Léonard-Alexis Autié

Portrait of Léonard

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Léonard-Alexis Autié (* around 1751 in Pamiers , France , † March 20, 1820 in Paris ), also Léonard-Alexis Autier , also known as Léonard , was a French hairdresser and theater entrepreneur. He was the hairdresser of Queen Marie-Antoinette and founded the Théâtre Feydeau in Paris in 1791 .

biography

Léonard-Alexis Autié was born in the small town of Pamiers in Gascony . Both of his parents worked as domestic servants. He had two younger brothers, Pierre and Jean-François Autié and Autier, who also became hairdressers. All three called themselves Léonard , which led to a certain confusion among historians.

Career as a hairdresser

The ambitious, but initially completely unknown and penniless Léonard-Alexis began his career in Bordeaux and came to Paris in 1769, where he initially worked for an actress at the Théâtre de Nicolet , named after Jean-Baptiste Nicolet (1728–1796). His unusual, innovative hairdressing style attracted attention at court, and he quickly received orders from Madame Dubarry , mistress of King Louis XV. , as well as from a lady-in-waiting of Marie-Antoinette. In 1772 he was allowed to hairstyle the Dauphine personally for the first time. Marie-Antoinette already had an official hairdresser named Larseneur, but she preferred Léonard, who wordlessly ignored the efforts of his predecessor and adapted it to his taste.

At Marie-Antoinette's request, he launched a fashion magazine called Journal des Dames in January 1774 together with the milliner Rose Bertin . He opened a hairdressing school under the name Académie de coiffure and brought his two brothers to Paris as business partners. Jean-François and a cousin were employed in the court of the Queen, while Pierre was employed for Madame Elisabeth , sister of King Louis XVI. , worked. One of Léonard's eye-catching tower hairstyles was the so-called pouf , which was initially worn by the Duchess of Orléans and quickly enjoyed general popularity. Another creation, Belle Poule , bears the name of a French battleship that gained fame after a sea battle against a British frigate.

At the beginning of the 1780s, Marie-Antoinette Léonard appointed to succeed his retired predecessor Larseneur. While she was aware of Léonard's eccentric and narcissistic character, his creative talent cleared all concerns. His elaborate wigs were over a meter high, weighed more than five kilograms and cost up to 50,000 livres , which corresponds to € 65,000, whereby they were changed every day by the queen and wealthy ladies-in-waiting.

From 1787, Léonard had enough financial means not to have to work anymore. Although he remained a royal hairdresser, he only appeared on festive occasions and left the daily work and the management of the hairdressing academy to his brother Jean-François.

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  Title page of the Journal des Dames , 1774

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  Léonard at work

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  Young noble lady with pouf , from the Cahier des Costumes français , 1778

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  Marie-Antoinette with a Léonard hairstyle

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  Léonard's creation Belle Poule , named after the frigate of the same name

impresario

Marie-Antoinette loved Italian opera . She supported the efforts of Mademoiselle Montansier (1730-1820), director of a theater named after her in Versailles , to bring the Italian troupe of the King's Theater from London to France. Encouraged by the Queen and with the financial support of Mademoiselle Montansier, Léonard became impresario . In the Ancien Régime , the king's eldest brother, who held the title of monsieur , traditionally held the office of theater director . The incumbent Comte de Provence had no interest in the theater, but approved the use of his name for the new Théâtre de Monsieur .

Quarrels quickly broke out between Léonard and Mademoiselle Montansier. Léonard wanted to produce Italian operas, French operas, French theater and vaudeville pieces at the same time , while Montansier wanted to limit himself to Italian opera and train Italian star soloists. In the end she agreed to resign under costly conditions, after which Léonard received financial support from Giovanni Battista Viotti and was able to open the theater in January 1789. After the king's arrest, the theater was named Théâtre Feydeau . Although it was very popular with the public, it got more and more into debt, had to cease operations towards the end of the revolution and was demolished in 1829 because it was dilapidated.

Escape to the revolution and end

After the failure of the royal attempt to escape to Varennes in June 1791, Jean-François Autié, who was involved in it, fled abroad, where Léonard-Alexis joined him briefly and returned to Paris after three months. In the course of the impending reign of terror , however, everyone in the vicinity of the queen had to fear for his life, and so Léonard probably fled to Russia towards the end of 1792, where he was allowed to prepare, among other things, Russian nobles and the body of Tsar Paul I. Jean-François had since traveled back, was arrested for his involvement in the escape to Varennes, and guillotined on July 25, 1794, nine months after Marie-Antoinette . Léonard-Alexis did not return to France until the beginning of the Restoration in 1814 and died in Paris in 1820.

Private life

Around 1779 Léonard married Marie-Louise Adélaïde Jacobie Malacrida, daughter of a chef of the future King Charles X, in Paris . The couple had three daughters and one son. During the Revolution, Léonard's wife refused to join her fleeing husband and was divorced in 1794. Léonard-Alexis died without leaving a will. His two surviving daughters shared the remaining sum of 716 francs and some jewelry, including a brooch with a bird of paradise , valued at three francs, and which he most likely received for his services to Marie-Antoinette.

Afterlife, movies

The authorship of Léonard's memoirs, which were published in Paris by Alphonse Levavasseur in 1838 under the title Souvenirs de Léonard, coiffeur de la reine Marie-Antoinette , remains unclear to this day. They could be from Louis-François L'Héritier , or from Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon, known as a forger .

Léonard has been featured in several feature films and television films, including Marie Antoinette (by James Lance ), Versailles - Kings and Women, and the period film Ridicule (by Antonin Lebas-Joly ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Will Bashor: Marie Antoinette's Head .
2. ^ Gustave Bord: La Fin de deux legends. L'affaire Léonard. , P. 65.

literature

• Gustave Bord: La Fin de deux legends. L'affaire Léonard. Paris 1909. Digitized
• Will Bashor: Marie Antoinette's Head: The Royal Hairdresser, the Queen, and the Revolution . Guilford, Connecticut: Lyons Press, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7627-9153-8 . Kirkus Review (English)

Web links

• Léonard, coiffeur de Marie-Antoinette Visites privées (youtube)