Carla Bruni ‘is a modern-day Marie Antoinette’: French magazine slams First Lady as self-obsessed

Posted by lena on Oct 29, 2009 in News | 0 comments

France’s leading high society magazine has today produced a devastating portrait of Carla Bruni as the country’s new Marie Antoinette.
Point de Vue presents the 41-year-old First Lady as a daffy multi-millionaire socialite who does very little real work, and who is completely out of touch with ordinary people.
The attack by the Paris weekly, which specialises in covering the lives of aristocrats and European royalty, will come as a huge blow to President Nicolas Sarkozy as he tries to play down his monarchichal style.
He was recently humiliated after trying to parachute his 23-year-old son Jean, known as ‘Prince Jean’, into a job as head of Paris’s largest business district.
Photos of the President’s third wife have been juxtaposed with paintings of Marie Antoninette, the Queen of France whose high living and laziness led to her being guillotined in 1793 at the height of the French Revolution.
‘Same posture, same look, same smile,’ Point de Vue writes at the start of an eight-page feature, adding that both women were well known for their obsession with designer clothers and their own physical image.
While Marie Antoinette relied on court artist Elisabeth Vigee-Le Brun for her flattering portraits, Miss Bruni gets hers done by American photographer Annie Lebovitz, who charges thousands of dollars a picture.
Self-obsessed Marie Antoinette would pretend to be a shepherd at her ‘play’ farm in Versailles, near Paris, and also enjoyed singing and playing the harpsichord.
Miss Bruni also likes spending ‘country’ weekends at Versailles – where she too has an official home – and is a self-styled pop singer with an obsession with psychotherapy.
Referring to Miss Bruni’s recent TV appearance about her psychotherapy, Point de Vue reads: ‘At a time when an economic crisis is coming to a head, unemployment is rife, and there are government controversies, the wife of the president prefers to talk in front of a camera about her first psychoanalysis session.’
It added that such traits baffled traditional rural French people, who expected the First Lady to be both self-effacing and hard working.
‘Equality’ is a central tenant of the French Republic, with many believing that Miss Bruni, who comes from a wealthy Italian family, represents inherited wealth like the former Habsburg princess Marie Antoinette.
Legend has it that Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI, when told about the poor having no bread to eat, said: ‘Let them eat cake’.
Left-wing Miss Bruni has advised her husband on a range of controversial policies since she married him last year.
She was said to be behind the appointment of gay culture minister Frederic Mitterand, a personal friend and member of her ‘court’, according to Point de Vue.
Miss Bruni is currently at one of her Mediterranean homes on an extended holiday.
According to her online diary, her last official engagement took place more than a month ago when she visited the Andy Warhol Museum in New York on September 25.
source: dailymail.co.uk