Last Thursday, the Duchess of Sussex posted a lovely Instagram carousel, with photos of her summer holiday with her husband and children. There were photos from Portugal, where Meghan and Prince Harry own a second home, a vacation home in a luxury resort. There were photos from Montecito. And there were photos from Althorp, the Spencer family’s ancestral estate. In the wake of Meghan’s Instagram carousel, there’s been nothing but angst, anger, rage and tears from the royalists. Tom Sykes – the Daily Beast’s Royalist columnist – immediately raged out a hilariously absurd piece which boiled down to “how dare Meghan show off her happy summer vacation when we did everything we could to humiliate her and target her!”
When Meghan Markle shared a carousel of recent photos on Instagram this week, she no doubt wanted to project an image of her family shedding the cares of recent months on a well-deserved European vacation. Instead, her pics summoned up the ghost of the Gauloises-smoking, wine-drinking, pinball-playing French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007).
The central claim of this chin-stroking king of the media saturation age was set out in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), in which he argued that we have passed beyond the point of struggling to tell the real from its representation. The struggle is over. The simulation won. The copy, he said, no longer refers back to an original but has replaced it.
Baudrillard would have enjoyed Meghan’s Instagram feed, and this week’s pics of the family’s European summer vacation.
As The Royalist recalls it, this was a fraught period for the Sussexes. They were deep in life-defining security negotiations with the British state, a back-and-forth that threatened to make it impossible for them to travel to the U.K. for the rest of their lives.
Having a massive argument with the U.K. government while squinting at your phone under a parasol doesn’t sound like my idea of a great holiday. I was told by a source that Harry was close to tears on the phone. Meghan’s side told People magazine she was saddened by how it all unfolded. We hardly need their statements to work it out. Harry didn’t bring the children for much of the trip. This is not the usual description of an ideal family holiday.
Baudrillard would have given what I am contractually required to define as a “Gallic shrug” as that two-week break re-emerged, one Instagram post later, as a golden summer in which none of this ever happened. Here instead is a Meghan and Harry so relaxed, so ostentatiously at ease, that they eat dinner giggling against a stone wall, collapsing into each other’s arms. They visit a fish restaurant where the menu is chalked on a blackboard.
They swim. Harry hurls the children through the air with cheerful recklessness in a swimming pool. They process down an avenue of lime trees at Althorp clutching bouquets to lay on Diana’s grave, which seems a weird thing to post as part of your holiday content, but hey ho. “Then we went to a grave!” Even this somber task is sun-kissed and wonderful.
But for those of us who are not post-structural theorists, I suspect the truth is simpler; it just looks like a load of bulls–t.
You know the expression “living well is the best revenge”? That’s what is happening here. They’ve now spent days throwing tantrums because they didn’t break Harry and Meghan. The Sussexes’ revenge is that they had a lovely time in Europe for the most part, humiliation rituals notwithstanding. Tom Sykes is mad because Meghan didn’t post photos of Harry crying!! HOW DARE SHE! How dare she remind everyone that the Windsor Melodramas were only a small part of what was probably a month-long vacation.
Photos courtesy of Meghan’s Instagram.
