Meghan Markle’s Family Photos Stretch Belief to Breaking Point

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 copy, he said, no longer refers back to an original but has replaced it.

His most convincing illustration was Disneyland.

Disneyland, Baudrillard said, is not a representation of America. It is America—the version people actually believe in, and, more damningly, the one they prefer.

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.

It is remarkable to reflect that Baudrillard died before Instagram existed, because his theory suits it perfectly. He described four stages in the life of the image: first it reflects reality, then it masks reality, then it masks the absence of reality, and finally it floats free of reality altogether, a pure simulacrum answering only to itself. This Instagram carousel is not a summer vacation represented; this is the summer.

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.

I use the word in something close to its technical sense, and will lean here on the teachings of another thinker. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt (1929-2023), in his celebrated essay On Bulls--t, distinguished the liar, who at least respects the truth enough to conceal it, from the bulls--tter, who is sublimely indifferent to whether what he says is true at all.

The holiday carousel is bulls--t in precisely this Frankfurtian understanding of the term—not a denial of the miserable fortnight we all watched unfold, simply a serene refusal to acknowledge that facts are a remotely relevant category. One thinks of the Kardashian photo consent form, the wedding in the back yard, the professed lack of awareness of who the British royal family were.

I don’t think Meghan’s attempt to replace reality with shiny Insta performance works. It reads instead as a heavy-handed bit of amateur advertising. It is an effort to reshape our understanding of what these people are like, but most people made their minds up on that question some time ago.

The proposition that Meghan is a breezy, easy-going woman who asks nothing more of life than a rustic-looking fish restaurant will not wash with anyone who has followed the story.

So with all due deference to the Voltaire of the shopping mall, I think Meghan is failing to conjure her reality here. Mainly this is because the narrative that emerged from that week (the chaos, the drama, the security fight) was put out, assiduously, by none other than the Sussexes themselves.

I’m sure Meghan has read her Baudrillard. She went to college. Maybe she believes that Simulacra and Simulation is not a critique but a manual. But even in a media-saturated hyperreality, there must be some load-bearing core of credibility, and this is where Disneyland instructs us.

Disneyland works because it is underwritten by a consistent narrative: it is not one thing on Monday and another on Tuesday. Disney has pulled off its dream of replacing reality with a load of plastic because Disney never breaks the story.

But Meghan keeps breaking it. She told us last week what an awful time they were having, how difficult it all was, how upset they were about the security. Then she posted the perfect holiday, which is a very good example of why the simulation, in her inexpert hands, keeps collapsing back into the real.