The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)

The Rest Is History

This episode details the harrowing final months and ultimate execution of Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. I

Key takeaways

• Marie Antoinette was targeted by intense, misogynistic propaganda from journalists like Jacques Hébert to dehumanize her.
• The Committee of Public Safety oversaw the systematic destruction of royal monuments and the exhumation of over 100 corpses at Saint-Denis.

Main topics

• Marie Antoinette's imprisonment
• Revolutionary propaganda and journalism

Notable quotes

Nothing can hurt me now.

Conclusion

A somber examination of how political radicalism and dehumanizing prop

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:10) It is now 16 or 17 years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, Speaker 1 (0:29) glittering like the morning star, full of Speaker 2 (0:32) life and splendor and joy. Oh. What a revolution. And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom. Little did I dream. That I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists and calculators has succeeded Speaker 1 (1:19) and the glory of Europe Speaker 2 (1:21) is Speaker 1 (1:22) extinguished forever. So... Speaker 2 (1:25) That's one of the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written about the French Revolution. It was written by the Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, often seen as one of the godfathers of conservatism. Burke wrote those words in 1790. So very early on in the revolution, he was prompted by the tumultuous events, really, of 1789, the March on Versailles by a mob of market women and of revolutionary militants. The attack by night on the apartments of the Queen of France, which had sent her running bare... foot to the bedchamber of her husband to seek sanctuary and the removal of the royal family to Paris, never to return to Versailles. Tom, to Edmund Burke, as to so many like-minded people across Europe, this was practically sacrilegious, wasn't it? Yeah, Speaker 1 (2:10) because the French monarchy was the most splendid, the most magnificent in the whole of Europe. It provided a role model for every other royal family. And it stood at the apogee of... an entire society that was founded on kind of loyalty and manners and notions of honor, which ultimately reached back a millennium and more to the very beginnings of the French monarchy amid the collapse of Roman Gaul. Its roots are that deep. And now to Burke and to people who read Burke and admired his sentiments, it seemed that everything that was most glorious about that monarchy and about those traditions were being reduced to kind of arid politicking about rights and money, which is essentially the issues that were current in 1789 and 1790. But of course, for the monarchy and specifically for the King and Queen of France, it gets a lot worse after 1790. I think for admirers of everything that... royalism could be, the Queen of France, the heroine of that passage, that very florid passage that you read, stood as a much more potent symbol of the French monarchy than the Queen's dull and plodding husband, Louis XVI. Because the Queen was, of course, Marie Antoinette, a figure who was famous across Europe for her glamour. She's a woman who was perpetually setting new trends with her... clothes, her hairstyles, her whole way of life. She was on one hand bred into the height of luxury. She wasn't just the wife of the King of France, but the sister of the Emperor of Austria. But she was also a woman who had found herself stifled by the formalities of court life at Versailles. She had worn the most expensive jewels in Europe. And in fact, diamonds got her into quite a lot of trouble over the course of her. time on the throne, but also famously in the Petit Trianon, her hideaway in the grounds of Versailles, she played at being a shepherdess. This was a woman who was incredibly mobile in her tastes, in her sense of fashion. She's always at the cutting edge of what is modish. And I think that she is viewed by historians of fashion as not just a representative figure of the Ancien Regime, the regime that gets toppled in the French Revolution, but of... ideals of fashion that will emerge in the 19th century and which are still very current in France today. So in that sense, she's a kind of trendsetter because she is a woman who, by always changing her dress, is establishing the idea of fashion as something that is never stable, that is constantly evolving. She is the face of the future as well as Speaker 2 (4:50) of the past. But arguably far more striking is Marie Antoinette's role. in the propaganda of the 1780s that leads to the French Revolution, isn't it? Because she's loved by lots of people, but she's absolutely detested by others. Oh, by far more. I mean, I would say she's much more detested than loved. She becomes the personification of what people see as the injustices. the inequality of the Ancien Regime. So in the 1780s, as people are complaining about high taxes, as massive problems with the harvest, people running out of food and so on, the sort of stories of her extravagance are repeated in ever more lurid terms. And there's this sort of vein of scatological and pornographic criticism on Marie Antoinette, which to a 21st century reader is actually pretty shocking. I Speaker 1 (5:34) mean, a lot of what is reported about Marie Antoinette in the 1780s and then... into the 1790s, is grotesque. And I think one could say misogynistic fantasy. It is repeated by her enemies and believed by hundreds of thousands that she is a woman who loves literally to bleed the people dry, that she is a kind of vampiress. She maintained at the expense of the state, a legion of leeches who go out and... bleed the poor dry. It is also said, as you know, that there's this pornographic element that she is a kind of compulsive adulteress, that she's a nymphomaniac, that she's a lesbian, that she practices incest with her own children, and that she goes out murdering the children of paupers just for kicks. And all of this is believed. She comes to seem like a kind of monster from the pages of the Marquis de Sade. And so this has a knock-on effect on the way that her own children are seen, because it is assumed that she's infected the royal bloodline with her own monstrous evil. There's a pamphlet in which she is made to cry out, a daughter of crime, I now give birth to it in turn. And so there is the sense that her children, and particularly her sons, who are in the line to inherit the throne, that they are infected by this kind of taint of evil that Marie Antoinette embodies. Speaker 2 (6:56) But while you have all the very, very aggressive, pornographic, misogynistic stuff about her, and it's hard not to feel sympathetic towards her, at the same time... The revolutionary sort of militants Speaker 1 (7:07) who in the early 1790s were saying, well, look, this woman is a bad person. There's Speaker 2 (7:11) no smoke without fire, right? She has been very extravagant. She has been the personification of the inequality of the system. And crucially, when they accuse her of plotting against the revolution, conspiring against them, consorting with foreign powers against the Speaker 1 (7:25) French people, they're not wrong. So on the one hand, she is accused of being Madame Deficit. the woman who single-handedly has bankrupted France. I mean, this is very deeply believed. That's not true. But clearly, she has been very extravagant at a time of mass poverty. I mean, that's what Versailles is all about. It's kind of hardwired into the entire system. And as you say, she does conspire against the revolution. I mean, what would you expect? She's a queen. She hates it. And she experiences the revolution as a kind of escalating process of humiliations and restrictions. placed on her, placed on a lifestyle that previously had not had such restrictions. As we heard, she'd been brought from Versailles to Paris in 1789. They try and escape. They get to Varennes. They are discovered and brought back. And then finally, in September 1792, the monarchy is formally abolished. And so she finds herself stripped of her very rank as queen. So it's not surprising. that she should have conspired against the people and the revolutionary ideology that was inflicting this on her. So as you say, she did in the wars that the French Republic are fighting against foreign enemies, she did conspire with those foreign enemies. She did pass on sensitive military information to foreign agents, and she did absolutely want to see the monarchy restored. She is complicit in... what at the trial of Louis XVI had been framed as treason. That is why Louis XVI ends up going to the guillotine. And this happens on the 21st of January, 1793. And when it happens, Marie Antoinette learns of the death of her husband by the sound of cannon fire ringing across Paris. And everything for her seems collapsed into ruin. So Speaker 2 (9:14) let's paint the picture now. So we are in January 1793. Where is she and Speaker 1 (9:20) what's her situation? She is in the tower of a medieval fortress called the Temple, and she had been kept there with her husband and with her immediate family. With the execution of Louis XVI, executed as a common criminal, you know, this is the heir of Clovis and Louis XIV, she now lacks a husband. So in a sense, she, I guess, feels that... The responsibility for raising her children are now completely on her shoulders. She is firmly under the guard of people who never lose an opportunity to rub her nose in the loss of her royal status. When she had been moved into the temple, she had been brought royal bedsheets and obliged to pick out with her own needle the emblems of royalty on it, you know, the crown and so on. The guards refused to show her any respect. She is now obliged to show. marks of respect to them. And all her titles have gone, all the markers of respect that had been a feature of her life, not just at Versailles, but growing up as a young girl back in Vienna. And her captors now refer to her in the wake of her husband's execution merely as Leverve Capet, the widow Capet, because Louis XVI had become Louis Capet, Capet being the name, the founding father of the kind of dynasty centuries before. And in fact, Louis wasn't a capé, he was a bourbon, but it's a kind of deliberate insult. So her world has Speaker 2 (10:42) completely imploded. Her husband is dead. Her baubles are gone. Everything that she took for granted has been ripped away from her. You would assume that she would sink into some form of depression or breakdown. I mean, that would be human nature, right? But she's more resilient than people expected. Speaker 1 (10:56) I actually think that even her enemies think that she has a quality of insolence, they would say, that means that she never gives up. Her admirers would say that she has a kind of an indomitability. Over the months that follow the death of her husband, she makes clear that she is not surrendering to depression and a lack of purpose in almost every way that she can. Her focus now is her family. And there are four members of that family left to her in the tower with the death of Louis. So there is her husband's younger sister, Madame Elizabeth, as she's called, and her two children. And the eldest of these is a daughter, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte. And she's very grave. She's very shy. And her mother calls her Lachsérieuse, the serious one. And she had turned 14 on the 19th of December, 1792, at the time her father was executed. That's her age. The younger of her two children, who she has with her, is the erstwhile dauphin, so the heir to the throne. And this is a little boy called Louis Charles. And he had become the dauphin. on the 4th of June 1789 with the death of his elder brother. I think perhaps it's forgotten that one of the reasons that Louis XVI is distracted in the build-up to the fall of the Bastille is that he is a bereaved parent. He has lost his beloved elder son. Speaker 2 (12:13) Yeah, absolutely right. His parents were crushed. They were crushed by the loss of this child. And it took them out of the picture at a crucial point in the beginning of the revolution. Speaker 1 (12:21) Louis Charles had been four at the time. And so by the time his father is executed, he is seven and he turns eight on the 27th of March, 1793. And all things considered, he's quite a sunny child. I mean, you think of everything he's gone through, very sunny, very affectionate. He has blue eyes. He has blonde hair, very like his mother. And Marie Antoinette adores him. Well, she calls him her, her chou d'amour. cabbage of love, which is kind of cutie pie, I guess you say it in English. You know, she adores him. But he is also, of course, in her opinion, much more than just her own, you know, her beloved little boy. He is Louis XVII, the new king of France. And Marie Antoinette has treated him as such the moment she heard those cannons ringing out over France to announce the death of her husband. So that evening she had bowed. before him, before her son, who at that point was only seven, and set him at the head of the table. He's now the king. And she had sought to replace her husband, who had been teaching his son in the kind of the disciplines and the academic studies that he thought was appropriate to a king. So Marie Antoinette does her best to replace her husband and to teach her son maths, history, geography, all that kind of thing, and also to pray. because he has to be raised as a Catholic, as the King of France. And so she teaches him to pray. Sadly, Louis Charles confesses to her, whenever I pray to God, it is always my father that appears to me. So he's obviously haunted, haunted by the death. That's very telling, isn't it? Speaker 2 (14:00) What about the guards? Because of course, those are the other people that they're basically sharing all their days with, the people who are in charge of looking after them. And the people who, as you've said, They've made Marianne Svenett unpick all the crowns with needle and thread and all that kind of thing. So they're not exactly benevolently disposed towards these children. Speaker 1 (14:16) No, all of this is absolute anathema to them because to them, Louis Charles is not Louis XVII because the monarchy has been abolished. So they will call him Louis Charles Capet. Capet is seen as being his family name. So that's his official name now under the... French Republic. But if they're feeling abusive, they will call him son of the tyrant or the wolf cub or worse things, as we will see. He's a very charming boy by all accounts. And so some of them are charmed and some of them do offer him little kindnesses in the way that you do to a young child. I think the problem for Louis Charles is that this kind of war of wills that is constantly going on between Marie Antoinette and the Revolutionary Guards who have her under their control. means that he's always in the crosshairs of that conflict. This conflict is taking place within their prison, but it is echoed out in the broader world beyond the great walls of the temple. Out there among royalists in France, but also among the monarchies of Europe that are trying to throttle the French Republic in its cradle, all these implacable enemies of the revolution view Louis Charles Capet as Louis XVII, as the legitimate king of France. So Speaker 2 (15:34) to go Speaker 1 (15:34) through them, Speaker 2 (15:35) there's the foreign opponents. So we've talked about them, the Austrians, the Prussians, and now, of course, the British. There are the émigrés. So there are the princes, the aristocrats and whatnot. who went across to what's now Germany initially. They're a source of enormous kind of provocation and angst for the revolutionaries. And now there are all these people in France itself. So of course, there are lots of latent royalists, but we talked last time. There is now a rebellion in the Vendée, West Central France, South of Nantes. The Royal and Catholic Army, as it calls itself. People who wear these kind of white cockades, who are shouting, Vive le Roi. longed of the king as a kind of battle cry and whatnot. And the king in that is Louis XVII. Exactly. So for the revolutionaries, these are their implacable opponents. These are the people, they're an existential kind of arch enemy. And the very person that is the focus for all these movements is right there in the temple prison under the revolutionaries' noses. This Speaker 1 (16:31) little boy. And these fears of a kind of revanchist monarchy are turbocharged by... What we've been emphasizing throughout this series is the key event in the spring of 1793, which really kind of lights the touch paper of the terror. And that is the defection of General du Maurier. He is leading the French Revolutionary Armies and he turns coat and goes over to the Prussians and the Austrians. And his plan, very overtly, which he had tried to rally the French army to, wasn't just to overthrow the revolution. but to install Louis XVII as a constitutional monarch and essentially recalibrate the revolutionary regime as a kind of British-style constitutional monarchy. It's the failure of that project that leads him to defect to the Austrians. And so it's not surprising that when the news of that reaches Paris, and bearing in mind the general mood of paranoia, the anxiety about... conspiracies everywhere, that lots of patriots on the streets of Paris, the enragés, the people who are enraged by everything that's going wrong and starving and hungry and poor, that they should have detected in this conspiracy the malevolent puppet hand of Marie Antoinette. Speaker 2 (17:44) Clearly, Marie Antoinette is not in a position to be a mastermind in a conspiracy because she is shut up in this prison. presumably the people who are actually running the revolution at this point. So let's take Robespierre. Robespierre, he must recognize that Marie Antoinette, there's no need to kill her because, or to put her on trial or whatever