ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 is a comparative assessment of the historical, cinematic and architectural narratives of the book against the heritage narrative, taking each of the former three narratives’ main elements and juxtaposing them onto the context of the latter. Through this juxtaposition, the chapter evaluates the prevailing narrative in the context of the site’s perception, thereby discovering the emerging range of images associated with the last Queen of France at the Petit Trianon. Chapter 7 also seeks to detect the reasons behind the formation of such images and the processes that led to the unintentional strengthening of some of them, contributing to the dissonant commodification of Marie Antoinette’s historical character at the Petit Trianon. At the same time, Chapter 7 assesses the postmodern, perpetual multiplication of representational images that have escaped the authority of their creators. To this aim, the analysis is complemented by relevant visual theories concerning the encoding and decoding of postmodern images (Barthes 1972; Baudrillard 1994, 2001; Eco 1986; Hall 1997). It is through an assessment of the incessant manipulation of these images of the last Queen of France, since her reign, that this book reveals the misconceptions surrounding the historical character of Marie Antoinette.
