1793: Marie Antoinette
October 16th, 2008 Headsman
This afternoon in Paris, 1793, the French Revolution devoured the Queen.
Among the most emblematic death penalty victims in history, Marie Antoinette — the “widow Capet,” as she was styled in egalite, after the guillotine shortened her husband — had the bad luck to personify the decadence of the ancien regime under the hegemony of the sans-culotte.
(And, of course, the good luck to be born heir to all the perks of absolutism she enjoyed for the first thirty-plus years of life. So, you know: a mixed bag.)
Those infamous excesses — and her infamous alleged bon mot, “let them eat cake” — are said to have been greatly exaggerated, nothing that everyone wasn’t doing, nothing that wasn’t understandable under the circumstances.
She had a gift, it seems, for accumulating to her personal reputation the outrage incurred by every gross and petty indulgence of the old order. And she had a popular press, the libelles, ready to embroider them salaciously.
Cruel, wanton, senseless … her death was all of these, but then many others in the Terror suffered the same, as many others had under the Bourbons.
As royal dynastic pairings go, she’d been dealt a bad hand.
Her mere presence in France was fruit of the controversial policy of alliance with the Austrian Habsburgs from the Seven Years’ War, and she was trundled off with her dowry and her teenage wiles to the foreign snakepit of Versailles just as the minister advancing that policy fell. Distrusted by the French as an Austrian catspaw, castigated by her family for her inadequacies thereto, socially expected to display conspicuous regal largesse during a budget crisis not of her making, and unable for the longest time to get a successful coition from her indifferent and/or impotent husband, it must have seemed to her some days like every play was a losing one.
She struggled to gain traction at court. But she would lose much more than influence.
I was a queen, and you took away my crown; a wife, and you killed my husband; a mother, and you deprived me of my children. My blood alone remains: take it, but do not make me suffer long. (WikiQuote)
Her bearing she kept forever: in a kangaroo court with a foreordained outcome where her imperious dignity still managed to turn aside an accusation of sexual abuse her son had been cajoled into supplying; on the scaffold, when she did not neglect courtesy to the executioner whose foot she trod:
“Monsieur, je vous demande pardon. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès.”
For much more queenliness, Marie-Antoinette.org delivers what the url promises, in quantity. If this figure or this period appeals, be sure to browse its forums.
Naturally, the doomed queen has had plenty of attention from printed word as well:
A few books about Marie Antoinette |
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As well as less, er, traditional media.
Part of the Themed Set: Belles Epoque.
On this day..
- 1817: Manuel Piar, Bolivarian general - 2020
- 1814: Juan Antonio Caro de Boesi - 2019
- 1752: William Jillet, Daniel Johnson, and David Smith - 2018
- 1771: Mary Jones, hanged for shoplifting - 2017
- 1555: Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, Oxford martyrs - 2016
- 1730: Nevsehirli Damat Ibrahim Pasha, Tulip Era Grand Vizier - 2015
- 1935: George Criner, "anything can happen to anybody" - 2014
- 1946: Neville Heath, torture-killer - 2013
- 1891: William Rose - 2012
- 1675: Samuel Guile, Puritan rapist - 2011
- 1975: The Balibo Five, before the invasion of East Timor - 2010
- 1946: The Nuremberg Trial War Criminals - 2009
Entry Filed under: 18th Century,Arts and Literature,Austria,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Death Penalty,Execution,Famous,Famous Last Words,France,Guillotine,Habsburg Realm,History,Martyrs,Popular Culture,Public Executions,Royalty,Scandal,The Worm Turns,Treason,Women
Tags: 1793, action figures, French Revolution, jacques-louis david, let them eat cake, louis xvi, marie antoinette, october 16, paris, place de la revolution, seven years' war, tasteless, the terror, versailles
They are very convincing and will certainly work.
“There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’, if we could but remember and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passions, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon a thousand persons, the other upon a hundred million; but our shudders are all for the “horrors of the… momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief terror that we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror – that unspeakable bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Mark Twain, writing about the French Revolution,
in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court