Today (October 16, 2017), 224 years ago, at 12:15 p.m., Marie-Antoinette was beheaded in Revolution Square (later – Place de la Concorde) in Paris.
There is much controversy about the Queen's personality and her role in the fall of the French monarchy, but few dispute that her final months were spent in torment, both physical and mental, which she endured with fortitude and nobility of spirit; there is almost no dispute that the people who tormented her were the scum of the human race; and there is absolutely no dispute that she met her death befitting a queen.
And as much as I am not enthusiastic about the tendency to examine history through the prism of gender, it is very difficult not to notice the polar differences between the treatment her husband, Louis XVI, received before his death, and the treatment she was given: it seems that her femininity actually aroused some additional level of vindictiveness in her captors.
The trial of Marie-Antoinette
First of all, it is distinguished by the reason for the execution – in Louis’ case, it was a formal accusation of treason, and his execution was a legislative act of the Convention. In her case, the radical revolutionaries simply needed a victim to forge a bloody alliance between themselves and the Parisian mob – the Sans-Clots, in the face of the coalition army approaching the French capital.
Other candidates for the role of victim, the Girondins, had already been eliminated by this stage. The first to demand Marie-Antoinette’s head was Jacques Hebert, the most extreme of the extremes, who told the delegates in no uncertain terms: “I have promised Antoinette’s head. I will go and cut it off with my own hands if you delay in handing it over. I have promised it in your name to the Sanclotes who demand it, and without whom you will cease to exist.”
Second, Louis XVI and his team of lawyers were given time to prepare their defense. Marie-Antoinette and her lawyers were given a day. Third, there is no comparison between the nature of the charges against him and what was alleged against her in court. Naturally, Abert surpassed them all. He was close to Antoine Simon, the chief warden of the Temple prison, where Marie-Antoinette was held with her daughter, son, and sister-in-law.
After eight-year-old Louis-Charles was physically torn from his mother and given over to the care of the jailer, Simon, a former shoemaker, “to educate him in the spirit of the Revolution.” Louis-Charles, who after his father’s death had now become Louis XVII, was a long way from being a king even in potential – his entire intelligent life had been spent moving from one prison to another, and the boy developed a real desire to please his jailers.
Now, when he fell into the hands of Simon the Beast, who introduced into his life the exciting novelty of beatings to death for disciplinary offenses, the boy became a broken vessel. And when Simon told Laber that he had caught the boy masturbating, the two revolutionaries jumped at the news like they had won a great prize – it didn’t take them much time or effort to extract from the boy the confession that the ones who taught him to do it were his mother and aunt, “who used to lay him in bed between them and…”
During her flash trial, which lasted a day and a half, Marie-Antoinette conducted herself with a cool, alienated restraint – answering laconic questions. When Abert made his accusations, she did not get him to answer. When one of the jurors asked why she did not respond to Abert’s accusations, and the judge demanded that she answer, she abandoned her coolness and replied angrily: “If I did not answer, it is because nature itself refuses to answer such an accusation, when it is leveled at a mother. I appeal to all the mothers sitting here.”
A very threatening uproar passed through the women in the audience, and the vendors from the Parisian markets, perhaps the Queen's loudest haters, could not help but take her side – they turned to scream that this trial must be stopped here and now. The wonderful accusation that Aber and Simon had concocted almost turned on them. Only with great difficulty did the judge manage to calm the audience and continue the proceedings.
The End of a Queen
Fourth, Louis was surrounded by confidants, his private priest accompanied him to the gallows, and he was even given the privilege of saying goodbye to his wife and children. Marie-Antoinette was completely alone at the end – she was transferred from the Temple to the Conciergerie prison, where she lived in very poor conditions, under the watchful eye of the guards, who did not leave her room.
When she wanted to change clothes or go to the bathroom – she would put a cloth partition between them. On the day of her execution – they prevented her from even doing this, she was forced to change clothes and sanitary napkins in front of them, and they did not take their eyes off her even when she vowed to go to the bathroom. The priest who was brought to her was one of the Republican priests – unfit in her eyes, and she refused to speak to him or confess to him before her death.
Fifth, while Louis was being driven to his gallows in a closed carriage, she was being driven on an open cart, with her hands tied behind her back, facing the direction of travel, and she almost fell over on the turns. She was driven – exposed to the insults and spitting of the mob (although nothing hurt her, but she saw everything). And despite all this, she proudly mounted the gallows, accidentally stepping on the foot of the executioner, Henri Sanson, and her last words were words of tenderness and atonement: “I’m sorry, I didn’t do it on purpose.”
Jacques Abert, on the other hand, when less than six months later he quarreled with Robespierre and was led to the gallows himself, squealed like a pig being slaughtered, urinated on himself and fainted several times on the way from the cart to the guillotine. His executioners, unlike Sanson, did not treat him with respect, and tampered with the mechanism in such a way that the blade stopped three times a tiny distance from Abert's neck, causing him to burst into more sobs of terror. His wife was executed twenty days after him.
Want to read more about Marie Antoinette?
- Ariella Goichman Gerber, a fashion blogger, wrote about theIts influence on today's fashion world.
- Orly Oren, a lecturer in art history, wrote about the painter who loves her Elizabeth Vizja LeBron.
- And of course you are welcome. Stroll through Versailles in her footsteps.
Very interesting and heartbreaking. I knew she was accused (falsely of course) of incest with her son, but many of the details you wrote in the article were new to me. Thank you very much. It turns out she was also suffering from cancer when she was executed. A very unfortunate episode in French history.
She deserved her fate.
Only a mentally ill person could write what you wrote.
Is an eight-year-old child held in solitary confinement without trial, without friends, without proper food, without medical care,
Separated from his mother by a sword, while perverts and murderers abuse him mentally and physically?@
Interesting, today you would scream at them that they are 'war criminals' and accused of pedophilia and murder and more
But when the education system shouts morning and night, "Freedom, equality, and brotherhood," in whose name tens of thousands of families have been murdered
Simply because they were in the middle, or hated by their neighbors who took advantage of the chaos and madness of the revolution.
So everything seems fine.
By any Western/legal/Mizrahi/Torah standard – all the leaders of the revolution were sadistic, scoundrels.
Opportunistic egoists for whom hell is too cold. With calls for brotherhood, not murder in its name. A. B. of morality.
There is no doubt that Marie Antoinette's end was cruel, and that her son suffered severe violence and abuse. The tragedy of both of them was that their upbringing and education did not allow them to understand at all the price of their life of luxury and the feudal governmental and economic structure of which they were a part. It is worth understanding the sources of this murderous and vengeful cruelty - centuries of trampling, exploitation and terrorizing by the landowners - the nobility and the king - on masses of poor, hungry, humiliated and frightened peasants and townspeople. It is worth reading the chapter "The Cruel Marquis" in Dickens's "Between Two Cities" to understand how much the upper class had become attached to most of the French. This is the background and the reason for the desire for revenge, and Marie Antoinette was one of tens of thousands of his victims.