After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Final Days of Marie Antoinette

Episode Date: July 29, 2024

How did Marie Antoinette, last Queen of France, spend her final days before the guillotine took her head? Did she ever really stand a chance? Anthony Delaney takes Maddy Pelling on a journey back to the French Revolution's reign of terror to meet icon of history Marie Antoinette.Written by Anthony Delaney. Edited by Tomos Delargy, produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code AFTERDARK.You can take part in our listener survey here.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast

Hello and welcome to After Dark. This episode we're going to be talking about the final days of an icon of history, Marie Antoinette. The night of the 1st of August 1793 felt particularly tense. The streets of revolutionary Paris were a fizz with a bewildering mix of jubilation on the one hand and abject terror on the other. Seven months earlier, on the 21st of January 1793, the fallen king Louis XVI had lost his head. Tonight, his former queen Marie Antoinette was to be transferred alone from the imposing medievalism of the temple prison to the Gothic splendour of the Conciergerie, the former seat of power for the medieval kings of France. Over the recent tumultuous months, the Conciergerie had become known as the antechamber to the

guillotine. Now, at 37, the former Queen's hair had already turned wholly white. She looked pale and drawn, much older than her years. Her captors referred to her simply as the Widow Capet, having stripped her of any hint of divine right. This was the dawn of a new age, after all, the age of liberty, equality, and fraternity. And in the context of that age,

to see the widow capet contained thus was, in their minds, wholly necessary. When the prisoner arrived at the Conciergerie, located right in the heart of Paris, on the Île de la Cité, she was immediately confined to a small, sparse cell and kept under 24-hour surveillance by two gan Dharm. Here, she became prisoner 280, further removing any trace of her former regal identity. Those faithful to the crown, aware of their former queen's new lodgings, would go on to formulate plot after plot in a desperate attempt to rescue her from the clutches of the revolutionaries.

These schemes, collectively, were dramatically referred to as the Carnation Plot, yet despite their devotion, the plots were doomed to fail. Once the widow Capet's guards discovered plans were afoot, they thought it safer to move prisoner 280 to another cell deeper within the Conciergerie in order to better conceal their prize. In all, then, the widow Capet, Marie Antoinette, would remain at the Conciergerie for 76 days. But what followed would prove altogether more harrowing. Welcome to After Dark. together more harrowing. Welcome to After Dark.

This is an account of the final days of the widow-capet, the former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. And as you may have gathered, we are going to be talking about the final days, the last days on Earth of Marie Antoinette. Oh, we are prepared for that. Oh, we hadn't prepared for that. Oh, should we go home? We have prepared.

So awkward. There's a lot to get through here and I think we all come to Marie Antoinette with certain ideas, certain images, certain stories and anecdotes, some of which are not true. Let's start at the very beginning. Who was she? STANLEY She was, to begin with, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa, his wife Maria Theresa. And she became the wife of the Dauphin of France when she was 14, now he was only 15. So she was, this obviously would have been an arranged marriage as royal marriages were,

particularly when one of those parties was going to become the queen of France. This is a big position to be putting her to. And initially she is hugely welcomed. We get this impression that she was always disliked. But actually she was very, very like people rushed out to greet her when she first arrived in Paris. For instance, I think the crowds were like 50 to 100,000. So a lot of people were in a really positive mood about the arrival of this new princess, as she was at the time. So many people came out when she arrived that actually 30 of the crowd were trampled to death in that push to see her. So, you know, this is a frenzy slightly in her early teenage days. Remember, she's 14 then 15. So this is the main thing I think about when I think about my Antoinette, other than the obvious

fate that does befall her. It's just how young she was, because she's an Austrian princess. She's not French. And that's a fascinating thing that we think of her as like the icon of Frenchness and French chic. And the sort of, I suppose, that contrasting image of specifically 18th century France, the absolute glamour and the absolute horror of what was happening. They're both married in her story, really. Let's just pause a little bit and think about the fact that she's 14 when she marries Louis, and he's 15. 15 at the time of the marriage. I know. Not necessarily unusual for the age, but even then, quite young. And just the experience of that.

And if you think about the I'm sure this is going to come up loads in this episode. But if you think about the Sevier Coppola film, is it just titled Marie Antoinette? I think it is. She really looks at the moment of that youthful transgressing from childhood into being the future queen and what that would mean for a 14 year old. And of course, Kirsten Dunst who plays Marie Antoinette in the film is not 14, but she is young enough to look and sort of small enough in frame that she looks very sort of teenage-like. I always remember that scene in the film, it might even be the opening where she's going across the French border. This is a thing that really happened to Marie Antoinette of if you're a foreign princess coming to marry someone in the French royal

family you had to leave everything behind. And so they get across the border, she gets out of the carriage, there's a tent waiting for her, she has to take all of her Austrian clothes off and put all French clothes on. Literally from the skin outwards, like every layer has to be French, all of her jewels have to go, everything. And even her little dog in the film, they take her little lap dog and she's given her a little French lap dog. That's really well done in the film, the dog, yeah. Yeah, and I think that's a sort of a key narrative all the way through Marie Antoinette's life, isn't it?

This thing of her being stripped of anything personal that she's chosen, and the way that she expressed herself. And instead people project so many things onto her and apply so many different identities and versions and that happens constantly throughout her life and well after her death as well. Yeah and it changes. The role she plays for people, for French people particularly changes throughout her reign because by the time we, well we know this doesn't end well, by the time we come towards the end of her reign when she's more secluded at the Petite-Triennon then we are

looking at somebody who they've lost touch with, they don't like, she's part of a failed system as they see it. But I will say, you know, talking about putting all these layers, she never said, as everybody knows now that's heard of Marie Antoinette, she never said let them eat cake. We don't actually know where that came from. We think it did originate with a member of the French royal family, but not at this time.

It's earlier. And it's potentially earlier. And it's let them eat brioche, not cake anyway. So we've translated that badly. There's a lot of myth making that goes on with with Marie Antimette. And that, Sophie, a couple of films is a continuation of that myth making that was happening on the ground in the 1780s. Well, you know, she is so part of our contemporary culture as well. I'm thinking about the way that she's used in sort of pop culture, digital cultures and things. I actually wrote something a few years ago for a newspaper about Carrie Johnson, Boris Johnson's wife. When they were when they were in Tandonic Street,, her behaviour and her apparent lust for interior design and

spending huge, quite obscene amounts of money supposedly on the interior of the flat at Tendonning Street, she was likened to Marie Antoinette. She was called Carrie Antoinette, not an easy comparison. And there were images, sort of stoical images that compared her to the French Queen and I thought that was really fascinating. And then also famously, I think it was an Instagram reel or something on TikTok that got absolutely went viral, which was attacking Kim Kardashian, her company Skims. And I think it was looking at the sort of ethics of the company. But the woman who was doing this satire had done herself up to look like Marie Antoinette and Kim Kardashian is this kind of mashup. And the title of the video is like, Let Them

Eat Skims. Oh, it completely went viral. And I think she's a useful shorthand, Marie Antoinette, I mean, for sort of capitalism and consumption and sort of gluttony of little delicacies and jewels and sort of female excess that's problematic and that we're uncomfortable with. That's true, entirely true, and I agree with you. And yet on the other side, there is also, and I'd be interested to get your thoughts on this, the kind of reclamation of that in order to try and reclaim that, which is not entirely true at all, actually, even historically, what modern audiences do in order to consume the history more positively and to view it with a little bit more of a direct feminist lens is this idea of the kind of girl bossification of Marie

Antoinette. And we see this with other women in history too that have been maligned in some way with the two queens that we're talking about, Belleyn and Marie Internet, have been executed. And it's obviously a positive thing about trying to reclaim these things, but it's anachronistically modern, some of the takes and I think we miss history because of it sometimes. Yeah, I agree. And I think social media has a lot to answer that the other queen I can think that happens to is Lady Jane Grey, who's the nine day queen. Let's not get into that. But for the sake of this argument, there are these really anachronistic takes on Marie Antoinette. But let's delve a little bit deeper into the real history and her lived experiences as we can reconstruct it in the

archives. So we're in 1793, at the moment of her final days leading up to her death. Can you give us some context of what's happening in that moment? And it's a pretty explosive decade across the world. There's a lot going on. So this really is the age of revolutions. And if you're doing an undergrad history course, you'll find that this is, that's the name of the title of every course and every undergrad history and you will be covering these things. So the Haitian Revolution is ongoing during this time.

Few years earlier, do the maths, but 1776 we have the beginnings of the American Revolution, which didn't end until 1783 or thereabouts, depending on when you actually see the ending of it as. So we're talking 10 years earlier, the world has changed because America has been declared an independent, the United States have been declared. Then we have failed revolution in Ireland in 1798. And then in the context of 1793, I think it was March that George Washington sworn in for his second term as the president. So seismic change is a foot. This is changing how the world and they knew that at the time they could feel that it was known that this was the world would never be the same again. So when we're looking at seismic change, this is the time.

And it's changed that's still being played out in real time in very bloody terms. Britain's at war with France in this moment. Not only is France at war with itself and there's turmoil on the streets, but internationally it's fighting other enemies. Yeah, and there's a sense, I suppose, of the boundaries of the maps being redrawn and everything is to play for. Like this is, you know, the stakes are very high. The stakes just in terms of land grabs and territories, but also in terms of ideas about monarchy, who gets to rule the power of the people. You know, in Britain in this moment, in this decade, there's incredible paranoia about radical politics and this idea that actually they've got rid of the monarchy or the right to get rid of the monarchy in France, might they do the same here? You know, there's real fear in terms of that. So it's a real moment.

So let's talk about the most famous revolution possibly of them all in this moment. So the French Revolution, it begins in 1789, but it's still going on in this moment. So explain it to me in the simplest terms, because it is a really difficult history to get to grips with. It's really complex. It's a really complex history overall. I'm always in awe of historians of the French Revolution because there's so many twists and turns. But simply put, we're looking at a period between 1789 to 1799. However, some people would argue that that's much more prolonged into the 19th century, but for this particular acute part of it, we're generally say 1789 to 1799. Simply put, the French Revolution brings about the end of the 1780s.

And this was mostly due to its involvement in the revolution in America. So they had sided against Britain and secured victory and that was good for them and a global... But it came at a cost. But it came at a cost. Not just that, also because of the elaborate spending of Louis XVI. Now, bear in mind what you were saying earlier about Marie Antoinette's spending. On the ground at the moment in the late 1780s, we're looking very much at Louis XVI here.

He's the big spender. Yeah. Because that's where, realistically, that's where the spending is coming from. So she's not so much of a baddie at this point just yet. I mean, she is, don't get me wrong, they don't love her but... You can see why people get frustrated with her and you know, the fact that she cosplays being a peasant as well, right? Like she has her little retreat near Versailles that she goes to, which is a little farm and all of her friends get to do like the petting zoo and they dress up in their little milkmaid outfits and things. It's pretty insulting when people maybe three or four fields along are starving to death. You can see why people got

frustrated. And they did get so frustrated that they stormed the Tuileries Palace in 1792, taking the royal family captive. They were all held together initially, so that was at least something that kept the family together but soon realized, look, if we want to carry out revolution here, the royal family have to go. And Louis XVI was beheaded, just him to begin with, on the 21st of January 1793. So that was the end of him. And therefore that's the end of the monarchy. There's no coming back from that. Louis gone, Marie Antoinette is going to follow. Because what do you do with her? She is a figurehead. Yes, she's his wife. Yes, she was 14. She didn't have much choice in the matter. Regardless of how she behaved in that role, maybe not regardless, because it is relevant. But I think she you've killed the king. Is that not enough? But I think they feel everyone must go because she has so much support still.

Yeah. It's more of a philosophical question to be settled at this point. And but they did ask that same question for quite some time. They did not know what to do with her. All they knew is that they wanted to strip her of her regalities. This is why she becomes the Widow Capet. This is why she becomes prisoner 280. She's not Marie Antoinette, she's not the Queen. She's not even referred to as the former Queen. We refer to her now often as the former Queen and people did actually at the time. But in official documentation, she's prisoner 280. You know, that's how she's referred to. So they did struggle to know what to do with her, which

is why in the opening narrative, it's eventually decided that they need to remove her from her family because they're stronger together. The unit is stronger together. So she's living with her sister-in-law and some of her children. She's then removed on that night that I described in the opening, she's taken to the Conciergerie and that's where she's isolated. At that point, I don't think it's inevitable that Marie Antoinette's going to die. Okay, even though where she's been taken to is known as the, what is it, the antechamber to the guilty. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true. It's true. It's true. Absolutely. Things aren't looking great.

No, no, it's, she doesn't think it's inevitable. She thinks it's, and actually, they're not sure what to do with her, because they keep her around for quite a long time. 76 days, she's there. They didn't just take her and get rid of her like they did with King. What's she feeling in this moment? I don't know, because it would be speculation. In this moment, but I can give you an indication, and the indication is not that she's going to die. She doesn't think right now that she's going to. She thinks there's a way out. She knows she's never going to be queen.

She knows that's not going to happen. She does, however, have a son. But as we're about to find out, they will use that against her. The 14th of October 1793 and the revolutionary court in Paris is packed to the rafters. They have come to see the living spectre of their former queen, the widow Capet. Dressed all in widow's black, she cuts quite the forlorn dramatic picture. And those who had gathered to see her are, well, they're utterly shocked by her appearance. How, some of them wondered, could this frail, pale and sickly woman be the she-devil of Versailles? According to various historians, the cross-examination that took

place lasted a gruelling 20 hours across two days, and it included 40 witnesses, each one chosen specifically to discuss the matter at hand. Was Marie Capet guilty of high treason? Those assembled were treated to exaggerated stories of drunken royal orgies. She had, they claimed, manipulated the now beheaded king. What's more, they had damning evidence against her signed in her own hand, which demonstrated that she had been conspiring with Austria against France, except on closer inspection, these supposed documents had been dated

after the former queen had been imprisoned. In her defense, Prisoner 280 made few remarkable responses, repeatedly replying in the most basic responses, I do not recall, or I never heard talk of anything like that. She did, however, admit to overspending when carving out her faux rural idyll at the Petit Trianon. She admitted, "...perhaps more was spent than I would have wished."

It wasn't until the prosecutor mentioned Capet's supposed incest with her son Louis-Charles that the former Queen lost her temper. The prosecutors had supposedly extracted a confession from the former Dauphin, confirming that incest had taken place. Did you witness it? Marie Capet snapped at the public prosecutor. He, in calculated response, was quick to point out that she had not denied the accusation. response was quick to point out that she had not denied the accusation. If I have not replied, she retorted, it is because nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother. Despite this affront, Marie Antoinette was sure she had acquitted herself well.

She knew, however, that the odds were stacked against her, and so she hoped for the best possible outcome. Life imprisonment. Her hope was dashed, however, for at or about 4am on the 16th of October 1793, the widow Capet was dramatically condemned to death for high treason. When asked if she had anything to say, Marie Antoinette simply shook her head. It's quite the scene. It is, it's very dramatic, isn't it?

And purposefully so, they wanted it to be like that. Have you ever wondered if the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually real? Or what made Alexander so great? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit where I'm joined by leading academics, bestselling authors and world-class archaeologists to shine a light on some of ancient history's most fascinating questions like who built Stonehenge and why? What are the Dead Sea Scrobs and why are they so valuable? And were the Spartan warriors really as formidable as the history books say? Join me, Tristan Hughes, twice a week every week on the Ancients from History hit wherever you get to your podcasts.

And we have such a sense there of the way that Marie Antoinette is set up against her judgment panel, essentially, that she's on her own, she's being attacked, her character's being attacked. And obviously, the accusation of incest with her son is so horrific, it's so horrific to her. It is also thinking back to that sort of bossification of these women, it's reminding me of Anne Boleyn and the accusations against her. And it's, I suppose, an easy thing to do to in order to attack a woman's reputation, and to make her seem unnatural in some way is to make those accusations. And especially when the Queen's body is the property of the king for making heirs, but also really the property of the state of the nation of France and that she is in some way

compromise that or compromise the body of her son as well. The once heir to the throne. Yes, clearly not anymore. But yeah, that she would do that is so unmotherly and it's so monstrous. Good for her for pushing back on it. Yeah, apparently it's the only time she became animated during it, which says something in itself, doesn't it? That kind of discussed that inspired in herself. Yeah. And also the self control that she must have been really concentrating on the entire time.

So the exhaustion, she must have been exhausted. She was just she had been in that cell for over two months, two and a half months at that point. One thing which I want to pick up on is you mentioned about the drama. And I want you to look at this image because that drama has been captured in here. And it's interesting because there is a tension between the actual account that I just read and this, it's not huge, but there's a discrepancy here. And I just wondering if you can describe it for us and then we can talk about it in a little bit more detail. And I was just wondering if you can describe it for us and then we can talk about it in a little bit more detail.

Okay, so this is an 18th century print. It's in colour. It is showing a courtroom, a room where a trial is clearly taking place. There is a whole host of men who are sat at tables and benches, they're sort of almost like stable stalls around the room where these men are sitting. And there's her judge sat to a very gilded marble top but gilded gold, pretty ornate table very much a sort of throwback to the world that Marie Antoinette has been taken away from and has been sort of demolished at this point. And everyone's looking at a figure who's taken to the middle of the open floor. She's wearing white, we can assume it's Marie Antoinette herself. She's obviously just risen from a seat, interestingly, and she's been

given the floor and every head in the room is turned to look at her in this really plain white dress. She has a slightly off white shawl around her shoulders and her hair is a white what looks like a wig. We know at this point her hair had turned white though, so it possibly is her natural hair. She seems to be holding her hands out in this way that she's begging for people to take her point seriously. It reminds me a little bit of other 18th century images in the same period of actresses on the stage. It's like a theatrical pose. As a side note to this, I would say people, Shakespeare, for example, in this period when Shakespeare in the 18th century has this big sort of revival. And

there's a move away from doing these sort of classical poses into something a little bit more natural. And we get really famous actresses like Sarah Siddons on stage giving her Lady Macbeth in a sort of naturalistic way. And she's depicted in this very similar way of like really owning the stage and the space and moving in this elevated and theatrical way, but in a way that's more human and less robotic. That's what it's reminded me of here. And I think, you know, talking about the drama talking about, she's very much stepped onto a stage here. And even though these men are all against her, they're against everything she stands for, and they have stripped everything from her literally, they can't help but take her in. And I wonder if the printmaker who made this image, if there was

some sympathy for the Queen that she is depicted in this quite sympathetic way, actually, and she seems like a really an isolated character, but a noble one. I think so. I think there must be simply because the depiction of the Queen or the former Queen goes against what the documents tell us she was wearing. They say that she was in Black Widow's habit, whereas she's here in white and it's angelic. And, and as you say, she's kind of almost justiculating for her freedom as if she's maybe like pointing towards the door about to go to the door. And also she's being faced purely with men. But if you look at the faces of some of those men that are looking at her, not all, but all of them are quite angular and quite sharp. But some of them look to be depicting working class faces.

And in the spirit of revolution, these are men in this case, who would not otherwise have been anywhere near the Queen and here they are judging her. There's a really great example in the front left of the picture. Actually, there's quite an upper class looking man where he's got a powdered wig on he looks very respectable, but behind him is a man wearing the same uniform crucially. So this is this revolution has been a great leveler in terms of who can occupy what roles, but he has his natural hair, he's got no wig on. He has what looks to be the shadow of a beard, he's unshaven, and his

shirt is open. He doesn't have a waistcoat like the more respectable gentleman in front of him. He's in almost a state of undress. And what's interesting about him is where these more quote unquote, respectable gentlemanly characters are sat looking directly at the Queen, they know how this process works. And it's still part of a sort of statesmanship, whether you're a supporter of the royal family or not, they are treating her at least that level of respect that the process has to look real. And this man in the far left corner, the unshaven gentleman, he is so not meant to be in that space, according to the printmaker, that he's turned gentleman, he is so not meant to be in that space, according to the printmaker, that he's turned away and he's actually turning back to the Queen almost as a second

thought, he's like, oh, she's talking again, you know, and he's not in any way invested in her in the words that she's saying or the plea that she's making really for her own life. Yeah, it's fascinating. There are so many political and social codes in this one image. I love this image. I think it's really into, I say love, we know what comes next, so it's hard to love it. It's really tragic, actually. And it paints through us that tragic figure. That's a really good word. Tragic and it feeds into that stage thing that you're talking about, the tragedy. It looks like a tragic piece. That's spot on, I think. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, this is this is a the kind of message that came across the water to England as well. And you know, in Britain, there was huge, as I say, anxiety around revolution happening there, but also huge sympathy for Marie Antoinette herself and writers like Edmund Burke become particularly obsessed with this, this sort of pure angelic version of the Queen. It's a

completely unobtainable inhuman version of her but a version that is elevated that is morally pure. This to me is Edmund Burke's version of Marie Antoinette. So we'd heard that by the time she took her seat again, or by the time she'd finished speaking probably more precisely, Marie Antoinette thought that it's possible she had convinced those the men gathered that she might be saved and by that she meant imprisoned for life and her team thought that too, her team as if it's like on her defense team thought that too. They were like, right, this is going to be life imprisonment. We've, we've done a good enough job here, but they never actually stood a chance because the outcome had been predetermined by the Committee of Public Safety.

Of course it had. Yeah, but this is really, this is a really bad taste in your mouth and I'll tell you why. So the Committee for Public Safety was set up during the Reign of Terror and it was sort of the governing body of all the legislative things that were unfolding in relation to trials. all the legislative things that were unfolding in relation to trials and I realized that it is a translation from the French, but Reign of Terror, exciting, sounds gory. The Committee for Public Safety. I know it's not catchy, is it?

Not as sexy. No, no, no. So this, it's a kind of a provisional government, but also a war cabinet as well. So this is why they're involved in the Crisis management. Yeah, emergency government. They're finding their boundaries. So they're bleeding into all different types of things, but very much active during the reign of terror, the violent phase, which we're in, in 1793. Are they the sort of administration deciding who's going to the guillotine as well? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're deciding who's going to trial. But yes, essentially,

yes. Okay. The trial then happens. But they're linked and very much linked because we have this individual called Jacques-René Hebert. And he was one of the French revolutionary leaders. He was within that committee not where he was at the trial, but he was within the committee that he had said, we need Marie Antoinette, we need the blood of Marie Antoinette to solidify the people of France with our cause. Her blood will be that thing that glues us together, that joins us together. Sarah- Going back to the ownership of the Queen's body by the nation. And there's actually, you know, there's something very religious there as well, of course. But he actually says, this is what makes me feel a bit sick. He says, I have promised the head of Antoinette, I will go and cut it off myself if there is any delay in giving it to me. So this,

again, ownership of that body, the violence that coalesces around the former queen at this point. And the entitlement, the male entitlement to a female body, and it's not just women they were doing this to, of course, but there's something, it's such a violation. It's so, the fact that it's pre-planned, and as you say, she doesn't stand a chance. It's whatever the politics then, and whatever your politics today, it's really hard not to feel sorry for her on a human level. Yeah. Again, that word tragedy comes up, doesn't it? Which you previously said, because it's tragic that she has hope because there is none.

Yes. And she's sitting in her prison cell thinking, at least I don't have to be humiliated. Because of course, it's not just the horror of facing having your head cut off, but it's having it cut off in front of a public audience. This is humiliation for a woman who has been shown nothing but respect and has had to perform respect and politeness her entire life. To have all of that stripped from her all her dignity, everything she knows and has lived her life by. All those rules have gone out the window and then some. And she has to go and have her body humiliated and destroyed in front of a jeering crowd. Which brings us right on to the next part of the story.

Immediately following the verdict, Marie Antoinette had been given writing materials to set down her final thoughts and words. She wrote to her sister-in-law, Madame Elizabeth, lamenting her imminent death on account of her children. "'You know that I have lived on only for them and for you, my dear and tender sister,' she confessed. Though she took comfort in the fact that she would soon join her husband in heaven. She also wrote to her mother, asking her to forgive Louis Charles for testifying against his own mother. He was, Capet pointed out, but a child, and had been coerced. Once her letters were written, the former queen was offered a final meal, which she refused. What use was nourishment now for her, she thought. Everything is over for me. Now for her, she thought, everything is over for me. In her final hours, she was dressed in a plain white dress,

and her hair was cut short to allow the guillotine easier access to her neck. Her hands were bound, then quickly unbound, when the former Queen, in humiliation, had to ask her jailer for permission to relieve herself in the corner of her cell, before being bound once more. Then, at 11am, she was placed inside an open cart and transported to the site of her execution. When an hour or so later Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold on the Place de la Révolution, she stumbled momentarily, losing a shoe, and stepped on Charles-Henri Saint-Saëns,

the executioner's foot. Pardon me, sir, she is recorded as having said, I didn't mean to do it. A remarkable apology, given that this was the same executioner that had beheaded her husband 10 months earlier, and that he was about to remove her own head from her body, a head on which a crown once sat. At 1215, on the 16th of October, 1793,

the cheers of the gathered crowd shook Paris and reverberated across the world. The Austrian she-wolf, as they called her, was dead. As the once royal blood flowed and dripped in crimson rivulets from the scaffold, the streets of the French capital pulsed with the jubilations of their revolutionary motto. Vive la République! I have a lot of questions. But the first one you mentioned there that she chooses not to have a last meal. Yeah.

What would your last meal be? Oh my god. Okay. My last meal would be hands down be pizza. It would be the Texas barbecue Domino's pizza. And I am a pizza. That's so miserable. No, it's the most glorious food in the entire world. That would be my... Go on, what's yours? Oh, my mum's roast dinner. It'd have to be a Christmas dinner, Christmas dinner, all the trimmings. Absolutely everything. God, I'm so I'm getting hungry. No, it's coming up to lunch. That's why I'm going to

eat a lot of bread. Let's let's move on. Again, it's such a cinematic scene. The way that this narrative has come down to us is really it gives an impression of someone hugely dignified, someone battling to keep her calm, whether she succeeds or not, you know, she does stumble. But she is the physical exhaustion she must have felt in her body keeping herself calm. I mean, we often talk about people going to their executions on this podcast. But this is such a moment and she would have known it was such a historic moment. This isn't a routine execution of a criminal outside Newgate or so huge. I can't imagine being in her shoes or shoe when she's lost one. And the fact that she apologises to the executioner,

it's a performance of that politeness that one would expect of her, right? It's a performance of her station. But also did she say it? Wow. For somebody to be on that scaffold and actually hear that and record it would be unusual. Not that there weren't people around there were. And actually I have an image here so you can talk about some of the people that are, well we don't necessarily know who they all are of course, but just give us, I mean we've discussed it in the narrative, but just give us an idea, Maddie, of what's in this image, if you can have we have

the guillotine set up and what that scene might look like. We're looking at a really crowded scene. This is Paris, it's bustling, we're on the the plaster revolution. guillotine is set up in the center of the image. I'm not going to go to that scene just yet. I'm going to talk about the crowd. First of all, we've got what looks to be hundreds of soldiers in their red uniforms, the powdered wigs and that black tricorn hats on. Then we've got members of the public jostling to see the action. We've got people almost sort of falling over each other in the foreground, we've got a child on the shoulders of maybe a brother or a father. We've got women shouting out holding up what looks to be little

maybe handkerchiefs, possibly to soak up the blood, of course, that's that's going to come from the execution and the toppled head. There's even a dog watching and their horses rearing up. There's some men who have brought along a cart, and their horses rearing up. There's some men who have brought along a cart and they've stood on the cart. It possibly is actually the cart that brought Marie Antoinette to the scaffold, but now it's been taken over by the crowd and they're using it as a platform from which to get a better view. It's sort of chaos. It gives a sense of the desire that people had to see the spectacle play out. And then on the scaffold itself, we obviously have the guillotine. It's massive. It's really imposing. It's too big. Yeah, arguably too. Yeah,

I think any guillotine is not great. But it's certainly it's like double the height of the execution platform itself. Yeah, probably three times as high as a person. Yes, yeah, two and a half maybe definitely. We have four figures, the scaffold, all men. And then we have this fifth central figure, which is Mary Antoinette herself, and she's lying horizontally. She is dead. Her head has been cut from her body. And there is depiction of blood gushing from her body. It's really dramatic stuff. We can see the executioner who's just let go of the rope to release the blade. So this is literally just happened. The other two figures, I think one on the right is possibly a priest who's taken her last confession, maybe. And the figure, the final figure on the stage, he almost looks like he's sort of boying up the crowd. He's looks like he's talking to them. He's moving

quite in an animated way, almost like he's running around the stage. He looks like a bit of a showman. And this guy in his hand, he's holding a stick or pike. And there's something on the end of it. The head of Marie Antoinette. And he's displaying it to the crowd, isn't he? He's that's why he looks so he looks jubilant, doesn't he? He looks like he's running around with it as if saying, look, look, we have her. Here she is. She's gone. She's dead. From there on, it was the buildup was was kind of very dramatic.

And then it starts to just peter away into nothingness almost. Her remains are taken to the Church of Madeleine as it happens. The best church in Paris. And the gravediggers, apparently, as the story goes, taking their break. So Marie Groscholtz, who, if you haven't read Edward Carey's Little, you need to. We love this book better known as Madame Tussauds. She comes along and takes a cast of the head for her displays that then travel with her to England eventually. And she is, the remains of Marie Antoinette are buried in an unmarked grave at that particular moment in time.

They don't stay there though, do they? They don't, no. In 1815, Louis XVI's younger brother exunes her body and gives it a proper burial in the Basilica des Sandini. And at that point, the story goes she never had can have dignity really, because what we hear is that they're the garments are quite badly decomposed, but they're still there. You still get shreds of her hair, but her garters are perfectly preserved. So we're seeing this sexualization of a corpse. Yeah, of a corpse that she's not allowed any rest at all. I mean, again, a similar thing happens to Anne Boleyn, not to make too much of this comparison. But you know, a lot of her, the memory that we have of her is quite sexualized and

sexual person and that it's her sort of sexual charms that that and snare Henry the Eight, you know, and that he just simply can't resist them. Her power is too much. And that's why he has to leave his first wife. And I think we see that a little bit with Marie Antoinette, not so much the scheming that's attributed to Anne Boleyn, but this sexualization of her body and again, a sort of ownership of it. And I suppose you're going back to the desire to have her blood running in the streets, essentially, not only to have her head but to have her blood sort of given to the people of France in this very Catholic ritualistic way. This here we see when her body is exhumed, it's a sort of transformation of her

into a relic or a set of relics as well. So again, it's like the sort of Catholic element to this, or sort of broader religious element, certainly. No, I think you're absolutely right. And that transfers onto items that were associated with her. So for instance, there are literally referred to as the Maria Internet relic. So you have a jug that she was supposed to have used when she was in one of the cells, we have something that supposedly contains her toiletries. There's a handkerchief. There's a shoe. Yeah, well, this is the shoe that she lost. Is it though? The Museum of Bo Arts

has this shoe that they claim is the shoe belonging to Marie Antoinette. It's very contested. But basically, to feed into your point of this kind of almost saintly relic thing that grows up around her. Yes, absolutely. It's there. But I do I, I would love to think that that could be the shoe. I mean, how incredible that's what an item if that is. Yeah, because it's such a moment. It's such a moment in her death. I think that's a good place to leave it. This has been really helpful in delving a little bit deeper and looking at the human stories at the center or some of the human stories, anyway, one sided potentially, in terms of the revolution. As a moment in history, the revolution is so complex, and it's not necessarily something that we're

taught in school in Britain. I don't know if people are taught it in America, that'd be interesting to know, actually, given the early American French collaborations. that'd be interesting to know, actually, given the early American French collaboration. No, not at all. Are you taught in Ireland? That's interesting. That speaks volumes. Um, but for me, it's a set of dates. It's a set of complicated political ideas and shifting loyalties and rising and falling prominent politicians. And obviously, a lot of gore and violence mixed into that. And actually what you've given us today is a little bit of an intimate insight into a real woman who has so many versions of her out in the world, and she's constantly being reinvented. As we talked about at the beginning of this episode, there's a

shorthand for all kinds of consumerism and excess. And actually, you've given us today a pretty dignified woman, someone who fought for some level of survival at the end of her life. And when she didn't get that fought for some peace and some dignity, I think. So thank you. I'll be sending you an invoice. Thank you very much. If you've enjoyed this episode of After Dark, you can leave us a five star review wherever you get your podcasts. You can email us at afterdark at thehistoryhit.com. We love to hear from you, thoughts on old episodes and ideas for new ones. So get in touch and we will hear from you soon.