This Soft Girl Painting Ignited The Slave Trade. Here’s Why.

This piece is called Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. What started off as a humble portrait of the queen scandalized Paris so badly it was stripped from the Salon walls and fueled the expansion of the slave trade. But how could a painting cause such catastrophe? The garment the queen is wearing in this portrait is called a chemise which was something usually worn underneath womens clothing. Basically, Marie Antoinette is posing in her underwear. But the queen’s indecent exposure wasn’t what altered the course of history; It was the fabric she was wearing when she did it. The chemise Marie Antoinette wears in this portrait is made of muslin, which is a type of cotton. People were accustomed to seeing French aristocrats in fitted silk garments. And they were offended when the queen wore an inexpensive fabric like cotton because they interpreted it as a threat to the class structures. Also at this time, the majority of cotton was produced in India which was a British colony and so it was seen as an English textile while silk was produced by French merchants . The very thought of cotton grazing the queen’s skin was seen as unpatriotic and a threat to the entire French silk industry. Despite the outrage over Marie Antoinette’s cottage core aesthetic, everyone still wanted to look like her. Every affluent woman couldn’t wait to get their hands on their very own flowy cotton dress. And thanks to the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, cotton could be processed much more efficiently to meet the surge in demand. But there was just one problem. They couldn’t grow and harvest it fast enough. But there was another way: the American South. Within 10 years of the invention of the cotton gin, the value of the US cotton crop went from $150,000 to $8 million. The boom in cotton demand meant the slave population grew from around 700,000 in 1790 to over 4 million by 1860. By the 1830s, the U.S. produced the majority of the world’s cotton, and by 1850 the Southern states were responsible for 75% of global cotton exports. This made the South extremely wealthy and economically dependent on the institution of slavery. Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s relationship with the queen brought her fame, fortune, and prestige, but all of this vanished in an instance when the French Revolution began in 1789. Because of her proximity to the queen, Elisabeth became concerned for her and her daughters safety and she fled France for Italy. The artists decision to leave France turned out to be a wise one as Marie Antoinette was beheaded a few years later. The artist was able to build an equally impressive career and reputation abroad as she had in France which is perhaps the best testament to her artistic genius and charm. Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun wouldn’t return to France until after the turn of the 19th century. She died in Paris in 1842 at the age of 86. When Marie Antoinette slipped this dress on to pose for her portrait, she probably didn’t know the damage it would do. But she probably also didn’t know that she wouldn’t be around long enough to see any of it come true. Thank you for watching!! Credits: Arcadia - Wonders by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Smoke effect from Vecteezy