When France guillotined the queen: the harsh trial and terrible death of Marie-Antoinette

He hit his head on the door lintel during his transfer to the prison Concierge . An attentive guard asked her if she was injured. Still somewhat confused, the queen Marie Antoinette of France , the Austrian, replied fiercely: “No! From now on, nothing can harm me.

The anecdote is cited by Frantz Funck-Brentanon in his The last days of Marie Antoinette. And it recounts the difficult times that the sovereign wife of France had to go through during her last months. In mid-1793, the days were very tense in the French Revolution . The government of Public Safety Committee He barely managed to keep the process going, suppressing the revolts of those who demanded the return of the monarchy. “Despite the tensions linked to the dechristianization campaign, the revolutionaries remained united in the conviction that it was necessary to crush the internal revolts which threatened the Revolution”, explains Jeremy Popkin in The birth of a new world – History of the French Revolution.

For the most exalted, the time had come to make a new demonstration of force. Already on January 21, 1793, King Louis XVI was guillotined after a trial during which he was treated with a certain decorum – even if his outcome was already decided in advance. However, the queen still remained, Marie Antoinette.

“The punishment of the enemies of the Revolution was one of the harshest demands of the Parisian radicals. They wanted revolutionary army units to incorporate revolutionary courts and be equipped with mobile guillotines, so that convicted suspects could be immediately executed. The Convention committees feared that the process of repression was spiraling out of control and resisted these demands; However, approved a series of high-level political trials in Paris which attracted public attention throughout the fall of 1793,” adds Popkin.

The queen had been in prison since mid-1792, in the Temple tower . It was therefore quickly decided to proceed with a summary trial, in which contrary to the cautious treatment reserved for Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette was subjected to a particularly cruel trial because of her status as an Austrian. “In this feverish world of satirical and pornographic attacks, the king and queen were the revolutionaries’ most vulnerable targets,” says Peter McPhee in his study. The French Revolution 1789-1799.

The queen was simply called “The Widow Capet”. as a way of reminding him again and again of his uncomfortable position. As a warning, the woman was transferred from the Temple to an isolated cell in the prison Concierge , in the middle of the night 1st of August of 1793. It was at this time that the episode of the headbutt occurred.

From there he began to be transferred to the headquarters of the Revolutionary Tribunal, an organization created by Danton (and that later I would end up sentencing him to death ) and in which a prosecutor, Fouquier Tinville , made the accusations. “She was accused of having been, “during her entire stay in France, the curse and parasite of the French”, of having held “conspiracy meetings”. […] under cover of night’ in which all the calamities of the Revolution had been plotted and having taught Luis ‘the dangerous art of dissimulation,'” says Popkin.

Determined to humiliate the queen, the accusations were not only political. “Marie Antoinette, above all, was mercilessly attacked for her alleged sexual depravities and his evil political power which had emasculated the monarchy,” explains McPhee. And it was one of the leaders who threw the stone: “Hébert claimed that Marie Antoinette taught her son to masturbate and that she often shared a bed with him. . This justifies (Madame) De Staël’s fear that the attacks on the queen will reinforce prejudices against her sex,” explains Popkin.

Embarrassed, the queen stood up and appealed for female solidarity to reverse the accusations. “Nature refuses to answer such an accusation against a mother. »

But the sisterhood was of no use to him. Maria Antonia Josepha Joan of Habsburg-Lorraine was sentenced to death by guillotine which was planned for the next day at noon, October 16, 1793 . In the morning he had the traditional breakfast broth French broth, and changed his clothes in front of his guards with the help of his servant Rosalie Lamorlière . As she was not allowed to wear black, she chose to give the signal with a white dress.

The tail of her long gray hair was cut and, contrary to what had happened with her husband, she did not have the right to choose a priest to confess to, since she had been given a constitutional one, with which Marie-Antoinette refused to deal with. And unlike the closed bar in which Louis XVI was transported to the scaffold, she was transported in an open wooden cart, where she received the noise and projectiles of the people.

On arriving at the scaffold, Place de la Concorde, he lost one of his shoes, and with the other he accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot, to whom he said: “Sir, I apologize, I didn’t do it on purpose.” These were his last words before the heavy national knife fell on his neck. She was the last queen of France, at least in the 18th century. Later, María Amelia de Borbón-Dos Sicilias would be queen consort of Luis Felipe I. She was not the last Austrian either, since he himself Napoleon Bonaparte He married Princess María Luisa of Austria in 1810, but that’s another story.