Miss France is a royal shame
By: Frankie Faunet
Tags: Television, Beauty, Royalty, France, Culture

Miss France is a royal shame

Miss France contestants trying to look regal even with masks.

Over the weekend, the annual Miss France beauty pageant was held, and if you weren’t able to tune in, you missed an eyeful. No, I’m not referring to the swimsuit competition, or any of the other ways in which this fête parades the objectifiable (and objectified) beauty of its contestants.

I’m talking about everything that is shit in France, and a fair amount of other places as well.

To be clear, I believe the first and most important critique to be made of beauty pageants starts from a feminist perspective. In France, for example, we don’t hide behind any bogus claims of having our pageant be a scholarship competition. It’s a beauty pageant, where the contestants are judged — in part — on both how beautiful AND how photogenic they are.

It’s like a horse show, except the women dance instead of jumping over things; it’s like a dog show, except they stumble through prepared speeches instead of resisting shiny toys. Just like in horse and dog shows, everyone moves and sits on command.

Which is a shortcut to saying the Miss France competition treats its contestants like dumb animals, regardless of whether they’re asked to speak and of whatever we can assume about the young women’s degree of consent. Instead of beasts of burden, they are beasts of desire.

And while someone might try to object, citing all the women in the professional jury — all former Miss Frances — the panoptical gaze of the camera-plex, broadcast live and accompanied by parallel media campaigns on every platform imaginable, makes any such argument silly. Never mind that I’m not going to be the one to teach you about female enablers of patriarchy…

What I really want to talk about today is Versailles. Fucking Versailles. I mentioned this last week with the successful winners of the reality tv talent competition La France a un Incroyable Talent being a family of conservative Catholics from Versailles, but allow me to restate the important bit: Versailles is a shit hole.

A symbol of crushing monarchy, host to a nobility that hated working class people and suppressed democratic uprisings, Versailles is a remnant of feudal France that persists as a tourist destination and a seat of bland conservativism. Decadence, violence, and resistance to change — that is Versailles.

But nearly 10 million visitors tour the Chateau de Versailles every non-pandemic year, and it would boggle the mind if we didn’t have tools to understand it. Herded through the hallways, forbidden from stopping longer than the time it takes to snap a selfie in the Hall of Mirrors, queuing up for a macaron at Ladurée at the end of the tour and wandering wistfully around the gardens with a drunk and stupid smile on their faces — you’d be forgiven if you thought these people were brainwashed.

The truth is that everyone is in pursuit of a daydream, one in which they project themselves onto and into the opulence of Versailles, in order for a brief moment imagine themselves as protagonists in that setting, not just as simple courtesans, but as royalty — princesses and princes, queens and kings — masters of the exquisite scene before their eyes.

To do so requires so much magical thinking, I’m almost in awe of it. You need to forget the inherent violence of monarchy, the impoverishment and plunder of other places which makes such riches possible. You need to time-travel so as to be in whatever pastiche of the past you build up around your Marie-Antionette-themed fantasy.

Most importantly, as tourist, you need to look and magically erase all the crowds!

Somehow rendering the crowds invisible means escaping the reminder of just how unremarkable you are, how common you are, how much you are a member of the masses. It helps you forget that even if you were born in the golden age of French monarchy, you would have more chance to be born with three legs than as anything better than a peasant. It helps you avoid seeing how your entry free is proof that this building still stands only on the backs of other people’s labor.

What does this have to do with the Miss France beauty pageant? Well, it may seem a little tangential, but if you watched this year’s edition, you would have noticed a segment about how the contestants prepared for the final competition. Viewers were treated to views of the contestants working out, practicing dances, posing for photos, swimming, and more — all at the Miss France Academy hosted at Versailles. Cue the images of the contestants running through the halls of the miraculously-empty chateau.

Would-be Queens in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors.

There is praise being given to the Miss France beauty pageant as it includes more women of color (never mind the anti-semitic tirades that have followed one contestant of partial Israeli origins), and I’ll even confess a little admiration for Miss Guadeloupe as she announced her studies in astronomy and told people that her upbringing in a poor neighborhood was proof that people like her could make it (though the strategic participation in the pomp of power is a different discussion), but the pretensions to modern-day royalty is a clear signal that no degree of representation can counterbalance the politics of this event.

Miss France reigns, she receives a crown, she is given money, but also has duties. In the age where one of our leading television fictions is a multi-season retelling of the life of Queen Elizabeth II, there is a seductive narrative in the idea that a pretty girl from anywhere at all can be transformed into a princess overnight. It would be very Disney, if it wasn’t already trademarked Miss France.

For the viewers, the pageant perfects the masking of reality, by choreographing the photogenic women in the halls of Versailles emptied of tourists, allowing the illusion to be complete, without leaving the safety of your home.

But this is pure fantasy. I’d go so far as to suggest it is the worst kind, even, as it requires us to forget the damage done by monarchy. Wish for a return to royalty and find yourself under its oppressive thumb. Or be the thumb yourself and lose your humanity.

Either way, we are being brainwashed by these televised spectacles of regal aspiration — isn’t it appealing to imagine, if only for a minute, waking up with (what seems like) the world at your command, your every desire within reach, and the peak of luxury at your bidding? Appealing, maybe, but at what cost? What would you have to sacrifice — WHO would you have to sacrifice to have all that?

And meanwhile, we’re just lumped together in the crowd, lapping up the TV broadcast while eating shitty pizza, planning a day to visit Versailles and throw away our money to get shunted through, hoping desperately to be able to snap a photo or two where the other tourists are absent, so later we can look and imagine ourselves alone, so we can show it to our loved ones, exclaiming, “Isn’t it amazing?! I walked through the door and for a minute I was completely alone,” as if that didn’t say everything about our collective sadness.