Summary
Overview
This episode examines the final months of Marie Antoinette and the French royal family during the Terror. Following Louis XVI's execution in January 1793, Marie Antoinette faces mounting persecution, culminating in her trial and execution in October 1793. The episode also reveals the tragic fate of her young son, Louis Charles, the would-be Louis XVII, who became a pawn in revolutionary politics and suffered horrific treatment before his death at age ten.
Edmund Burke's Lament for Marie Antoinette and the Old Order
Edmund Burke's famous 1790 prose captures the horror felt across Europe at the French Revolution's assault on Marie Antoinette and the monarchy. His florid passage mourns the fall of a queen who had represented the pinnacle of European glamour and the thousand-year traditions of French monarchy. Burke saw the revolution as reducing glorious traditions of loyalty and honor to arid political debates about rights and money, with the age of chivalry giving way to one of economists and calculators.
- Burke wrote his famous lament in 1790, early in the revolution, prompted by the March on Versailles and the attack on the queen's apartments
- The French monarchy was the most splendid in Europe, providing a role model for other royal families with roots reaching back over a millennium
- Burke saw the revolution as reducing monarchy's glory to political discussions about rights and money
" But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished. "
Marie Antoinette: Fashion Icon and Revolutionary Target
Marie Antoinette embodied contradictions—a glamorous trendsetter who pioneered modern fashion concepts while simultaneously becoming the target of grotesque propaganda. The sister of the Austrian Emperor and wife of France's king, she established fashion as constantly evolving rather than static. However, in the 1780s she became the personification of inequality and excess, subjected to pornographic and scatological attacks that portrayed her as a vampiric monster who literally bled the people dry.
- Marie Antoinette was famous across Europe for setting trends with clothes, hairstyles, and lifestyle, establishing modern concepts of fashion as constantly evolving
- She became the face of both past and future—a representative of the Ancien Régime while establishing fashion ideals still current in France today
- Propaganda in the 1780s portrayed her in grotesque terms: as maintaining leeches to bleed the poor, as a nymphomaniac, lesbian, and murderer of paupers' children
- Revolutionary accusations of conspiracy and treason against her were actually true—she did pass military secrets to foreign powers
" A daughter of crime, I now give birth to it in turn. "
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