FACULTY SPOTLIGHT: My Life In French
By Caroline Weber as told to Jean-Michele Gregory
Caroline Weber, whose book about Marie Antoinette’s manner of dress is due out in September, is wrapping up her first year as a professor of French.
 After seven years of teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Caroline Weber joined the faculty last fall as an associate professor of French. Here she talks about her influences, her upcoming book, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the French Revolution (Henry Holt, 2006), and her transition to Barnard life.
My mother’s side of the family is French, but they moved to America a long time ago. They actually left France during the French Revolution, which is the period I’ve specialized in. But when I was younger I went to a French school in Switzerland and learned the French language at a pretty young age. My school in Switzerland demanded a certain amount of specialization even at the age of 11, so if you liked literature classes and language, that’s pretty much all you did.
Then I went to Harvard, which I loved, but one of the quirky things about Harvard is that they make you declare your major at the end of your first year. I didn’t feel like I had a lot of knowledge to pick anything else as a major, so I kind of got channeled
into this—both as a 12-year-old and then again as an 18-year-old. And it was positively reinforcing, because I love it. But it’s meant that I’ve been doing all this for a really long time.
My first book came out with an academic press three years ago, and I really enjoyed working with the editor there, but for 10 years I’ve been writing in a strictly academic vein. At my stage of academia—which is not so junior anymore— the thought is, OK, what are we doing with our lives? A lot of my friends talk about how they want to be a public intellectual and how they want to reach the world. I don’t know if my
ambitions are quite that grandiose, but it would definitely be nice to reach more people.
Both my parents have Ph.D.s, but when they tried to read my first book they found it dense and boring and specialized —and not written for them. So one of the challenges for me in writing for the trade press has been to relate a serious, scholarly argument about Marie Antoinette’s clothes in a more accessible way. My parents and my students are the kinds of people I keep in mind when I’m writing now: really educated people who don’t necessarily already know everything there is to know about my tiny little field.
Everyone thinks they have some picture of Marie Antoinette, but it’s a picture that is so different when you look at it up close. The myth of her as this frivolous, flouncy,
over-dressed queen is one that we carry around uncritically. But if you think about the fact that a lot of the leaders of the new French Republic were talking seriously
about her clothing as a political problem—they would say things like, “The way her hair is dressed is proof that she is out to betray France”—it suggests a deeper, more controversial, and more exciting political meaning to her clothes.
I take my teaching seriously. I wouldn’t have wound up in this profession if I hadn’t had professors of both sexes committed to helping me find my voice at a young age. Colleagues of mine have joked, “If a Barnard student doesn’t like something in your class, she’ll let you know.” And thus far, that hasn’t been anything but a blessing. It makes one’s life as a teacher and a thinker really, really nice. It clarifies for me all the things that my Barnard alumnae friends have said to me about the College all these years.
Meeting students who are so enthusiastic and hungry to learn means that you want to do your best for them. At the same time, I’ve been operating under a really intense writing deadline. It just means I haven’t slept or seen my friends or husband much for the last year. One of the sad ironies of this project is that I feel like I’ve never been more terribly dressed than the year that I spent writing on Marie Antoinette—between teaching and writing there is no time. I’m waiting to catch up on about a year’s worth of Vogue.
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