Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Royal Sex: Marie Antoinette

Episode Date: July 11, 2025

Behind the wild accusations of extra-marital affairs and a lavish lifestyle, who was the real Marie Antoinette? Why did her marriage to King Louis XVI go unconsummated for 7 years? And why did her life of luxury end in tragedy amidst the French Revolution?Joining Kate today for the second episode in our Royal Sex mini-series, is Professor of French literature, Catriona Seth, to help us get to know this remarkable woman.This episode was edited by Tomos Delargy. The producer was Sophie Gee. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. This is Bertwicks the sheets. Is this what you meant to listen to? Is this what you signed up for? Are you in the right place?

Because there's still time to back out now and go find something much more wholesome. All right, you stay in. But if you want to stay, I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, Pokemon, adults, to other adults, about adulty things and an adulty way you're covering around adult subjects

and you should be an adult too. And if you've been here before, you know the drill by now. Right. On with the show. Tens of thousands of people are lining the Place de la Revolution. It's October the 16th, 1793, and unless you manage to get here early or brought something to stand on, there is little chance of you seeing any of this execution.

But despite this, the crowds are keeping each other updated on what's happening down front. And around midday, a rising tide of jeers signals the condemned arrival. and an open-topped cart journeys through the crowd to the scaffold. Suddenly, there's a hush, as those nearby the guillotine prick up their ears to hear any of her final words. She accidentally stands on the executioner's foot, which means her last words in this world

were, pardon me, sir, I meant not to do it. Then the condemned woman is laid down, the blade falls, and it's all over. All about us, the crowd breaks into cheering, applause and congratulations. Songs are being sung about the death of this tyrannical queen. Listening in, we can hear the end of La Morte de Marie Antoinette, and it goes something like this. Madame Gillotine is my lady in waiting.

For me, no more cooking. Farewell to the flattering bait of the courtiers. Farewell to all my lovers, I die alas by a harsh death. Marie Antoinette was just 37 years old when she was tried to. for treason and executed in front of a baying mob. But even then, these people could not stop talking about her sex life. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the fun of money. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, History of Sex Scandal in Society with me, Kate Lister. If you know anything about Marie Antoinette,

you will know all about the luxury, the excess, the extravagance, the baths full of strawberries, the cakes on command, the elaborate fashions. I bet you've heard the phrase, let them eat cake. But did she ever really say that? Did she live that kind of life when people just a few miles away from, her was starving and teetering on the edge of revolution. Who was Marie Antoinette? What was her marriage to Louis XVIth like? And did she really have

as many affairs as people like to suggest? Today I am joined by Professor of French Literature Katrina Seth to find out about the life and the sexual proclivities of this iconic queen. Little heels and fans are the ready betwixters. Let's do this. And welcome to betwixta. Sheets, it's only Professor Katrina, Seth. How are you doing? Hello, Kate. I'm very well, and I'm delighted to be here to talk to you. I can't believe it's taken us this long to get round to Marie Antoinette, to be completely honest. You are Professor of French Literature at All Souls College, so you are one of the ideal people to speak to about this woman. Can I ask you, before we get going with what a woman she was, how did you come to study what you are studying? Have you

always been interested in French literature. Where did it come from for you? I've always been interested in French literature. I was lucky enough to be brought up bilingual from the age of seven. Oh, lucky. Oh. I thought I was going to go work in business and I did all sorts of mad things like being a consultant and then I decided that actually literature was much more fun than anything else. And I've ended up with possibly the best job in the whole of the field here at Oxford. So I'm a very lucky person. And it means I can spend my time looking at letters by Marion-Otoinette. Have you seen letters by marriage? I get like goosebumps, like, with things like that like this is something that she actually wrote and touched. Yes. I've seen lots of letters by

Marie Antoinette, including ones which had never been published before. No. Which is really moving. And often the material aspect of them is extraordinary and you learn all sorts of things. I mean, for instance, there are little tiny scraps of paper sometimes on which she writes. And you realize that these are little notes which are meant to be smuggled out or else they're just quick jottings, you know, like sending a text message to a friend saying, you know, come and see me later type of thing. And, you know, she'll just scribble something on a piece of paper, hand it over to her lady and waiting who will, you know, rush down the corridors

and go and find her friend to bring her along to invite her over. God, that's amazing. You do have the best job. That's incredible. I don't think anyone's going to be listening to this going, Marie who, who are we talking about? But just in case, can you give us a bit of a bit of a bit of a bit of a job? a background, who was Marie Antoinette? Where did she, where did she come from?

She comes from Austria. We associate her with France because she's the most famous queen of France, but she was born in Austria in 1755. She was born, obviously, to a mother and a father, but to a particularly formidable mother, Empress Maria Teresa. Formidable how? Formidable because she ruled over a vast empire. Maria Teresa was called the quote, king, unquote, of Hungary. in her own right. Oh. And she married someone much less important than her, Francis Stephen of Lorraine.

And by marrying him, she made it possible for him to become Holy Roman Emperor. It wasn't easy. Lots of people attacked the very idea that you could have a woman at the head of a country and that she could do things like talk to her troops or envisage economic reforms or whatever it happened to be. But she was completely extraordinary with a very very very. wide set of interests. It didn't stop her being a control freak. So on the one hand, she's talking about what's going to be done, you know, who they have to send off to be the ambassador to Naples,

for instance. And, you know, with another hand, she's hauling up one of the archdukes and saying, oh, you haven't done your homework sort of thing. And, you know, then saying, actually, I think, you know, my third daughter has grown a bit. So possibly we should change the bed in her room. What was she like as a mum then? Like, I kind of vis her as like a pushy stick. age mother, but by the sounds of it, she was very busy. Did she have much time for it? She was very busy and she does a lot of delegating. And so a lot of the everyday sort of running of the children's lives is taken over by governesses in the girls case. She's much more interested in boys than in girls, alas, but she has that vision of things that, you know,

women are less important. Although I'll talk about why she thinks women are important a bit later. But because she's this sort of control freak, she's forever trying to find out, you know, what's what's going on and who's doing what. And she does love her children. But she has a vision of things according to which, you know, she's probably arguably one of the most important people in the world at the time. She thinks that this is God's will and that she was sent down to earth to be this very important figure and that it's all right and good. and that her children need to do their duty and their duty has to come before their happiness and she talks about that regarding one of her daughters.

So I said that she gives her daughters one important aspect or she sees one important aspect in her daughters and that is that they can be married off and create this sort of immense network of kinship within Europe and she's about to send off one of her daughters to marry the king of Naples who has a very bad reputation, Ferdinand. and she says, oh dear, you know, all the reports I hear about him make him sound like not the ideal husband at all. But there we are, you know, as long as my daughter does her duty, then, you know, all will be fine.

She'll, you know, she'll go to heaven and, well, you know, if she can be happy on the way past, that's a bonus sort of thing. Oh, wow. Oh, wow. Okay. And Marie Antoinette, to come back to her, is the last of Maria Theresa's daughters. And she's the one who gets the plumb position in the marriage stakes because, In 1756, a year after Marie-Antoinette was born, France and Austria decide to enter into a pact when they're sort of hereditary enemies. And this is a reversal of what usually happens in Europe and the way the balance of power shifts in Europe. And that can make us think about things which are going on nowadays where, you know, some of our traditional allies might, you know, stop being our friends. Yeah, yeah, with you.

Exactly. So France has become a friend suddenly. And as a result, Maria Theresa thinks, well, what we need to do is to shore up this alliance by having a whole series of marriages to people who are also connected to France. And so I mentioned Naples. But Palmer, for instance, is a case. One of the sisters of Mountaine is married to the Duke of Palmer. And the Duke of Palmer is the king of France's grandson and this sort of thing. So there are lots of ways of trying to.

to create this backup, which means that your allies, in political terms, are also people with whom you have close family ties. They're in the family, yeah. They're in the family. That's smart. And that's what Maria Theresa wants to do. And usefully enough, she has a daughter who is just the right age, Marie Antoinette, to go and marry the dauphin of France, so the heir to the French throne.

How old was she then? She's 14 at the time and they decide that this marriage is going to take place and it takes place by proxy. So Marie Antoinette has to sign all sorts of documents, etc., gets all dolled up, goes to the parish church in Vienna, the Augustina Kircher. Her brother Ferdinand stands in for her future husband and she's married by proxy. So she's considered to be married to someone she's absolutely never met. You know, it's a bit like our dress rehearsals before weddings in the sense, except that it has binding value. And so she sets off from Vienna and will spend several weeks in very elegant but rather uncomfortable carriages

going from Vienna to Versailles with a whole series of staging posts on the way where she has to listen to all sorts of speeches in German, Latin, French. Could she speak French? She's off to France. She's off to France. And in that respect, she's quite lucky because she spoke French. Everyone at court in Vienna speaks French. They speak French in a way which the very snooty French say is saying it as well,

not quite French sometimes. Some of their expressions aren't quite French, etc. But she speaks French. And her father, Frances Stephen, of Lorraine, who died when she was 10, was from Lorraine, which subsequently became a part of France. But yes, she does speak. and write French. Okay.

And once the wedding has been decided, the French court at Maria Theresa's request sends over a French abbey to serve as a sort of private tutor for Maya Antoinette to ensure that her French is up to scratch, that she knows who the important families are in France, what the major episodes of French history are, and so on. Was she smart? Was she a clever child?

I say child. She wasn't considered a child at 14, was she? She's not an intellectual. Marie Antoiness is not an intellectual. Okay. And, you know, reading isn't her great love. Her formal education was somewhat neglected early on. So the sort of reading and writing aspects of it were rather neglected early on until Maria Theresa realized that, you know, this wasn't good enough

and tried to put her on a sort of accelerated course. She's, I think, someone whose great love is music. She absolutely loves music. She's a very good musician herself. There's a lot of music going on at court in Austria when she's young. And when she gets to Versailles, music is going to be one of her occupations when she's very bored. So she'll play the harp a lot, for instance. And she's forever, you know, hauling musicians over and saying, you know, can you come over and, you know, play this with me or send me the sheet music for your newest hit sort of thing.

And she's quite influential in terms of the way French music goes. because she has gluck brought over from Austria at her brother's suggestion, and that influences the way the French sort of consider opera. So that's, I think, her major interest, her major sort of field of expertise. And she then, of course, gets carried away by an interest in fashion and spends a lot of time, you know, dressing in the most elegant way possible. And will subsequently also, and I think this is another of her contributions possible, to the way France develops, gets very interested in interior decoration.

And a lot of the furniture choices, for instance, she makes, a lot of the choice she makes of textiles and so on, they're quite influential. And they, I think, continue to cast a very long shadow over French elegance. You know, the fact that Marie Antoinette is still seen as a figure who's elegant enough to inspire, for instance, couture dresses or to be used in a lot of advertising and that sort of thing in such a recognisable way. I think bears witness to the fact that she was actually, she had a real eye for novelty but also for quality.

She's a fashion girlie. She's a fashion girl. Certainly when she's young, you know, when she gets to Versailles and discovers that she has her husband who's totally uninterested in her. Just about to ask you that, was to say, was Louis a fashion fellow? Was he also interested in music? and was it a match made in heaven? I think it was probably quite the opposite when Marie Antoinette arrived for various reasons.

So, I mean, the first reason is that young Louis is not really interested in women at all. I mean, he's not interested in anything more really than going hunting and fiddling around learning how to pick locks and things like that. He's very interested in lockswist and things like that. He likes cartography. He's sort of middle-aged before having been young is Louis. So he likes getting up early and going out hunting. And of course, Marie Antoinette is the ideal party girl who wants to stay up all night and, you know, dance with her friends to the latest tunes. So it's not really a match made in heaven initially, no.

Were they happy about the union? Do we have anything on record? Were they excited? I mean, it must have been really scary as well to travel to a different country and you've got to marry someone you never met. And by the way, he's the do fan. And I mean, even if you've been brought up knowing that's going to happen, it must have been quite. intimidating? I think it was quite intimidating. I think Marielle Twainette is split between the feeling that this is her duty and she has to do it and do it well. The honour, she's very

sensitive to the fact that yes, her mother feels she can do this and do this properly. But she also, we know because when she goes to France, she's accompanied part of the trip by an Austrian suite of dignitaries and so on. And someone called Prince Staremberg who'd been the Austrian ambassador in Paris is one of them. And he writes reports back to Maria Theresa. And there are occasional times when he says, you know, well, she had a bit of a sort of a weepy, you know, she had a bit of a weepy fit when she was locked up in her room sort of and this. So, no, horrid. I mean, bits of it absolutely horrid.

It must be said. And it must have been even more difficult for her to get there and then have this quite. I mean, maybe he wasn't like this, but this is what I see, like quite awkward husband who doesn't seem to be really. I mean, it might have been different if it was this dashing, romantic man. He swept her off her feet. But I don't get the sense that Louis was like that. I think you're absolutely right. Paul Marie Antonetti is cast into the court at Versailles where things happen,

they have very different rituals and routines to what goes on in Vienna. And I think she feels, you know, she's cast adrift in a sense. She doesn't really know what's expected of her, particularly as, you know, Louis isn't around most of the time. And when he is, he isn't interested. Also, the king, who is Louis's grandfather, Louis was a scallywag, wasn't he notorious for it? He had been widowed, but even before being widowed,

that hadn't stopped him having strings of affairs. And he had a mistress, the Comtesse du Barri, who lived at court and who was there all the time. And of course, Marie Antoinette having been brought up in a very prudish way, thought this was completely shocking. So she's left with no particular female role model. She's left with this king who's on the whole rather kind to her, you know, sort of grandfatherly figure.

But, you know, she's left thinking that his behaviour is completely appalling. And all of that, I think, needs to very confused and particularly confused. As, you know, she's been told that she's being packed off to France, that her duty in life is to produce heirs for the French throne. But she has no way of going about it at this stage. Right, so we've got to get into this. This is one of the big mysteries that hangs over their relationship, isn't it? It remains unconsummated for about seven years.

I mean, it's so much rumor and mystery surrounds this, but what's your take on what on earth was going on? Well, there are a lot of things you're right, which are sort of mystery and rumor. There are some things about which we can be certain. The first thing is that Marie Antoinette has absolutely not. being briefed. She doesn't know how things were. How is that possible? You know, there's not been a birds and bees talk by her mother or a lady in waiting before she left. Nobody sat this girl down and said, this is what's got to happen. Nobody did. And we know this by analogy because there are unpublished letters between two of her

older sisters, one of whom had been married for a little while and the other who had just got married. And so the one who'd been married for a little while, Maria Christina, Marie Christina, she's known in the family, write to her younger sister saying, so how was it, you know? And what do you think? It must have been a rude awakening for you, mustn't it? And, you know, isn't it shocking actually having to, you know, to act as a wife? And she says, you know, it's really a humiliating duty for us. Wow.

Of course, you know, if that's the only way of having children, you know, we're going to have to put up with it. And, you know, those are the words that she writes. That's incredible. I'm translating them loosely. But that's what she writes. So there's very clearly no education. And there's confirmation of that in Marie Antoinette's case. Because several years down the line when Maria Theresa has been bullying Marie Antoinette by letter saying, you know, come on.

You know, there's only one reason for you to be in France and that is to produce a child to be heir to the French throne. Maria Teresa then, you know, has people inquiries. including, you know, sort of ambassadors and other statesmen and diplomats. And, you know, two of them have an exchange and the letters are preserved in the archives in Vienna saying, you know, the embarrassing thing, of course, is she doesn't understand what, you know, what she's supposed to be doing. So, you know, we're going to have to get down to explaining it sort of thing. Wow. What's her mum saying to it? At no point does her mum write in the letters, this is what you've got to do.

She's just saying, why haven't you had a baby yet? And Marie Antoinette is just out there going, I don't know. I've absolutely no idea what's going. She just thought she was going to get pregnant. She doesn't think she's going to get pregnant, but she doesn't realise, you know, she sort of thinks sharing a bedroom with her husband is probably sufficient type of thing.

And Marie Antoinette doesn't hold any of the cards in her hands, essentially, because, you know, if the dauphin goes off hunting and, you know, sleeps in his own, because, of course, like all royal families at that stage, or nearly, they have, you know, separate rooms, etc. So there's very little Marie Antoinette can do at that stage? I suppose there's not, really. If somebody had sat it down and explained it to her,

could she have marched herself off to Louis' bedroom and just gone right, you pantaloons down and cracked on with it? Or is she expected to just stay there and wait for her husband to join her? You know, I think she could have hoped to seduce him, and I think to a certain extent that's what she tries to do over the years. But it takes an awful long time to happen. And, you know, when Louis finally thinks that, well, yes, he'd better give in and he's married to this woman and, et cetera, and he ought to perform,

then there are all sorts of worries about whether or not he might be physically malformed, whether he might have to have a sort of little snip of his foreskin to make things easier. And so there are other humiliating parts there where, you know, both Marie Antoinette and the dauphin, you know, sort of have to see their doctors and, you know, everybody has to be looked at. So it's all very, very unpleasant on the whole. Did Louis know what to do? I'm not sure if he ever had an operation, but did anybody explain to him? I presume that at some point somebody did, but I don't think that he starts out with, you know, particularly accurate ideas.

Wow. Probably because, you know, he doesn't want to. But anyhow, so that's how it starts, you know, not under very good auspices. And of course, during the years when the marriage is not consummated, Marie Antoinette has become something of a fashion icon. on because she's young, because she dresses well, she's entertaining, she's charming, and she's the sort of, you know, the it girl, the ultimate it girl. And as a result, everybody assumes that she must be having affairs, just not with her husband. Oh, look at that. Does everybody assume it? Certainly there's a rumour mill which starts saying, you know, oh, well, she's so friendly,

for instance, with her brother-in-law, who's a much sort of more dashing individual than her husband, etc. So that's, I think, one of the things which starts off by undermining her reputation, the fact that it takes so long for the marriage to be consummated. And, you know, whenever anything goes wrong, it's always the woman's fault. I'll be back with Katrina after this short break. And life at Versailles was not private, right? I mean, everybody would have known about this. Maybe you can tell me, because when you're seeing sort of cinematic representations or popular cultures,

is this idea that even the bedroom is full of people just sat there on the couch with popcorn waiting for people to get on with it. I'm not sure if that's quite right, but certainly people would have talked about this. They would have known. Yeah, I'm not sure about the popcorn, but yes, people were certainly talking about it. And you have sort of diplomatic dispatches

with people discussing whether or not, you know, the king spends his knights with the queen after Louis has become king in 1774. Because, you know, to get from one room to the other, you're visible. And so one of things going on to actually very cleverly does is she has a back staircase installed. so that at least they can, you know, sort of meet without being visible.

But yes, there's a lot of that going on. And there's a lot of sort of, you know, bribing servants and things like that to get information. So, yeah. And when it's unconsummated, she's on really dangerous ground with this, because is it true that I think it's in the UK, but if it's not consummated, the wedding isn't legit. Was that the case in France, too? Marie-Antoinette's position is very difficult as long as it's not consummated.

And indeed, I mean, as long as she, hasn't given an air to the throne. And that's one of the things Maria Theresa is very worried about because she thinks, you know, if my Antoinette doesn't get on with it, there is precedent in France for wives to have been sent away. And that would, you know, make the whole process of the sort of alliance which she's been trying to shore up. So stressful.

Yeah, unfortunately. And so that's one of the reasons why there's this bullying. And it is, you know, it is bullying by Maria Teresa. via her letters. So yes, Marriottinette's position is dangerous. In France, when Louis XIV became king, he was crowned, but the coronation involves, like the coronation of King Charles, involves holy oil being put upon the brow of the king. And in French, that's referred to as the sacre, the anointing, because it's a way of making you sacred. which means that you in a sense become something more than a mere mortal.

And in the French tradition, queens are rarely crowned, and Marie Antoinette is not crowned. She's not crowned. There's no holy all for her, etc. So she's literally sidelined at the coronation. If you look at the engravings which show the coronation, the king is in the middle of the cathedral in Rains with all sorts of men around him. Marie Antoinette is on a balcony on one side with the other women.

And that's one of the reasons, I think, but the figure of the Queen of France is such an ambiguous one. She's so visible and yet she has no real power. But thankfully, and history have a lot to thank him for, Marie Antoinette's older brother decided to go and have a word with the young couple. Is that right? That's absolutely right. Joseph is Marie Antoinette's elder brother. He's been a holy Roman emperor and has been co-raining with their mum. mother since the death of their father. And Marie Antoinette gets on well with Joseph, although he's,

you know, sort of a generation, half a generation older than she is, possibly partly because Joseph had a single daughter, unsurprisingly called Maria Teresa after her grandmother, who was Marie Antoinette's closest companion when she was a little girl during her final years in Vienna and before little Marie-Teres' tragic early death. But Joseph and Marianne Antoinette get on well and Marie Antonet desperately wants her brother to come and she misses her family terribly and having her brother and a brother whom she loves dearly over is something she really, really wants, really looks forward to. And yes, Joseph, who is very much a modern monarch, comes over. And he's someone who'll be interested in, you know, what's going on in the industrial sphere and

so on. He travels widely in France. He asks all the right questions. He looks at sort of technical advances and so on. But he's also very, very fond of his little sister and he sits down, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI and says, okay, you know, what's going on? Finally. And why is nothing happening? And could you just get on with it, please, basically? And that very much is what proves to be the sort of the ultimate deciding factor. And Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI finally consummate their marriage. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Exactly so. That's more or less what Marguyenotel says in a letter to her mother.

Oh, bless her. And they subsequently will have several children. So they're off. It just took a word from Big Brother. It took seven years for that to happen. But now everyone knows what goes in where and what you're supposed to be doing. And now the babies are coming. She's on much more secure ground now. She's on much more secure ground politically. She's also much more fulfilled. For Marie Antoinette, motherhood is a really fulfilling role. Oh, she likes being a mum. She loves it. She's always like children. And in fact, when she was quite lonely in her early years at Versailles,

she adopted or more or less sponsored a whole series of children who were, you know, children drawn from the popular classes, but whom she'd come across for various reasons. You know, one of them was nearly knocked over by her carriage and this sort of thing. So she's very, very, she loves children. She's fascinated by them. She's again very much of her time in that it's a period when the child as individual is really being discovered. And so she's quite unlike the model of French queens before her,

who on the whole would send their children off to convents and then meet them again sort of 10 years later. So Louis the 15th, he dies and they become king and queen. They're still very young when it happens. And doesn't Louis have a bit of a, oh God, can't do it with two young? no, no moment. Yes. I mean, reports are that, in fact, they both of them said, you know, we're too young. So, you know, we need God to help us.

How old were they? They're like, they're not quite 20, in fact. God, when you think of what you were doing at 20. Exactly, exactly. But they are king and queen. And now we're into Marie Antoinette, queen proper. She's got a baby's and she seems to be very happy with that. And I want to know now, is this reputation for excess that she has?

is that justified or was that whipped up in revolutionary propaganda? Did she really have bathtubs filled with strawberries and hair that needed scaffolding to support it and spend the annual deficit the entire country on a pair of shoes and all of that stuff? I think reports have been greatly exaggerated, but there is an atom of truth there. Marie-Atollette, when she was young, had no particular conception, I think, of money. One of the interesting things, and it's characteristic of France, it doesn't happen to Marriott's sisters who are sent elsewhere, is that if you are sent as a foreign bride to marry a French prince, you don't get to keep anything you own. And that means the dresses Marie Antoinette has on the way, as soon as she gets to Versailles are given to ladies in waiting, you know, as part of their, you know, exactly. And the only thing she's allowed to keep is her diamonds.

and there's a list of them. There are handwritten saying, you know, the diamonds of Madame La Dauphine are the following and then list of them. And I think that's one of the reasons why she gets interested in jewelry because it's the thing she can own herself in the way that she can't own other objects.

And yes, she gets interested in her dresses and in her dressmaker, Mademoiselle Bertha, who is making ever, ever newer and ever more extraordinary dresses. and she goes in, she has a phase where, yes, she has the wildest hairdos in town. And the wildest hairdos in town does mean having all sorts of extra bits of hair on scaffolding, added to your own hair, all of this, of course, is powdered, and then you have lots of things stuck into it.

And Marie Antoinette's conceit is quite often to have a hairdo which references something which is going on. So a news item, a current news item. That's wild. Like telling the news through your hair. Exactly. So for instance, this is during the American War of Independence, and that's one of the things which really bankrupts France

rather than Marie Antoinette's spending. But Marie Antoinette has a French frigate, a model of a French frigate put in her hairstyle to celebrate a French naval victory. Or when the king and his brothers are inoculated against the smallpox, just after the death of Louis 15th, the 15th died of the smallpox. She has a symbolic hairdo

in which she sort of references inoculation with the snake who's supposed to be the venom and a club sort of to get rid of the snake in the way that inoculation is getting rid of the venom of smallpox and so on. It's a wild period. It's a world period which doesn't go on in an indeterminately long manner.

On the contrary, more or less as soon as she became, becomes queen, what My Antoinette attempts to do is to carve out some intimacy, some privacy for herself. And that's something which in Austria was quite normal. The imperial family, you know, could go about their business in their, you know, in their own homes without anybody sort of coming in, you know, sort of opening the door on them as they were in the middle of getting changed or whatever. And Marie-Otelet tries to do this through a small, like a sort of mini-manner house on the grounds of Versailles called Triannon, Le Préant. Titriano, which Lou the 16th gives her as her personal property. And that becomes Marie Antoinette's

pet project. She has the gardens transformed and re-landscaped. She has everything redecorated. And she loves being there. And one of her great joys is showing her garden to her friends and, you know, sort of having picnics and this sort of thing. So it's a desire for a form of simple life and a life which is not lived in the public eye. And one of the consequences of this, is that French public opinion considers that she must have something to hide. If she doesn't want to be seen, she must be in out to sort of naughty shenanigans. And that's one of the things which will backfire, I think, against her, the fact that she wants to have some form of intimacy.

When I think about Maria Antoinette, there's this idea that she just and Louis, that they completely lost touch with what was actually happening outside of the palace grounds. and this, what was it called, the petty, petite trianon, beautifully said, thank you. Wasn't this where she like to dress up as a shepherdess and pet sheep and pretend to be like a milkmaid. And you can kind of see that it's that disconnect that's just like, while there's actual shepherdesses and milkmaids starving and desperately trying to find something to eat, she's there in this palace she's built for herself, cosplaying as a milkmaid. And that's become this kind of icon of how out of touch she actually was. Is that true? The Petitriand also has something called the Amoud la Raine,

which means the Queen's Hamlet, and that has sort of, I mean, it's a bit like Wendy houses, really, for children in the back garden. It has sort of glorified versions of rural dwellings, most of them which aren't even proper houses. They really are sort of little follies, decorative follies, and look very charming. And Marrientardin doesn't actually, you know, sort of roll up her sleeves and bake cakes or whatever when she's in Trinon.

So she doesn't do masses of the sort of play acting at that, although she does do a lot of singing and acting on her own little stage. But that's another story. There is very clearly a disconnect between the Mariantoin and indeed Louis XVI and what's going on in France. and all of Marie Antoinette's letters which talk about, you know, people, sort of the peasants and so on, show that she has a very generous heart and she's always worrying about people and saying, you know, it's terrible, they're hungry. She's very generous also with her own money. When she has money, she gives a lot of it away as arms and so on. But she also gives money to the wrong people.

So, for instance, there are sort of people around her who desperately want to, you know, money, etc. and to sort of curry favour with her and she's a bit naive about all of that. But yes, there's a disconnect. They're not aware of how terrible things are, I think, for most people. Did she ever say, let the meat cake? As far as we know, Marantanet never said let the meat cake.

What we do know is that the sentence was reported and attributed to another royal personage in a book even before she was born. I'll be back with Katrina after this short break. So Louis and Marie Antoinette, they are kind of that they're inside. They're doing the best at being kings and queens and they're kind of, Maria Antoine's having fun, pretending that she's a shepherdess and all the rest of it. But outside, anger's growing, the revolution is growing.

And one of the things that's used to attack Marie Antoinette are salacious, pornographic pamphlets that accuse her of all manner of shenanigans and her ladies in waiting. The Duchess de Pollynec, I think, was one of them, So why were they doing that and was there any truth to it? Was she having any affairs? Well, as far as we know, there's no truth to these rumors of affairs, which, as I mentioned, start even before the Royal Barrage has been consummated. But they get worse and worse over time. From having been sort of in jokes, I think, they become very salacious.

It's not unusual when attacking a woman who is seen to have some form of influence in the public. sphere to suggest that she must be a loose woman, have loose morals, and that's certainly used against Marie Antoinette. And there is a whole variety of pamphlets and caricatures, you know, some which could be believable, you know, where she's accused of, you know, having an affair with, you know, e.g., her brother-in-law, that would have, you know, although she didn't have an affair with him, you know, it would have been a possibility. But then there are all sorts of completely mad ones where, you know, she's accused of letting absolutely anything. anybody into her intimacy and it all ends up with a little spaniel as the last one of the

line type of thing. So it gets into bestiality. And all of this is just a way of attacking her. And the main reason for attacking the queen in this way is because it's also a way of weakening the king. Because it means that the king isn't virile enough to satisfy her. And it also means that if she's cuckolding the king, she's potentially cuckolding the whole of the nation. And so it's a subtle way of getting at the king who's still seen as this mystical figure. Obviously, you know, this is a way of making sure that he's attacked. And one of the aspects of Marie Antoinette, which recurs in these attacks against her, is the fact that she's Austrian and therefore that she's seen as the representative of an enemy power.

and of a very strong political woman, so her mother. Is there any truth that she was having it away with Count Axel von Fursen? That's the one unclear question mark over it. Yeah, the one question mark, but could be. I think the jury's still out, as they say, on that particular case. Axel von Fersen is a Swedish nobleman, you know, tall dashing Swedish nobleman, who's exactly the same age as Marie Antoinette, whom she meets. various court functions and so on. He then removes himself and goes and fights in the

American War of Independence, comes back, etc. And we know that Marantoinette and Felsen corresponded during this time. We don't know anything about the contents of their correspondence because it's been destroyed. He uses a code name for her. He calls her Josephine. But no idea what they're talking about and whether it just is sort of, you know, it's been rotten or whether it Versailles this weekend, you know, I had to meet this really, you know, boring party of delegates from wherever. We don't know. Or whether it's, you know, I miss you, I miss you madly come back type of thing. What we do know is that the friendship was a very close friendship and was sustained to the end.

Because what we haven't said is that in 1789, shortly after the fall of the Bastille, the Women's March on Versailles succeeds after some of our moment. violence in bringing the royal family back to Paris. So there's a clear shift of power there. They're brought back to Paris and installed in the Tullery Palace. So theoretically, there's a new court in the Tulli Palace acting in the way Versailles did. And after October 1789, Marie Antoinette never set foot in Versailles ever again. But during this period, a lot of people tried to support the king and queen.

And Axel von Felsen was one of the most supportive of the... their close friends and corresponded on matters political with Marie Antoinette. And there are lots of letters exchanged between them, some of which have survived. So some of them were actually written in cipher. So this is Marie Antoinette sort of doing the secret agent stuff of writing in lemon juice or using complicated codes so that you can't work out what words are and so on, talking about movements of troops, talking about, you know, where they can find money in order to try and sponsor a counter-revolution which would bring things back to where they were before.

But there are also elements in these letters where Marie-Otoinette writes to Axel von Fersen, farewell, the most dear and most loved of men and things like that. Now, whether that means that they were having an affair or not, or had had an affair or not, I don't know. Marie-Ontonet uses quite extreme languages with the people to whom she's close. I was reading one of the letters she wrote to a childhood friend of hers, one of the princesses of Hesse Darmstadt, just this morning. And she says, you know, this is in 7092, they have taken everything from me, except my heart with which I will love you to the last day of my life. So she's writing that sort of thing and she has that sort of language. But in the case of Axel von Felsen, it's very clear that there is a very strong bond between Marie Antoinette and him.

but I can't tell you whether that went anywhere beyond the strength of feeling. Some people are convinced it did. Some people say, no, no, no, Marriottet had such a sense of duty. It's impossible. Others say, oh, but maybe, you know, he fathered one of the children of Marie Antoinette and Louis, we don't know. And they really did take everything from her as well. That the figure of her just is in the time before she's going to face the guillotine. It's a very, very different woman, isn't it?

They've taken a children away. I'm not sure how long before her execution was Louis executed, but it must have been terrifying for her. So Louise executed on the 21st of January 1793. They've been imprisoned, properly imprisoned, in the temple, in a sort of fortress in the centre of Paris for some time. The queen is with her daughter and her sister-in-law. The king is with the dauphin.

And after the king, so the king is put on trial and given a proper trial with lawyers, but it is decided that he will be executed. He's executed on 21st of January. The little dauphin becomes king in the eyes of the royalists, including his mother, you know, who says, well, you're now the king. He is then separated from his mother and entrusted to an illiterate shoemaker who appears to have mistreated. treated him quite badly. The queen for a little while is with her sister-in-law and her daughter, and she is then removed and taken to the conciergerie. Now, lots of you will know the conciergerie

in the centre of Paris, that huge medieval fortress. And it was in many ways the sort of anti-chamber to the guillotine. She's held there, put on trial, but it's a trial with trumped-up charges. She's not given proper defence. They accused you of incest and all kinds of stuff, didn't they? Exactly. So one of the key accusations suddenly produced is an accusation of incest with her son, the dauphin, and now little Louis the 17th. And Mariantoin clearly was not expecting this and it's complete rubbish. And she stands up and she says, any mother in this audience will be my witness. And that actually sways the crowd. And that's a moment where her authenticity completely shines through, even surrounded by people who oppose her.

And she does get sentenced to the guillotine without getting too graphic about it, but how does she meet her death? I think that's one of the things that's so moving about the story is that you know what she was like in her heyday and the extravagance and the money and the lifestyle and then what it's reduced to as she's facing the guillotine. So she faces the guillotine. she isn't even allowed to wear what she wants to wear. She only has a couple of sets of clothes.

You know, her hair is cut off. She's allowed to wear a bonnet on her head. So she has to lie down on a plank in a public square and the blade of the guillotine comes down and slices her head off. And she is then taken, her body is then taken to a cemetery where all sorts of people are being buried. It's deconsecrated land. And she is buried with her head between her legs.

And funnily enough, in 1815, after the revolution, when there'd been all sorts of different political regime, Marie Antoinette's elder brother-in-law becomes king as Louis XVIth, because the little Louis XIV has died after being ill-treated and possibly having had tuberculosis. We don't exactly know while he was imprisoned in the temple. But Louis XIII has mounts the throne after getting rid of Napoleon. And one of the things he wants to do is to assert his legitimacy, and so to create links with the king who went before him. And so he has the bodies of Lou the 16th and Marie Antoinette searched for in this sort of wasteland in which they'd been buried. And of obviously no memorials had been allowed initially. But somebody had managed, after things quiet and down a bit by the plot of land and to tend to sort of garden,

They find someone who was actually there when Marrioltenant was buried. And they find her body quite quickly. They know where to dig. And there are two very extraordinary reports. One is that the Prince de Poix, who had known her well, you know, seize her body, seize, you know, the face and faints on the spot. You know, the grown man fainting on the spot. And the other is Chateaubriand, who sometimes he likes making things sound rather grandiose when he can.

But he says this face appeared and he says you recognize the jawline. He said, I knew that smile. She had given me when I was in Versailles and she was on her way to the Royal Chapel. So Marie Antoinette's body is then buried in Saint-Denich, which is the traditional necropolis of the kings of France, along with a body which they supposed was that of Louis, but there's much less certainty about its authenticity. So who knows? It's certainly officially Louis, but officially Louis. and definitely Marie Antoinette.

Maybe one day someone will dig them up for DNA testing and tell us whether they got it right or not. So as a final question then, and I know we're into the land of conjecture here, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Marie Antoinette is, she became this flashpoint, this symbol of the revolution,

of everything the revolutionaries, hated in the aristocracy, the excess and the greed and the debauchery. Do you think that Marie Antoinette could have done anything at all, to have stopped that revolution if she had realised that the plight of the poor, could she have intervened, or was it always going to happen,

regardless of whether she was there? I don't think Marie Antoinette could have done anything to stop the revolution. I do think that there were contributory factors in which she was involved. And one of them, we haven't talked about, is the diamond necklace affair, in which she's completely innocent,

but somebody tries to suggest that she wanted to buy the most extravagant piece of jewelry, which is on sale anywhere in the world at that stage. And there's a major scandal. And she had nothing to do with it, but since it was said to have been bought in her name, you know, it's one of those things mud sticks. The French say, you know, there's no smoke without fire.

And as a result, her reputation was quite badly tarnished. and she was really seen as somebody who was totally disconnected with what was going on in France and only wanted jewelry when everyone else was dying of hunger. So I think that, for instance, is an episode which has very great consequences for her because it marks a real stage of worsening of her public image. And I think, you know, the revolution might have happened, but you could imagine a type of revolution in which Marie-Antoinette would have been sent, away. You know, the king, the king should be executed was one thing. He was, you know, a political

figure, etc. You could imagine Marie Antoinette then being, you know, sent away into exile to get the trinioner. Exactly. Or live her old age in Vienna or something similar. And I'm always struck by the fact that in the middle of the 19th century, there's another deposed monarch in France, who's the emperor Napoleon III. And his wife, Empress Eugniz, you know, comes to, comes to England and lives her life in discretion, having tea parties with the local ladies and nothing more. And I'm struck by the fact that on the one hand,

most people have forgotten about Empress Eugenie, whereas Marie Antoinette remains such a strong figure. And on the other, by the fact that, you know, Eugenie was something of a fashion icon when she was young too, but what I think really was decisive for Marie Antoinette is the way she met her end. And it's this conjunction between having been, you know, the most famous, most celebrated, most portrayed, etc.

Woman in France, or indeed in the world at the time, and meeting this grisly fate and a grisly fate which in some ways was undeserved in the sense that she didn't have official political power. And I think that's what ensured that she has remained such an extraordinarily recognizable style icon nowadays. Katrina, you have been wonderful. to talk to. I knew that you would be. And if people want to know more about you and your work,

where can they find you? Not in person. Leave Katrina alone, but just online. I was going to say, Oxford is where I normally hang out, although occupational hazard when you're a professor of French literature, I'm quite often on the other side of the channel. There's a Marie-Antoinette exhibition just coming up at the Victoria and Albert Museum called Marine Antoinette style, which is going to be partly about the real Marie-Antoinette at Versailles,

and partly about the way in which she has inspired Coutureers and advertisers, etc. I'm very much looking forward to going to see it. So I wrote a little catalogue article about Marie Antoinette's letters, but I'm definitely looking forward to going to see the exhibition and learning a lot about Marie Antoinette's sort of afterlife. Oh, that's a fantastic shout-out. Thank you very much. You have been wonderful to talk to.

Thank you so much for joining us. Lovely to talk to you, Kate. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Katrina for joining us. And if you like what you heard, don't forget to like review and follow along whatever it is that you get your podcasts. We have more queens coming your way in this royal sex series. We've got a bit of Catherine the Great, no less. Make sure you check back in next week. If you'd like us to explore a subject or maybe you just wanted to say hello,

then you can email us at betwixt at history hit.com. This podcast was edited by Tom Delagie and produced by Sophie G. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheet of the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.