Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 86

power and of her assertion of independence” (BBC ����). While these fears
may be more intense and dangerous in traditional cultures, they exist in the
Western world as well.
As a historian, when I want to better understand modern phenomena, I turn
to the past. These links between celebrity, performance, and politics may
seem modern and specific to our age of social media, but they have a history.
As a scholar of gender in early modern France, I frequently find echoes of
the present in my research. Our fascination with celebrity spectacle and
the performance of gender as well as concerns about authenticity, politics,
and female empowerment through sexual assertiveness are nothing new.
Through the examination of moments in the past when the public obsessed
about performance, authenticity, and fears of female power and sexuality, we
can better understand the forces of the present that create a similar moment.
In early modern France, the members of the French royal court, especially
the royal family, performed under the gaze of other courtiers, and perceived
their daily lives as unfolding on a kind of stage. Contemporary writers often
spoke of “the theater of the court,” and considered the court of Louis XIV,
the Sun King (����–����), the most theatrical of them all. In this context,
women—for example, royal mistresses—could often exercise political
influence through social networks and the performance of beauty and
power. But with the onset of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth
century came a new insistence on the authentic and the natural. The French,
under the influence of philosophes such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, called
for greater transparency in government as well as sincerity in interpersonal
relations, and rejected the artificiality that had been an accepted element
of court life. The elaborate dress and cosmetics of courtiers symbolized
the affectations of aristocrats. The Rousseau-reading public rejected the
appearance of artifice and touted instead the beauty of the simple and the
“natural” in appearance and modes of interactions, especially for women—
although of course, this was as much of a performance as the “artificiality”
of earlier times.
As Revolution broke out in ����, and especially during the Reign of Terror
(����–����), restrictions on female behavior intensified; now, women were
expected to act as modest citoyennes, open and honest, devoted to their
families and supportive of democratic change, unadorned and dressed
simply in white. Writers accused women who wore cosmetics and elaborate
clothing that masked their true appearance of dissimulation as well as
85