Madame Tussaud, Beheadings, Death Masks

January 16, 2018 9:16 PM

Marie Grosholtz was really good at propping a freshly beheaded and bloody head on her lap so she could do a death mask She even started on Marat's death mask while Corday was being arrested for the murder.
posted by MovableBookLady (8 comments total)

Thanks for the post MovableBookLady: it left me curious to read a bit more about Marie. From this article I learned that:

Curtius was actively involved in the Revolution, participating in the Storming of the Bastille and entertaining some of the Revolutionary leaders. Marie met some important figures, including Robespierre and Napoleon Bonaparte.

However, during the Reign of Terror Marie was arrested. She was imprisoned with Joséphine de Beauharnais, later wife of Napoleon and more commonly known as simply the ‘Empress Josephine’. Marie’s head was shaved in preparation for execution by guillotine even before supporters of Curtius had her released.

I see there's an abridged edition of her Memoirs at archive.org - I'll be dipping into those at some point.
posted by misteraitch at 3:32 AM on January 17, 2018

I can only assume that there was a vampire epidemic during the French Revolution and all stakes were in use dispatching them, because I rather thought propping severed heads up for easy viewing were what stakes were really good at.

I mean, eww. Think of her laundry bill alone.
posted by delfin at 5:24 AM on January 17, 2018

She was given the grotesque task of digging though the Revolution’s mass graves to find heads of those that may be of interest and the masks were often paraded around streets as trophies. It couldn’t have been very pleasant, but it saved her life.

Holy understatement, Batman!
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:28 AM on January 17, 2018

It's this kind of dedication that allowed her to succeed where the adjoining Guy Fieri restaurant failed.
posted by condour75 at 6:30 AM on January 17, 2018 [7 favorites]

A while ago, I read Madame Tussaud: A Novel of the French Revolution, which presents Grosholtz as a wise monarchist who knew all along that the revolution was dangerous and a bad idea. It made me hungry for a fictionalization of her life which took maybe a more nuanced political position and a more thoughtful approach to what her psychology may have been like.
posted by meese at 12:01 PM on January 17, 2018 [1 favorite]

This post is relevant to my interests.
posted by Madame Defarge at 5:30 PM on January 17, 2018 [6 favorites]

Meese, I'd been wanting to check out the Tussaud novel-- but now I don't want to read it at all. What is up with the bullshit monarchical pretensions often found in English-language novels (and popular histories) about the French Revolution? So many social justice movements either got their start or became an unstoppable force during the Rev, but it seems that according to many Anglophone novelists, we just really need a big Daddy with a crown to keep the angry unwashed rabble at bay. (It's particularly disgusting in the age of Trump.)

Anyway, I really enjoyed the linked article. MT sounds like a fascinating huckster/hustler with mad marketing skills.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 1:31 AM on January 18, 2018 [1 favorite]

I went in once with my mom and we were completely freaked out by the horror scenes, but this is an excellent article that completely explains why this is even a thing. How fascinating! I wonder what Victor Hugo thought of her work.
posted by yueliang at 9:51 PM on January 19, 2018