SYMHC Classics: Léonard Autié

Published Aug 17, 2024, 1:00 PM

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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Stuff You Missed in History Class

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