On October 16th 1793, a widow and mother-of-four died. Her hair allegedly turned white overnight from the stress of anticipating her execution. Two weeks prior she had lost her son and heir, Louis-Joseph, at age 7. She was on trial for treason and theft, alongside a false charge alleging sexual abuse against her youngest son Louis-Charles. She had only two days to prepare for the trial against the ruthless Antoine Quentin Fouquirer-Tinville, President of the Tribunal.
The trial commenced with a vitriolic speech framing her amongst many other infamous women, “like Messalina, Brunhilda, Fredegund, Medici”. It fell quickly into a steady rhythm with Fouquirer-Tinville espousing accusations without evidence, and the woman despondently providing one-word answers or stating she had no knowledge of what the eyewitness testimony claimed. She was convicted of high treason two days later and sentenced to death by execution. Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave at Madeleine Church, where she remained nameless for centuries. Her last words were to offer her executioner an apology for stepping on his foot, “Pardon, Monsieur. I did not do it on purpose”.
Her name was Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, better known as Marie Antoinette. Naming her changes everything. This Frenchified name, given to her as a 14-year-old bride, marks her as Queen Fatalé. Against dire living conditions for the peasantry, the American Revolution, and ailing support for the feudal system, the 1787-99 French Revolution called for a complete overthrow of the aristocracy in favour of a democratic system. Antoinette became a symbol for everything aristocratic. Her historical narrative is of a cold-hearted and detached woman whose frivolity in a time of poverty had to be punished. Her tight corsets and four feet wigs hid a Machiavelli-in-disguise who pushed her husband, as urged by her mother, into signing the 1779 Peace of Teschen that secured her homeland Austria a territory of at least 100,000 inhabitants. One callous remark has survived all others: “let them eat cake” has become cemented in our culture, but is this villainous characterisation true?
Well, let them eat cake (or brioche)! At some point around 1789, when informed about her subjects’ abject poverty, Antoinette supposedly responded, “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”. The phrase was first attributed to Antoinette by Alphonse Karr in Les Guêpes, March 1843. This story was first told in a different form about Marie-Thérèse, who married King Louis XIV in 1660, where she was alleged to suggest that the French people eat, “la croûte de pâté” (the crust of the pâté). This was first recorded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1660 Confessions when Antoinette would have been 10 years old. Antoinette’s image is dictated by misogynistic falsehoods that oversimplify her character.
In our contemporary depictions of Antoinette, we continue to allow this mistreatment. She is sometimes the victim and sometimes a warning symbol of female profligacy. Toy Story (1995) and The Addams Family (1991) both frame Antoinette as a headless doll. She is rendered voiceless with her likeness becoming ironically consumable. The closest we’ve come to a feminist reckoning is in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette. She purposefully ends on the 1789 Storming of the Bastille instead of the execution. Coppola frames her story as the coming-of-age of a passive teenage girl. There is no care for historical accuracy while reimagining the character of Antoinette as a modern ‘Material Girl in Converse’. These retellings all strip her of any agency and complexity.
From the spring of 1789, Antoinette became a regular target for libelles and political pornography accusing her of affairs, overspending, and treachery. The queen – strong-willed, foreign, and female – became an easy target of Enlightenment satirists as tensions rose in France. These libellistes were more interested in profit over truth. Jacques René Hèbert, editor of popular radical newspaper Le Père Duchesn, made repeated calls for the destruction of, “that Austrian bitch”. Before 1789, only around 10% of pornographic libels targeted Antoinette. While the king’s trial remained confined entirely to his political crimes, her trial reflected the revolutionary political imagination.
Like many women in history, there is little space for Antoinette to exist as a fully realised figure with flaws and strengths. It is true that she had great affection for the newest fashions and, like other Versailles nobility, she sported elaborate headdresses. In 1776, Antoinette spent more than three times her dress allowance of 150,000 libres. However, Antoinette was not involved in the 1784-85 Affair of the Diamond Necklace. Her name was simply used to swindle 647 flawless diamonds worth 1.6 million libres. This scandal earned her the moniker ‘Madamé Deficit’, even as she lowered her spending over the 1780s. There is some truth to her avarice, yet there is far more nuance to her when only half-truths remain in our culture.
Thomas Jefferson, then Minister to France, wrote, “if there had been no queen, there would have been no revolution.” This is certainly true as Antoinette represented all aristocratic evil to the French lower classes. She is far more complex than her spending, sexuality, or name. Vile and false propaganda made her an easy scapegoat for revolutionary rage. These myths resurface in our current characterisations of Antoinette. She should be understood as a mother, as a woman born into strict gender roles, and as an aristocrat who exploited the lower classes. Marie Antoinette is more than a symbol: her life and death must be reframed.
By Mae Caitlin Murphy