Pass as a Woman, Act Like a Man: Marie-Antoinette as Tribade in the Pornography of the French Revolution

The pamphlet in which these words appeared, suggestively entitled The Uterine Furors of Marie-Antoinette, was typical of an eighteenth-century pornographic genre that highlighted Marie-Antoinette’s voracious sexual appetites, including her purported taste for women. The sexual proclivities of the Austrian princess, married to the French dauphin in 1770, had become the subject of rumor even prior to Louis’ succession to the French throne in 1774. But the queen’s allegedly polymorphous sexuality took on legendary proportions during the French Revolution. At that time, anonymous authors with a variety of political agendas turned their efforts to creating pamphlets with titles like The Royal Dildo or National Bordello Under the Auspices of the Queen. ² The charge that the queen was a tribade—a common term in the early modern period for women who had sex with other women—was never the only sexual transgression cited in the pornographic pamphlets. One pamphleteer specified, for example, that “incest, adultery, the most sordid and shameful lubricity,” as well as the “reversal of the sacred order of Nature were games for this lewd Messalina.” ³ Pornographic pamphlets depicted the queen with an unusual range of sexual partners and in an imaginative array of sexual postures. Yet tribadism made a frequent appearance, and not just as the appetizer to a solid main course of heterosexual sex. ⁴