard were able to send
a pretty significant 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 twenty first,
seventeen ninety three, before the money that Leonard and Duberry
sent had gotten to its intended Royalist recipients, King Louis
(38:55):
the sixteenth was executed by guillotine. Leonard continue to communicate
and work with the princes of France 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.
(39:18):
For some time there was actually confusion as to whether
or not it had actually been Leonard who was executed.
So you remember we mentioned in the first episode that
problem where Leonard recruited his brothers as assistance 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 guillotined. It said Eutier Leonard and
(39:38):
then in parentheses Jean Francois, But for a long time
people just thought it was Monsieur Leonard. And in any case,
it was clear that France 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 on October sixteenth,
(39:58):
seventeen ninety three. Duberry, who had returned to France despite
Leonard begging her not to, was also put to death
on December eighth of the 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 was like, that's all I have.
I gotta go get them. And that did not work out.
So after spending a brief time in Verona, where the
(40:20):
French King Louis the eighteenth was set up in an
exile's court after the young King Louis the seventeenth, the
child of Mari Antoinette Louis 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 in Saint Petersburg in seventeen ninety eight. There,
at the age of fifty eight, he rebooted his career
(40:42):
as a hairdresser, Czar Paul the First greeted him warmly,
and Empress Maria employed Leonard at once. He established a
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 Saint Petersburg for sixteen years,
and just three years into his stay he had been
asked to style the corpse of Zarpaul the First after
(41:06):
he was murdered for refusing to advocate. After Leonard applied
makeup to the deceased and arranged his hair, it was
said that the man looked better in death than he
ever had alive. Yeah, he wasn't a classically attractive man,
but Leonard really made him look quite good. And while
Lanard lived in Saint Petersburg, a fire actually destroyed all
(41:26):
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 busy styling
the hair of Russian nobles. When the French monarchy was
restored in eighteen fourteen, Lanard 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
(41:48):
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 the eighteenth apartments,
obviously a position far below what he had hoped for. Yeah,
I thought maybe I'd be a marquis. I'm a door guy.
Encouraged by a friend who was a woman that had
actually been his mistress before the revolution and who he
(42:11):
reconnected with after returning to Paris, Leonard petitioned to open
another theater, but getting 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
(42:32):
the nobility who pointed out that one more theater privilege
granted by the king was really not a particularly big risk,
so it would be better to grant a loyal servant
of the royal line such a privilege than someone who
might not be a loyalist, So Lanard persisted. He had
been told to draw up a petition for the opera
comique for the Minister of the Interior, with the assurance
(42:54):
that the royal family would support it. So Monsieur Leonard
had a friend help write the patient, and that same
friend promised to 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
(43:16):
in the flurry of other petitions that were constantly being
sent to the office. But on his desk it sat
and sat. It stayed 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
(43:38):
that was true, but he had not touched it. Kind
of a smarmy snarkuated and the query. Eventually, one of
the princes spoke to Leonard on the matter, and when
Leonard asked if 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
(43:59):
going to be his theater, but that he was being
named Orderer General of State Funerals, which is a cushy
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
(44:20):
profusely and adjusted to the idea that he was now
a state funeral director. His installation ceremony was filled with formality,
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
(44:40):
given their profession. Yeah, it seems so bizarre to me. Oh,
you want to start another theater and you're a hairdresser.
Would you like to be a funeral director? What? And
While this turn of events, though, it did seem to
be getting the seventy three year old's life back on track.
This was certainly better than being a dorman. He was
soon sued by his former business partner in the Teatre
(45:03):
de Monsieux, Madame Montenesier, for unpaid annuities that he owed her.
The proceedings took 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
(45:23):
could pay it off on March twenty fourth of eighteen twenty.
Leonard presided over only one funeral procession on his job
as orderer of state funerals, 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 attendants. Of Leonard's children, only two
(45:45):
of his daughters survived. They inherited seven hundred and sixteen
francs in an assortment of small jewels, including one tiny
piece which had 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
(46:08):
was not much for his kids to keep. Leonard's memoir
Souvenir de Leonard coiffior de la rem 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 is the case with a
lot of memoirs we talk about on the show, many
(46:31):
of the events in the memoirs do align with events
that were playing out in France, Europe and Russia at
the time. These memoirs were reprinted in the eighteen nineties. Yeah,
and then they got an English language printing in the nineteeneens.
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
(46:54):
and fiscal downfall of many 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 cove
and ambition and a serious case of confidence, can make
this really huge impact on world events. Yeah. I don't think, oh,
(47:15):
I bet the Queen's hairdresser really was an important figure,
but he really was in a lot of ways. So yeah,
to me, it kind of you know, fills that that
constant litany that I'm always chanting about. Every person is
making history all the time. Yeah, even if they're they're
just and am using the air quotes because I don't
think of it that way, just you know, doing an
(47:36):
updo makeing hair. Thanks so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL
or something similar over the course of the show, that
could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History
(47:58):
Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all
over social media at missed indistory, and you can subscribe
to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app,
and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you missed
in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more
(48:19):
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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