Lock her up! In this case, they not only locked her up but also cut off her head. It is not often that a queen is arrested, tried, and publicly executed. Henry VIII had two of his wives beheaded, one after a trial, the other by bill of attainder, but their executions took place in the privacy of the Tower of London. Marie-Antoinette’s problem was not her husband, Louis XVI, who was tried and executed for treason in January 1793. At the time of her own trial nine months later, she found herself the former queen in a year-old republic. Although the prosecution of the king could be justified by the revolutionaries on legal and political grounds, the proceeding against his queen raised more eyebrows, since in France a woman could never hold the throne in her own right.
Marie-Antoinette suffered her fate because of her reputation as a heedless spender of public funds, behind-the-scenes manipulator of ministers, counterrevolutionary conspirer, and, not least, unbridled libertine. She had been a controversial figure almost from the moment she set foot in France in 1770 as the fourteen-year-old daughter of the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, for the Austrian Habsburgs had long been sworn enemies of France. The diplomatic and military realignment that had taken place during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which France and Austria were allies, had not pleased everyone at the French court, and those who opposed it did not hesitate to feed the rumor mill against Marie-Antoinette. Later, the revolutionaries had only to mobilize this often pornographic pamphleteering to their own ends. In death she became for some a martyr of a dazzling age now tragically darkened, for others a reprehensible symbol of aristocratic arrogance, as conveyed by the apocryphal remark “let them eat cake” (when there was no bread). Over time, the queen perhaps got the last word, as she gained an enduring celebrity as the embodiment of youth, elegance, and taste.
The most influential purveyor of the martyr image wrote presciently about her a full four years before her death. The Anglo-Irish politician Edmund Burke reacted with fury to the uprising of October 1789, in which thousands of Parisian market women tramped in the rain to Versailles, attacked the chateau with the men who had joined them, and dragged the royal family to Paris. The queen was forced to flee her private rooms through a secret passage to avoid being killed. Two of her bodyguards were hacked down. Burke nostalgically recalled seeing Marie-Antoinette in person when she was still a young wife and not yet queen: “I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy.” He expected ten thousand swords to leap to her defense in October 1789, and “little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men.”
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