Marie Antoinette (part three): Reputation’s Never Been Worse

Vulgar History Podcast

Marie Antoinette (part three): Reputation’s Never Been Worse

September 24, 2025

Ann Foster:
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is Marie Antoinette Month, which is what I’m calling this series of podcasts about Marie Antoinette and her world. We’re actually in the midst of talking about Marie Antoinette herself. This is part three of a Marie Antoinette season. She would call it part trois, or I guess maybe part drei, because German was her first language, but this is part three. So, if you’re tuning in, welcome. But also, you’ll get a lot more context if you listen to parts one and two beforehand, although maybe you’re just a big fan of the events of this episode, in which case, welcome French Revolution aficionados, because that’s what we’re getting into today. 

In part one, we were talking about Marie Antoinette; her childhood, growing up in Vienna and what that was all like, ending with her marrying the Dauphin of France. Part two ends with that Dauphin becomes the king of France, making her the queen of France, and you know, she was living her JoJo Siwa, early twenties life, just trying to discover who she was and what kind of person she wanted to be and what kind of fashions she wanted to wear. The fact that she was the queen of France during a time of massive economic crisis made that not go great for her in terms of her personal… Her PR, not great. And in this episode, we see what happens next. 

So, we ended last time with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace situation, which also, if you listened… Last Wednesday, we had the episode of this podcast, and then, last Friday, I played a bonus episode, which was revisiting an older episode of the podcast about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, just getting more in-depth about that whole thing. So, now we all know about the Affair of the Diamond Necklace and how that affected Marie Antoinette’s reputation. She’s really in her Reputation era right now. However, unlike Taylor Swift, for instance, she doesn’t have an international fan base who are going to be there, fighting for her to restore her. If she went on a tour, Marie Antoinette, I don’t know that it would be selling out arenas at this point. 

So, previously on… The Affair of the Necklace, much of which predicated on her wearing these very filmy sort of nightgown-like nap dresses that people in the trial thought, like, “You know what? Marie Antoinette wore these fuck dresses, and so therefore we think she wanted this necklace, and therefore we think it was reasonable that the Cardinal of Rohan thought that that was really her meeting him in the garden that time.” This makes no sense to you if you didn’t listen to part two, the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, but just go with it. Just go with it. It’s just a “Previously on Glee” moment. 

Also, in the previous episode, Marie Antoinette and her husband, who is King Louis XVI, but on this podcast, we call him Berry because before he was the Dauphin, before he was the King of France, he was the Duke de Berry, and that’s what people called him growing up. And it just suits him. And there’s a lot of Louis’s in the story, and that’s what we’re calling him. They finally consummated their marriage, after seven years, after her brother did sort of an intervention and explained, literally, the birds and the bees to them. 

Hater Nation (which is what we call everybody at Versailles who hated Marie Antoinette) hated Berry, thought that somebody else should be the king, like maybe them. Hater Nation includes Berry’s two younger brothers, Provence and Artois; it includes his cousin, Ryan Phillippe, whose real name is… His name is Philippe, the Duke of Orleans. We call him Ryan Philippe from Cruel Intentions because that’s his name on this podcast. 

So, Ryan Phillippe is the cousin, and he’s kind of like, if Berry didn’t have any sons and if his brothers didn’t have any sons, then Ryan Phillippe would be who the next king is. So, he feels like he’s so close. And he’s just really cosplaying as, like, a poor, working-class person to make everybody like him. His plan, his hope, Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions, is that the poor people of France will kind of rise up behind him and support him, and he can become the king, but in sort of a parliamentary system, like England has, where it’s not ultimately a powerful tyrant king, but it’s sort of like a constitutional monarchy. He would be the king of that. So, he’s working against Berry, and the way that people are really ruining Berry’s whole kingship is by going after his wife, Marie Antoinette, who is such a notable public figure that that’s kind of the easiest way to attack him. You still see this today, really, with when you’re trying to attack somebody, it’s just like, well, insult the wife, basically. 

Other notable members of Hater Nation include Berry’s aunts, Adélaïde, and I think the other one is called Victoire, maybe there’s a third one also called Sophie. But they’re just the Aunts; they are leading voices in Hater Nation because they just haven’t liked Marie Antoinette this whole time. Everyone’s against her, and these years of secretly leaking stories to the pamphlet tabloid press is really paying off because, as they saw with the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, Marie Antoinette’s reputation is pretty terrible. And let’s see what happens next. 

So, actually, speaking of the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, I wanted to mention some hat details I didn’t get into before. Oh! Actually, we’re going to be talking about so many hats in this episode, and this hat info comes from a very important book that I read, that is called Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber, which has so much interesting fashion-based information in it. My other references for this episode and the other episodes are Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette and Her Daughters by Nancy Goldstone, and also Marie Antoinette: Teen Queen to Guillotine by Melanie Burrows, which is just coming out in October. I got an early copy of it, and it’s a great book, and everybody should read that too if you just want to read about our girl, Marie Antoinette. 

So, there are so many amazing hats in this episode. If you want to play along at home, maybe make a list of the hats and after the episode, send me a message ranking which hats you like better than other hats. I think that’ll be a fun task for you to do. Another task for you to do, if you want to get bonus extra credit in podcast listening, is to, in the past episodes and this one too, just write down how many people’s names come up who we’ve talked about previously in this season of Vulgar History, because it’s a lot. 

So, hat number one enters; it has to do with the Affair of the Necklace. So, Marie Antoinette, one of her many enemies, and it’s a one-sided enemy, it’s not like… This one, there’s a bit of back and forth, but a lot of the people who hated her, a lot of her enemies, she didn’t even know they were her enemies. She was just, like, vibing out, doing her thing, wearing her outfits and these people, you know, just like anyone, any public figure, there’s haters, and you just don’t know who they even are. But then there’s some people who she personally, actively did not like herself. 

So, a person she did not like, for good reasons, was the Cardinal Rohan, who was a guy… He is a Prince of the Blood, so he is one of those people who was descended from not the last king of France, but like, the previous king of France’s brother or whatever. And he had been badmouthing her for ages, so it’s very rich of him to be like, “Oh my God, Marie Antoinette’s being so mean to me,” where it’s like, he was actively spreading propaganda about her so-called orgies and whatever. Anyway, he got tangled up in this whole thing, and he was sent to prison. The prison he was sent to, the Bastille, guess what? That’s going to come up in this episode in a major way later on. So, he was this rich guy who was in the Bastille, and because he was on the other side of Marie Antoinette, the people, the common people, like the Ryan Phillippe people at his mall, the Palais Royale, they were all sympathetic to him; they thought that he had been fooled and tricked by Marie Antoinette. People felt so badly for him during his prison era. People in the Bastille prison were understood to sleep on straw on the floor, which some of them did and some of them didn’t. He did not. But people thought that he was sleeping on the straw on the floor. 

And so, we’re still in an era where there’s not Instagram, there’s not TikTok, what we have is our heads and the things we put on our heads, which are sometimes hats and which are sometimes poufs, which are just big wigs with, like, stuff in them. If you think of Queen Charlotte from Bridgerton, like, that would be a pouf. So, we’ve got poufs, we’ve got hats. If you’re making your list of hats, I would say hats and poufs all go on one list altogether. So, the pouf-hat squad were like, “This is what everyone’s talking about. Rohan, he’s in prison. We feel so bad for him. So, we’re making a new hat and it’s called,” in French, but I’ll give you the translation, “the Cardinal on the Straw” is the name of the hat. So, it’s a hat in the shape of a cardinal’s hat with red ribbons to show that he’s a cardinal, but it was a cardinal’s hat on top of a straw hat to show a cardinal on the straw. So, that’s a hat. People were just… That’s how they showed that they were up-to-date with what’s happening in the world, and the news and what side of things they’re on is vis-à-vis what shape their hat was in. I know our girl Rose Bertin, Marie Antoinette’s personal dressmaker, and Leo, Marie Antoinette’s hair guy, I’m sure they were getting it on the cardinal on the straw hat trend as well. So, everyone’s just being like, “Oh, we feel so bad for him, a cardinal on the straw.” Little did they know, due to his rank of Prince of the Blood, he actually got a private suite. 

So, the Bastille prison was a castle that just was being used as a prison, and so he, in his private suite, was eating oysters and drank champagne and had as many visitors as he wanted. He was doing just fine, thank you very much. Anyway, he was found innocent in his trial. Innocent by virtue of Marie Antoinette’s fuck dresses. And so, Marie Antoinette’s husband, Berry, was just like, “This is outrageous. This guy slandered my wife. This guy is a shitty guy. Hate this guy. I’ve always hated this guy.” And so, he’s just so mad at how he just really fucked around with Marie Antoinette’s reputation, and Berry, say what you will about him, is king of France, he is a wife guy, and he’s there for Marie Antoinette. So, he used his king powers to exile Rohan from France. Because it’s like, well, he was found not guilty by the court, but who cares? You’re exiled from France. 

This made him look, well, it’s like, that’s a nice wife-guy thing to do for your girl. It did make the everyday people of France, who are, like, on the precipice of the French Revolution every second of every day, think that Berry is kind of a tyrant and a despot, especially because they all sided with Rohan in this. So ultimately, the whole thing, the whole affair, made everybody just hate Marie Antoinette so much, even more. They’re like, “Oh, she’s literally a whore because she wears the fuck dresses,” et cetera. I keep mentioning this, but that’s a crucial part of why people thought she was a whore. But they weren’t keeping up! They were keeping up with their hats, but they didn’t know, Marie Antoinette, by the time of the trial of the Affair of the Necklace, she had not even been wearing the fuck dresses for, like, a year. She had changed because she was now 30 years old. 

I remember when I turned 20 years old, a very long time ago, and I had this whole crisis of like, “Oh my gosh, I’m no longer going to be a teenager. I’m going to be 20. I need to change my style. I can’t wear my hair in Sailor Moon buns anymore.” I just remember that was a specific thing I thought. I was like, “I can’t have whimsical hairstyles. I’m going to be an adult. I’m now going to be 20.” That is not true and I do still wear Sailor Moon buns, and I’m a lot older than that. But Marie Antoinette was facing this thing that a lot of people face when you turn a new decade. She turned 30 and she was like, “No more fuck dresses, no more flower crowns.” She’s out of her Coachella vibe, and she’s into a new girl boss mode. So, she’s wearing more structured dresses; she’s like, “I’m a mom,” at this point, I think of three. She has three kids, two or three kids. And so, she’s just like, “I’m in my mom era.” She’s going to wear fur, she’s going to wear velvet. Like, this is her new thing. So, she’s just wearing more serious, structured dresses. She also made all the women at Versailles aged 30 or older do the same. Nobody can wear fuck dresses unless you’re under age 30, or the colour pink. She was just like, “We’re all… This is our new vibe. This is what’s happening. It’s our new mature era.” 

So, part of this change, like, she turned 30 and she was a mother, and you know, her whole twenties, we’ve talked about her JoJo Siwa era. She didn’t have a role; she didn’t know what she was supposed to even be doing. She didn’t have children; the whole point of being a queen was to have these children, so she was just partying and having a nice time. But now she has a role. She’s like, “Okay, I can just do this motherly job that I was hired to do,” basically. But also, she’d had numerous pregnancies. Her skin had less of the peaches and cream complexion she had as a young girl, and so she found that these lighter, macaron-type colours now kind of washed her out. She needed to wear a bolder, more jewel tone. 

Also, her hair was thinning out. So, she’d had thinning hair issues her whole life, really, going all the way back to when she was a teenager and they realized that she pulled her hair back with this headband, so she had traction alopecia on her hairline, she had this fivehead. So, they really, you know, Leo and her whole squad really worked on having protective styles for her and whatever. But they were still, as much as the poufs were like wigs, her whole, her own hair was being backcombed and frizzed, which is kind of like a perm they used to do. And then, just with the childbearing and everything, the stress of her life, her hair was thinning, she had bald patches. 

So, Leo, her hairstylist, hairstylist to the stars, invented a new hairstyle for her called la coiffure d’enfant, the child’s haircut. I don’t know if that means, like, the haircut of someone who’s had a child, or if it’s kind of like a cute page boy, if it’s like, you know, Audrey Hepburn with her shorter hairstyle. Anyway, so she had this new short hairstyle, and all the ladies copied it as well, which is so interesting. The whole thing about, like, everybody hated her; the regular common peasant people hated her because they thought she was this, like, shopaholic asshole; the people in Versailles all hated her because they were jealous of her, and they didn’t get what she was doing. And yet, everyone still looked to her for fashion; they all still wanted to dress like her. So, it’s interesting. But you know what? People could dress like her, and she’s just like, “They can if they want,” but her whole vibe now is just like, “I am a mom.” All she wanted, back when she was a little kid, she liked hanging out with her younger siblings, and then when she was a teenage princess in France, she’d hang out with the children of her entourage. She always wanted to be a mom; she was always a very maternal person, and now she finally is! So, she just wanted to shower her daughter and her son with attention. 

So, she had two kids; now she has three kids. This is the birth of the third kid, who is another son. His name was Louis Charles, because every royal son had to be called Louis, first name. But his middle name was Charles, and so there is some discussion in the various biographies that I read, as well as from the haters at the time, about: Who is the father of Louis Charles? Because he was a lot cuter than the other kids, which doesn’t mean he has a different father, but it could mean he has a different father who’s a more handsome person. So, some people thought, there had been rumours for ages now that she was having an affair with her husband’s brother, Artois, who is Berry’s younger, charming, hotter brother. Artois’s real name was Charles, so everyone’s like, “Ooh, did she name the baby after the secret baby daddy?” It’s like, if she had got knocked up by her husband’s brother, she wouldn’t name the baby after that person. She has some sense. 

Other people thought that maybe this baby, the timing of it, it might’ve been her new close friend, Axel von Fersen, who is this Swedish dreamboat who came into town and just got her in a way that nobody else did, in a really loyal and legitimate way. He liked her, and she liked him. And the various biographies I read are just like, “Were they fucking? Were they not fucking? I don’t know, but they certainly loved each other a lot.” And the timing of Louis Charles’s birth could be dated to when Axel von Fersen was around, but it could also be dated to a time when she was spending a lot of time with Berry. So, whoever the baby daddy is, she has a new son, and she’s so happy because all she wanted was to be a mom. And now, she has the heir and the spare and also her daughter, Marie-Thérèse, and her new child, Charles, was her favourite— Well, she loved all of her kids, but he was the cutest one, and like a lot of people when they have a new baby, they really dote on the new baby. But he was so cute, and she called him her choux d’amour, which means her little cabbage of love, which is a French thing people say. 

So, she was just hanging out with her kids. At this point, the kid’s governess is Gabrielle de Polignac, her bestie (the dark hair one, the Elizabeth Taylor one, who we did a whole episode about). Gabrielle de Polignac is the governess, so she’s just there with her bestie, with her kids in Petite Trianon, which is her little private enclave on the grounds of Versailles, where they could just, like, hang out and not have to be watched every second of every day by the Perez Hiltons of their time. Axel von Fersen hung out with them a lot there because he was welcome, and that’s another one of her close friends. Berry, her husband, the king, also came there because he wanted to flee his responsibilities, and he didn’t like being king either. It was a nice time for everybody in this era at Petite Trianon. 

She started dressing this different way. It’s not that she didn’t care about fashion anymore; she couldn’t not, like, this was her role. And this is also kind of who she is, she’s just interested in, like, whimsical, interesting new things, very in a very artistic, creative way. I could see a modern-day Marie Antoinette-type person having a nice time going to art school, you know? And just having, like, really cool Halloween costumes. 

Anyway, so for instance, around this time in all the newspapers or the pamphlets or whatever, shout out to Peru, the South American country. Allegedly, at this time— People from Peru: Let me know. Did this happen? I feel like it didn’t. But allegedly a mythical beast had been found there called the Harpy, which was a two-horned monster with bats’ wings and a human face and hair, and Marie Antoinette was so into it. I feel this is kind of like the Labubu of the time. People were just kind of really interested in this, like, ugly yet cute monster. And Marie Antoinette was all into it. She was the Lisa from Blackpink. As Lisa from Blackpink is to Labubu, Marie Antoinette was to the Peruvian Harpy. So, she got her bestie Rose Bertin to create this ribbon. So, it’s not like she’s wearing fully a Labubu Harpy on her; she doesn’t have a little plush toy, there’s not a little face of a Labubu on her. But she has this ribbon print that was printed with this design that was abstract triangles, and the abstract triangles were meant to represent the horns, wings, and fangs of the Peruvian Harpy. Soon, hats and dresses were all adorned à la Harpy with these ribbons on them. 

But while she was just having a nice time with her new hobby of Labubu ribbons— It’s like, everything she does is being so under a microscope. Everything she does, the haters are just like, “How can we turn this to make her look terrible?” And so, the Harpy was known to be gluttonous; that was the thing it did. It flew around on its bats’ wings, just eating children or something like that. So, pamphlets, of course, started circulating, illustrating Marie Antoinette as a Harpy, she’s the Harpy of France, or whatever. You know who financed some of these? Just as a reminder of just everyone at Versailles is the worst. Her brother-in-law, Provence, Berry’s younger dirtbag brother! The people closest to her were the ones who were, like, not just financing, and probably just like spilling details, it’s like, “Oh, you know, she likes this ribbon? It represents the Harpy. What can we do with that? How can we make her look terrible?” It’s just… I’ve made so many comparisons on all these episodes, but it’s really, it’s giving like Britney Spears’ family, just people who are closest to you and should be the ones who are looking out for you, are actually the ones betraying you. And she, like Britney Spears, didn’t realize the extent of it, at this point. 

Also, one of the reasons that the pre-French Revolutionary peasant people, why it was kind of easy to make them hate her was because of how much money she spent on stuff. And everybody in the royal family spent a lot of money on stuff; it was not just her, but she was just this public face of it all. Anyway, so she was still spending around the same amount of money on her clothes, which is like, yeah, maybe more than she should have been spending, but everybody was spending more than they should have been spending; Berry and his brothers were spending way too much money on renovating their numerous houses. Anyway, this led to challenges. 

So, her maid of honour was a woman called Comtesse d’Ossun. She was the one whose job— She’s kind of like house manager; she’s the one who’s responsible for paying off Marie Antoinette’s many suppliers’ bills. Marie Antoinette was always spending more than what her budget should have been, and it was up to the Comtesse d’Ossun to file a petition for an increase in money, like from, I don’t know if it’s from the government, or if it’s from Berry himself. I think it’s from the government. So, the whole thing about like “Our tax dollars are being spent on this!” Anyway, so she had to pay off these bills, she didn’t have enough money, so she had to ask for like, “Can we have an increase in Marie Antoinette’s allowance?” So, July 1786, Comtesse d’Ossun put in this petition for an increase in money from Marie Antoinette. Unfortunately, this was two weeks after the acquittal of Rohan in the Affair of the Necklace, so it was bad timing in that it kind of seemed to confirm that Marie Antoinette was such a shopaholic, that she was spending all this money on clothes and things, and it just made it even seem more obvious like, “Yeah, she probably would have wanted that ugly ass necklace.” 

At this time, we’re going to get into a lot of talk about France’s deficit in this episode, and also everyone’s favourite thing: tax laws. But I’ll make it interesting. So, France was in gargantuan debt, not because of Marie Antoinette’s outfits that she was buying, but because of various wars that they had been fighting for the last quite a long period of time, including that France had helped to fund the Patriot side, of the American Revolution, who had won, andthat was so great. You know, there’s all the hats, everybody got to celebrate that. So, France hoped that now they could have a new trade partner, the United States of America, maybe this will help. “Maybe the Americans are going to trade with us, France, and buy all of our exports, all of our products that we export.” But this did not happen, because the Americans were also poor, and the small amount of money that people had in America, they didn’t want to spend it on, like, French silk and luxury chocolate or whatever, and these were the main exports of France. In fact, people in America, although they had divested from the British monarchy, were still buying most of their supplies from England to get just kind of more basic, you know, like Costco brand items, and France is trying to sell the, like, name-brand stuff. So, that didn’t help. 

Meanwhile, in the previous episode, we talked about how France had all these debts that so they had gotten money from other countries by pretending that they weren’t bankrupt and pretending like they could pay off these debts. The reason they got those loans was because previous financial minister of France, Jacques Necker (the father of Germaine de Staël, who I did the episode about, she loved him a lot, and we talked about that in that episode), did this creative accounting where he made it seem like France wasn’t super in debt so the other countries would give them a loan. But now those loans were being called in to be repaid, and France couldn’t pay them. 

So, the new French minister of finance was named Calonne. And Calonne was also living an expensive, luxurious, kind of not really reading the room-type life. So, for instance, he lived this… He had a really tacky sense of style, so all of his properties were just gold-plated or whatever. He liked to have maximalist tendencies to really showcase how rich he was at all times, which didn’t go over well with the peasants. He also chose to have a portrait of himself done by painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who we’ve talked about on this podcast. She was known to be Marie Antoinette’s favourite painter, and he was rumoured to actually be her lover. So, just knowing that he was painted by the same person who painted Marie Antoinette made people think, “Oh, so that must mean they’re all friends. That must mean he’s friends with Marie Antoinette.” In fact, she did not like Calonne because he was a long-time friend of her enemy, Madame du Barry, the previous king, Golf King Louis XV’s former mistress, Madame du Barry, and Calonne was besties with Rohan, the Affair of the Necklace guy. So, Marie Antoinette didn’t like him at all, but people thought that they were friends with each other. 

Anyway, he was so well known for his ostentatious ways that Rose Bertin and all the other hat manufacturers started selling the chapeau à la Calonne, which was a hat that made fun of his ostentatious ways. It was a hat that just had, like, you know, so many accessories on it. It’s kind of like jewels and ribbons and lace and just so much that it was, like, over the top, including the Harpy pattern to connect him to Marie Antoinette. So, that’s hat number two, just for all the people tracking the hats in this episode. Or did I miss one? I think it’s hat number two. 

Anyway, so Calonne, not visually the face of the brand you want at this time, and he also had this impossible job of trying to balance France’s debt. So, he was like, “We need a plan to sort this out because we don’t have any money and this is le crisis.” So, he’s looking at what’s going on in France, and he’s like, “What about if we increase our revenues by taxing the nobility and the clergy?” So, up until this point, the only people who paid taxes in France were everyone else, so not rich people and not the clergy, who were, like, the people who were the richest in all of France. The only people paying taxes were, like, the angry mob of peasants. So, he’s like, “Yeah, what if we just increase our revenue by taxing the nobility and the clergy equally with the commoners?” So, just make a land tax; anyone who owns land will just pay a certain amount of tax. 

So, in the history of France as a kingdom, the aristocracy and the church had never been taxed before, but it’s like, yeah, this is a great way to make money. It’s really interesting, people talk about that today. Why don’t we tax our billionaires? Wouldn’t that pay off some of our debts and, like, provide much-needed social services? A similar concept, which was taken just as well by the billionaires of that era as it is by the billionaires of our era. Although Berry, the king, was like, “This makes sense. I like this plan. Let’s do it.” But even though he’s the king and he’s an absolute monarch, he couldn’t just change tax laws on his own. This had to go through the Parlement of Paris, which is sort of like the Supreme Court. This is the same place that had only just recently been the people who judged the Affair of the Necklace, who had just found Rohan not guilty. So, Berry is like, “They don’t like the monarchy. They’re not going to side with me on this, so we need to get somebody else to rubber-stamp this new tax plan.” So, Calonne was like, “Well, what if we just sidestep them entirely and call for this other thing? We can call for an Assembly of Notables,” which is a group of handpicked regional officials, and that would be a way that they could… If they approved it, then it would be okay. So, Berry’s like, “Great, do it.” 

So, they convened the Assembly of Notables at Versailles, February 22, 1787. The notables arrived and, you know, they’ve been told like, “France… We’re in this debt. We’re struggling. You know, we need to increase taxes because of the imminent financial collapse.” But the notables arrived at Versailles (which is where Berry lives, and all these people live, all these rich people), and they’re like, “Huh, couldn’t help but notice that you have all these home renovation projects happening and everyone’s wearing these various hats and poufs. All the royals seem to own numerous houses, like, so many horses.” Even though France was in debt, Versailles didn’t look like it, so the notables were like, “Doesn’t really look like you need to change the tax laws, actually.” Also, the notables, the Assembly of Notables, was assembled by people from land and nobility or the clergy. So, these are the people who would have to have their taxes increased. So, they showed up at Versailles, and they’re like, “It looks like you guys are killing it, actually. We don’t want to pay taxes,” and they got really mad about it. In fact, they opposed the proposal so vehemently that Berry was forced to veto the plan and actually fire Calonne. Calonne became known as Monsieur Déficit for his attempts to raise taxes. 

So, really, the haters are all just the rich people, really. The haters are, like, manipulating the peasant people in France to hate Marie Antoinette and to hate Calonne and stuff. But really, the haters… I don’t know, I just figured that out for myself. Maybe you just did too. You probably figured it out two episodes ago. Anyway, so Calonne is fired, and so there’s not one main minister anymore for Berry to turn to for help. And he’s somebody who, as we talked about in the first episode, is neurodivergence-y coded, probably. He’s somebody who can get really easily overwhelmed, he can get really easily overstimulated, and he has this paralyzing inability to make decisions, especially when he’s feeling stressed out. So, he needs people around him to help him and to help him make these decisions, and there’s not a minister around. So, he’s like, “Marie Antoinette, will you help me out?” And she’s like, sure. “Sure. I’m in my mom era, and I can be your honorary mom now as well.” 

So, Ambassador Mercy, this guy who is still on the scene, he’s one of the main people we know about what happened from, he was the Austrian ambassador sent by Marie Antoinette’s mother, now dead, (the mother, not Mercy). Ambassador Mercy is still there, and he is looking out for Marie Antoinette as her honorary dad. So, he reported that Berry came to Marie Antoinette in tears every day. He was so overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. He’s truly not able to function. So, Marie Antoinette, just to keep up with what’s happening, she’s 32, she’s been two years out of flower crowns, she’s in her mom era, mother of three, and she is at a point in her life where she is capable of helping him out. Maybe she would have been before, but remember, he used to not turn to her because he had that tutor before, who was like, “Austrian women are all bitches. Don’t listen to Austrian women,” or whatever. 

So, she’s like, “Yeah, finally. I can be the Maria Theresa to you. I do have some knowledge at this point.” You know, what she had was just, like, a real willingness to want to help. She also confided in Ambassador Mercy, who, you know, she was in contact with as well. She was just like, “Berry is in no fit state for this.” Like, he was struggling; he was not doing well mentally, physically. And so, she stayed by his side. She was the queen, but she was also his wife, and she was also kind of unofficially his minister. She took as much control of the situation as she could because she saw that Berry was not capable of doing this at this point. But there’s only so much that she could do because the crisis was so massive and, like, decades long. And how much could she help out? She had been iced out of government stuff until now; she did not know a lot about finance, but she just wanted to help because somebody had to. She stepped up. 

So, she brought in a new person to be the new minister of finance because she’s like, “Someone has to do this who’s not me.” So, this is a guy who was her trusted ally, Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, and the role that he took over was Prime Minister, which there had not been someone in that job for a long time actually, and the other ministers were mad that they brought in someone to be the Prime Minister, and they were like, “It is the queen who governs!” And she was present, visually, like, she arranged policy meetings, she sat in on these meetings with the king. Sometimes when he wasn’t up to it, she would attend in his place. She was there doing stuff because no one else was. Berry was not able to do it, and then the ministers were just like, “[grumbles] She’s not the king.” It’s like, yeah, the king is in his room, like, not able to talk right now. Anyway, so she did her best to understand the issues, and she did her best to advise her husband. But the issue is just, there’s no money. There’s no money coming into France. This is le crisis. 

Even the weather was working against her and them and everybody, France at this time. There had been bad storms before. Remember, there was that horrible hailstorm we talked about before. So, now there’s yet more severe storms followed by drought, and then excessive cold. So, the trifecta of just things that fuck up your farms. This ruined the crops, forced the price of bread—which we’ve talked about numerous times in this podcast—people in France are serious about their bread. It was the one thing that, no matter how poor you were, at least you had some bread, but now there’s not even bread for people. The price of bread reached record highs. 

And I saw recently— Wait, I think I took a screen capture of it. Yeah. I saw on Threads, so Alyssa C. Davis posted on Threads. What she says is, “Witch hunts weren’t random. Economist Emily Oster found in a 2004 study that witch trials surged during crop failures and economic crises. Hard times needed scapegoats.” I saw that and it made me think of Marie Antoinette, because there’s so much crop stuff happening and she is so much the scapegoat in this situation. Like, she does not control the weather, but everybody’s so hungry and so mad, and you can’t just blame, like, in today’s world, we can blame, you know, climate change, the billionaires, like, all these horrible corporations. And back then, it’s like, who are they going to blame? Like, God? The more people starved and the more the crops were shitty, the more people turned on her because they had to blame somebody. 

Actually, that makes me think of something else that I wanted to share with you. I’ve been trying to formulate how to describe this. The way that people turned on Marie Antoinette, and the way that she became the face of this whole economic crisis, is similar… The comparison that I thought of is earlier this year when there was that whole, like, space flight and Katy Perry went on, it was Jeff Bezos’s whatever it’s called, the Blue Origin space flight. It was just this group of women went up on this, like, little space tourism trip, Lauren Sánchez being one of them, Jeff Bezos’s now wife. It was maybe part of her bachelorette party, I don’t know. But this whole thing happened, and then Katy Perry was part of it, and she went up and she talked about like, “Yeah, I’m going to go up in full glam,” and she did, and then she spent all her time up in space, like, promoting her tour that she’s doing, or her new album that flopped. Katy Perry has been having quite a year in terms of just people turning on her, and the space flight really made people turn on her, and she really became the face of space tourism and, kind of like, Amazon and Jeff Bezos and everything. Where it’s like, if everyone was just like, “Yeah, let’s go get Katy Perry. Let’s cut off Katy Perry’s head.” It’s like, okay, you could, but Katy Perry didn’t cause this. She’s maybe benefiting from everything that’s happening with billionaires not paying taxes and big businesses and everything. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos shut down Venice for his wedding, and people are making fun of Lauren Sánchez for the dresses that she wore to that wedding, where it’s like Lauren Sánchez is not the cause of this, Katy Perry is not the cause of this, but people just always want to find… I just mean humanity, but you see this over and over and over again, it’s just like, can we blame a woman for this? 

What we see with this is that Marie Antoinette gets blamed for so much stuff. Where it’s like, in this situation, she’s certainly trying to help, but her spending habits and her fashion and stuff, those were part of the financial crisis, but that didn’t cause the financial crisis. The financial crisis, it’s like, go back 100 years. Louis XIV taking everyone to Versailles, making everybody have to get new outfits every day. It was this society that she was brought into, from away; this wasn’t even her style in Vienna. Anyway, that’s what I was thinking, which we’ll see in later episodes when Marie Antoinette really becomes, she already is a scapegoat, but once she’s in later episodes, imprisoned and things like that, I think I’ll draw back to these comparisons again, because it’s kind of like, if you have a scapegoat and then you capture the scapegoat, and then you kill the scapegoat, the problem is still there. So then, you just choose a new scapegoat, I guess. 

Anyway, so here’s what’s happening. There’s no bread. Everybody’s hangry. Berry is just trying to, he’s like, “We need more money, and the only way we can get money is from just taxes. That’s it. No one’s going to lend us money again.” So, August 6th, he tries to impose a tax on stamps and on land, but the Supreme Court, full of haters, they oppose this. Actually, they oppose this so much that they were disrespectful to him, they were hating on him, and so he sent them into exile because they were so disrespectful to him. And then violent protests against Berry, sending the Supreme Court away, nearly through the city, into the French Revolution. So, Berry allowed the Supreme Court to return. This is how close we are to the French Revolution happening. 

And then, the Royal Treasury ran out of money; the economy collapsed, companies went bankrupt. Many French people, as well as the foreign bankers who had lent them money before, lost their life savings and incomes. It was an economic disaster, and people were looking for a villain. Marie Antoinette was already so hated, but because she had been very influential in the government— The one time in her life she was influential in the government was during this time of trying desperately to stave off this economic collapse. So, they knew that she had been there; they knew that she had been in these meetings. And now France was officially bankrupt, and she—not any of these finance ministers, not Jacques Necker—she got the blame. 

So, one of her ladies in waiting, Madame Campan, who later wrote a memoir, wrote, “Her ostensible interference drew upon her from all parties and all classes of society and unpopularity, the rapid progress of which alarmed all those who were sincerely attached to her.” One of the biggest critics of Marie Antoinette and of Berry was Berry’s cousin, Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions. So, Ryan Phillippe, his whole goal, as I said at the beginning, was that he wanted to get Berry kicked out of being king so he, Ryan Phillippe, could be the new king in a new sort of constitutional type thing where there’s a king, but also a legislative body. He just wanted to be king, Ryan Phillippe, effectively. So, he actually joined the Supreme Court to declare Berry’s actions, like trying to impose these taxes, illegal. And Marie Antoinette and Berry were just like, “Fuck this guy, honestly,” and they both agreed to have Ryan Phillippe exiled for being insubordinate, which just made the peasants and people like him even more and hate Berry even more. 

So, Marie Antoinette’s unpopularity had been sort of fomenting; it had been building up slowly from the time she was queen until now. But then, now, it’s just like with the economic collapse, and with her involvement in it, all of the time that the Hater Nation had been spending making, paying for these pamphlets and stuff, really paid off, because now it’s just like an unstoppable train of hatred for Marie Antoinette. There’s no turning this around. Once this narrative has been set, I don’t know what she could have done at this point to turn this all around. 

Berry shut down completely. He was not able to have meetings, he was not able to talk to people. As he sometimes does, he just gets overwhelmed, and he just shut down entirely. Similar vibes to Henry IV, if you’re familiar with early medieval Tudor history, the wife of Margaret of Anjou, he also similarly became king, even though he didn’t really have the personality or temperament for it, and he would just shut down. And this just left Marie Antoinette even more to just become, like, the public face of monarchy in general. She kept living her life because what else can you do? She went into Paris to the Ryan Phillippe mall to go see the opera, but one day, she came to the opera and someone had left a note on the door of her box where she sat that said, “Tremble tyrants! Your reign must end.” And at the opera, people would hiss at her or ignore her completely. Finally, her bodyguard was like, “It is no longer safe for you to go to Paris and make public appearances. You are so hated.” And that’s where she used to go, to just have a nice time. She couldn’t go to the mall anymore. 

PS, at the mall, the number one bestseller in all the bookstores was the memoir of Jeanne de la Motte from the Affair of the Necklace, who had escaped prison and was now living in England, and I think Calonne had bankrolled her memoir because he also hated Marie Antoinette. 

So, everybody hated her, they’re reading this book about how Marie Antoinette was this lesbian lover with Jeanne de la Motte and all this stuff. And just adding to the bad timing of it all was Rose Bertin, who everybody knew had been Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker for a long time, she staged a fake bankruptcy to try and force all of her clients to pay her what they purchased on credit because her business was entirely run on credit. She wasn’t actually bankrupt; she just wanted some more people to pay her because she was annoyed at them or something. But because of her connection to Marie Antoinette, it didn’t take much for people to assume like, “Oh, Marie Antoinette bankrupted her. It must be Marie Antoinette who caused the bankruptcy of this woman.” And then this became the latest hat trend, a hat called “the savings account.” So, it was a hat—this is metaphorical—it’s a hat, and the top of the hat had been sliced off to sarcastically indicate how the national treasury had a bottomless amount of money. So, the hat is like topless, but it’s as though it’s bottomless. I don’t know, people were into it. This was hilarious to the people of the day. 

All of this, the financial collapse, and also just Rose Bertin’s, how she kind of burned some bridges here, Marie Antoinette not being able to go to Paris anymore, she just started spending less money with Rose Bertin. There was another seamstress she started working with a bit more as she entered a new frugal era. For the first time, she paid to have existing dresses redone rather than purchasing new ones. And Rose Bertin was like, “I’m not going to mend your dresses. You can take this to some other person.” So, Marie Antoinette was doing, like people do now, people trying to do now, it’s just like, take your old clothes and just tailor them a bit instead of buying a new outfit every day. But when Marie Antoinette needed a new major event outfit, she would still go to Rose Bertin, of course. 

For instance, a new major portrait was being painted of her at this time; it takes a long time to paint a portrait, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. So, this was a painting that Marie Antoinette— I said, like, what can she do to repair her reputation? Kind of the only move she had at this point was to remind everybody, like, “Look, I’m a mom. I’m a mom now. Isn’t this sympathetic? Please?” It’s like when people today, celebrities sometimes, who are in a scandal, suddenly pictures come out of them at the pumpkin patch with their cute children. You’re like, “Oh, look, they’re a mom!” Anyway, so she was working this new painting. She was wearing this red dress, and it’s a painting of her with her children. 

So, she had had a fourth child, I didn’t mention that. It was a daughter, her name was Sophie, but she died in infancy. Sophie was probably born prematurely, just like, the timeline of everything that happened around her birth. Marie Antoinette, when she went into labour, didn’t believe it was for a while, and Berry was actually out of town at that time. And Berry would not have been out of town if it was near her due date. So, probably, Sophie was born prematurely, she had lots of illness-type things, and she died very young. So, the painting was going to be a picture of Marie Antoinette with her four children and Sophie would be in this, like, bassinet. But then Sophie died while the painting was being done, so now it’s a painting of Marie Antoinette with her three children and then this empty bassinet, which makes it even… just emotional in a different way, really. Not just is she a mother, but she’s a grieving mother. 

This portrait was going to be displayed at the Paris Salon. The last time Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun had presented a painting of Marie Antoinette at the Paris Salon, it was the fuck dress portrait, which led to riots, et cetera. So, the Paris Salon was like, “Okay. We’re just going to mark off the wall where this painting will go, but we won’t put it out until the last possible minute just to try to avoid the riots.” But this backfired on them because people, like the wall, everyone knew where the portrait was going to go, and so somebody wrote, “Here is Madame Déficit,” and stuck that on the label on a wall where the painting was going to go, and that nickname stuck. Calonne had been Monsieur Déficit, now Marie Antoinette is Madame Déficit. 

Part of this painting too, if you look at it, and I talked about this with the author of the biography of Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Jordana Pomeroy, in this portrait, there’s Marie Antoinette with her children, and it’s really done in the style of a “Madonna and Child” type painting from classical art history. In the background of this painting, there’s a jewelry box, and it’s open and it’s empty. So, it’s kind of like Marie Antoinette is also not wearing a necklace in this painting. So, it’s really like, this portrait is showing, “These are the jewels of my life. Not literal jewels, my children. That’s what I value,” which is true of her, and that’s what she’s trying to indicate. 

So, she just continued, because of the hatred, just because of the ongoing scandal, she retreated from public view, she stopped spending as much money, which meant giving less money as gifts to her friends, which made her realize how many of her friends were shady people who only hung out with her for money. So, she started spending time with somebody who was actually nice to her, which was Berry had a sister called Madame Élisabeth, who had been a young girl when Marie Antoinette first came to France. They hadn’t spent that much time together, but they bonded; they liked each other. And Madame Élisabeth was very, I would say, nun-adjacent. She was very frugal; she dressed very simply. She probably would have become a nun is her kind of vibe. 

So, Marie Antoinette was spending more time with her, and they were getting along, and so it’s a real, like, it’s not even like a clean girl aesthetic, it’s even less, it’s just like a nun girl aesthetic. It’s just very plain. And then people, the haters, if Marie Antoinette dressed very ostentatiously, they would just be like, “How could you dress so ostentatiously? We’re in a financial crisis.” And she started dressing really plainly, and the haters were like, “How dare she dress plainly? She’s not dressed grandly enough. She’s the queen, and that’s inappropriate.” So, you know, nothing she did was correct because people just want to hate her. 

Meanwhile, the guy who was her ally, who she brought in as Prime Minister, Brienne, wasn’t fixing the financial crisis because guess what? No one could. And the people in the streets, they really liked Jacques Necker because the last major thing Jacques Necker had done, if you’ll recall, is he magically made it seem like France wasn’t in debt with his creative accounting, so they could get loans from other countries. That kind of kept France going for a while, but did also kind of lead them to this point now. So, was that a good thing he did? I don’t know. But the people, the French Revolution-type people, were just like, “Bring back Jacques Necker, he can solve this. If anyone can, he can. He’s our man.” And so, Marie Antoinette was like, “You know what? The people want Jacques Necker back, so Berry, I think that’s what we should do.” And Berry is like, “Whatever you want, babe.” So, Jacques Necker was reappointed to be the finance minister. 

He triumphantly returned to Versailles to work his magic, and people were really excited about that. The mob was thrilled about it; they went for parades with busts of him. I don’t know where they got busts of Jacques Necker from, maybe they had them from before. They also carried little mannequins of Ryan Phillippe through the streets of the mall, just being like, “We’re happy about this! This is all great.” They burnt effigies of Brienne, Marie Antoinette’s friend, the former finance minister. 

One of the reasons why they were really into Jacques Necker was that he was into the whole Rousseau of it all, the whole Enlightenment, liberty, equality, which was really, really trending lately because of the American Revolution, which had very recently just wrapped up successfully for the revolutionaries. So, Jacques Necker was like, “Okay, let’s sort this out.” And he’s just like, “This is even worse than last time I was here. I don’t think I could even pretend to have money. There’s truly no money coming in. We are truly a bankrupt nation.” So, he advised Berry to call… The Assembly of Notables hadn’t helped, and we knew that the Supreme Court wasn’t going to help, so it’s like, option C is we summon the Estates General to ask for emergency financial relief. 

The Estates General is the French version of a National Assembly. So, there are the three estates. The First Estate is the clergy; the Second Estate is the aristocracy; and the Third Estate is everybody else, the mob, let’s say. This is not a group that meets regularly; the last time that they had met was 1614, and now we’re in 1788. So, it’s really a last resort type thing to call, but this is kind of like, “We’ll call the Estates General and if they agree for the emergency financial measures, maybe that would be taxes or whatever it would be, but this is a way that we can maybe try and fix this crisis by calling this group of people together.” 

At around the same time that Berry called for the Estates General (this connects back to the whole American Revolution of it all) because America had recently released their Constitution, a thing that happened— Oh, it’s some significant date. We’re going to be talking about that later on the podcast. But anyway, the Constitution had been written. This outlined the structure, rights, and responsibilities of this brand-new system of government. And people in France were really hype about this. The Ryan Phillippe-type people were excited about it, the mob was excited about it. All the kind of like Rousseau, Enlightenment-type people were just like, “This is it. We love this concept of Constitution. Let’s have that for France now too. Let’s not just all be ruled by this king. Let’s also have people,” like we the people, et cetera, et cetera. So, the Estates General was meeting, and the Third Estate was like, “This is our chance, guys. We’re going to make a constitution. This is our chance.” 

Axel von Fersen, Marie Antoinette’s hot, Swedish friend/maybe lover, wrote in 1788, “Nobody speaks of anything but the Constitution. It’s a delirium.” People were really excited about the American Constitution, thinking maybe France could have a similar thing, and then, Berry announced that… So, remember, what he wants is to raise the taxes of the clergy and the aristocracy. And the Estates General is the clergy, the aristocracy, and everybody else. He knows, from the Assembly of Notables fiasco that the clergy and the aristocracy are not going to vote to increase their own taxes. He knows that it’s the Third Estate, that’s who is probably going to vote for this, so he decided to double the amount of people invited from the Third Estate so there’d be even more of them, so their votes would count more, and also it would reflect their majority in the general population. 

Also, at this point, Berry thought, naive sweet little baby, that the Third Estate had this instilled reverence for the monarchy, and he thought they would support them. So, he brought in even more people from the Third Estate for this meeting. So, this is the group that is coming; we’ve got the clergy, we’ve got the aristocracy, and then we’ve got this Third Estate, mob-type people, who are all coming and it’s like, “Yeah, technically we’re here for emergency financial reforms, but since we’re here anyway, let’s just declare a constitution and start a new kind of government.” 

So, the mob-type people knew they would never have a better chance like this. They wanted to, like the Americans who they’d help support, they want to seize the initiative and just drive home their point that France needs to have representative government. “It is up to us, the Third Estate, we’re going to make this happen.” And so, everybody shows up at Versailles, May 4, 1789. Every estate has their own outfit. The Third Estate, they’re wearing plain black hats and sombre coats, very like, basic, you know, not flashy-looking. The Second Estate, the aristocracy, were wearing their jewelled, magnificent finery, and then the clergy had beautiful robes like in the movie Conclave. So, in the past, the way that you dress meant who you were, and it meant how you should be treated. So, being dressed elegant and fancy in the past would have meant that these people were treated with absolute respect. But the Third Estate was just, like, proto mob, and they’re just like, “No, we’re all the same. We’ve read Rousseau. Let’s get this done.” 

Actually, among these people—everyone’s dressed in these different ways—some of the noblemen, some of the aristocracy who were vibing with the ideas of the Constitution and American Revolution, like Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions, cosplayed as Third Estate people. Like, they came dressed non-flashy, they came dressed in their most plain outfits. In fact, Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions had recently, he was really writing this whole like, “I am like you, poor people,” whole thing. He had made a great show of selling off expensive pieces from his family’s art collection, and the money he raised would go to help the people after this really hard winter they’d just all gone through. So, like, nice of him, but also makes himself look good. Two things can be true. 

So, he, as opposed to Marie Antoinette and Berry, the king and queen, they showed up the way that they’re supposed to at this, where everybody’s like, the fancier you’re dressed, the more respect you should have. They were the absolute most fanciest dressed people there; they’re in full monarchy drag. Berry is wearing this gold jacket to show you that he’s the Sun King; Marie Antoinette is wearing a silver dress, which shows that she’s the moon that supports the sun. Both were wearing the most precious diamonds that they owned from the royal collection. He had a diamond-encrusted sword, diamond buttons on his jacket, and diamond buckles on his shoes. On his hat, he was wearing what is now known as the Hope Diamond, which is one of the, like, hugest diamonds ever, that’s also got a cursed history. Marie Antoinette was wearing a huge diamond on her head and no necklace because she never… She was just like, “No necklaces.” For the necklace, she’s just like, “I need to make it known. I don’t like necklaces. I don’t wear necklaces. I’m not wearing a necklace.” 

So, it had been raining when this procession started. They’re processing on carriages in these outfits, except for, I assume the people of the Third Estate were walking. It had been raining, but then the sun broke through the clouds, making the king and the queen and their diamond-encrusted gold and silver outfits just glitter and look sort of amazing. And yet, the crowd was not calling out good things to them; they were calling, “Long live Ryan Phillippe!” the guy down there wearing the black coat. Marie Antoinette, at this procession, looked pale and upset. She was pale and upset, not just from the way Ryan Phillippe was being greeted, but from other things we’ll talk about in a minute, but also from gynecological things. She had had these four childs, and some damage had happened to her inside parts from these births, and this continues with her for the rest of her life. So, she’s ill as well, just so you know. 

Anyway, so while the royals and everybody were out in this parade, some members of the mob were just like, they’d heard so much about Petite Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s little enclave where she had her fake sheep farm, but also this little castle she lived in that she had redecorated. And all the rumours were that she had redecorated it in this trashy Calonne type way with gold and diamonds, and just like, “This is why the country’s in debt, because of her home renovations.” So, some people snuck into Petite Trianon so they could be like, “Ha-ha! Look, it’s all trashy.” But they went and they’re like, “Oh, it’s actually tasteful yet elegant,” and you know, they were disappointed. Anyway, the Estates General and its formal convocation the next day. 

The Third Estate made their first big move in a hat-based moment. When Berry was present, everyone was supposed to take off their hats because he’s the king, but the Third Estate kept their hats on. This was a big deal, and it’s kind of like “What’s going to happen? What’s he going to do?” But Berry, he took his hat off, and that made everyone else take off their hats, and that kind of calmed down this hat-based quasi drama. 

A person who was present, not sure why, Gouverneur Morris was there. If you’re marking off on your sheet, for those of you who are following along, people we’ve talked about in previous episodes, Gouverneur Morris is a surprise stealth supporting character in so many episodes of this podcast season. If you don’t know, if you didn’t hear the other episodes, he’s an American founding father who just went to France to fuck around, and he wrote some interesting diaries while he was there. Anyway, what he wrote about Marie Antoinette was that… Remember, we talked way back in the early episode, she has this resting bitch face. She just does, I do too. Lots of people do. But for people who didn’t know that she was ill, that she was going through this tragedy that I’ll tell you about in a minute. Anyway, Gouverneur Morris was just like, “Her face seemed to say, for the present, I shall submit, but I will have my turn.” Just the way her face sat made people confirm the terrible things people thought about her. 

So, the Estates General started meeting, and it’s just like, you know, a bunch of men meeting for politics stuff. They’re just like, “Mer-mer-mer! I want this. Mer-mer-mer!” So, it went on for like a month and a bit, and nobody could agree on anything, obviously. On June 17th, the Third Estate declared themselves France’s only legitimate legislative body, the Assemblée Nationale. So, they were doing their thing. They’re just like, “We’re going to make a constitution. We’re going to start a new government. You’re with us or you’re against us.” So, the Assemblée Nationale, previously known as Third Estate, invited the other two states to join them in drafting a constitution, and on June 20th, the Third Estate was locked out of the Great Hall, just for not following the rules or whatever, and in response, the Third Estate were like, “Okay, well, we need to have a meeting. Let’s make a constitution. Where is there a space big enough for all of us? Tennis court.” So, then they went to the tennis court at Versailles, and they swore a solemn oath, that is known as the Tennis Court Oath, to not disband until they had forced the monarchy to accept a constitution based on the principles of representative government. So, this is revolution-adjacent, but it’s like American Revolution style. Nobody’s cutting off anyone’s heads at this point; it’s American Revolution style. 

So, Berry, a man who really requires every day to be exactly like every other day, and to be able to prepare as much as possible for anything he’s going to do, was not prepared for this, especially because he and Marie Antoinette were in the midst, while this was happening, while the Estates General was happening, their son was dying. That was what I was talking about before when I said Marie Antoinette looked sad and whatever. 

Their older son, the Dauphin, seven years old, he had been ill for a very long time, like, most of his life. He had what was described as “tuberculosis of the spine,” which, as far as I can tell, just means tuberculosis has spread into other parts of the body. He is a sick little guy, and this is so tragic for both of them, Marie Antoinette and for Berry. It would be for any parent, but we’re talking about them, and they were both… Marie Antoinette was very, very, very close to her children; her children were so important to her. They were to Berry as well. They spent all this time as a family in Petite Trianon, like, much closer than a lot of other royals were to their children. 

Anyway, so when there was the procession, when they were dressed as the sun and the moon and stuff, their son was too ill to attend, but they laid him in the castle where he was staying, they put him on a sofa in the window so that he could watch the parade go by. And when his parents passed by that place, they knew he was there, and he was waving, and both of their eyes filled with tears knowing he was there. So, he died, this little guy, a seven-year-old, on June 4th, one month after the Estates General started, two weeks before the Tennis Court Oath. When he died, Berry and Marie Antoinette retreated to mourn at their chateau in Marly. But the day that the boy died, actually a delegation appeared, I think, some people from the Estates General (I don’t know if it was the Third Estate necessarily), like that day, the day that the little boy had died, some people came to see them and they were just like, “We demand the King to address our demands,” and Berry was forced to receive them. And he said, “Are there no fathers in the assembly of the Third Estate?” Which is, like, so sad and just really shows how people didn’t see Berry and Marie Antoinette as people. In this context, they were representing the monarchy, but also, it’s just like, can we take a week? Can we give them some time? No, they couldn’t. 

So, he and Marie Antoinette had to return to Versailles after only a few days of mourning for their son. Marie Antoinette suspected that, even in those two days away from Versailles, she knew that a hater nation at Versailles was working against her and Berry, especially Ryan Phillippe. Her suspicions were correct; these things were all true. And so, Marie Antoinette encouraged Berry to take a hard line against the Third Estate, encouraging him to disband the Estates General quickly before the members began a full-on rebellion. But Berry is not good at making decisions when he’s stressed out. And could he be more stressed out with the amount of things all happening to him simultaneously? Jacques Necker suggested maybe they could compromise with the rebels, and Berry was like, “Okay, that’s what we’ll do.” And so, when he was like, “Okay, we will compromise,” some other members of the clergy and as well as 47 noblemen, were like, “We will join the National Assembly now as well. It’s like a real thing. Let’s do this.” Ryan Phillippe was, of course, one of those noblemen to join this new National Assembly. 

So, the atmosphere back in Paris, because remember Paris is whatever, like, a few hours’ carriage ride from Versailles. So, they just hear the rumours of what’s happening, they’re not at Versailles. They were worried that the king was going to dismiss the Estates General rather than accept the constitution. People really wanted Ryan Phillippe to be the new king; people were cheering on the streets, “Ryan Phillippe forever!” And when Berry heard about this, he was like, “Okay, maybe they are closer to revolution than I thought,” and so he called for a strong military presence in Paris to maintain peace and order, which we see in today’s world as well. Does a strong military presence maintain peace and order? Or does it just cause kind of more riots and more upset? In this case, more riots and more upset. 

So, he heard that… It was revealed to Berry that lots of people from the French guards, from his army, intended to side with the National Assembly. So, Berry summoned soldiers to Versailles, foreigners and mercenaries, 30,000 soldiers were summoned to Versailles and to Paris to bring peace and order. Jacques Necker disagreed with this strategy, and then he was fired in the middle of the night and this made everybody in Paris even more upset because they all loved Jacques Necker. They were so mad that he was fired. The king and the military, they were like, “We think he’s going to separate the public.” So, this is where people who supported the Third Estate started to wear cockades, which we’ve talked about in other episodes. So, this is where the cockades were invented. 

Legend has it… So, a cockade, if you don’t know, it’s like, if you think about the French Revolution, they have those pins that are made of ribbons that are red and white and blue. It’s that. But initially, they were green because, legend has it, the first cockade was a leaf. So, Camille Desmoulins is a person we’ve talked about on the podcast before. He gave a very affecting speech at around this time. He was in Ryan Phillippe’s mall, and he snatched a leaf off of a tree in the mall, while inciting… He climbed on a table, he’s just like, “Everybody, let’s get guns and let’s go up and fight the royals.” So, he grabbed a leaf and pinned it to himself, and so, at first, people started wearing leaves or green little ribbons, until they realized that green is the colour of Artois, which is Berry’s younger brother, who was very unpopular. That was the colour of his team, his servants, so they’re like, “Okay, not green.” So, then they switched to red and blue because those were the colours they liked. The royal family’s colours were white, so they liked that this would be different from the royal family’s colours. Coincidentally, red, also the colour of Ryan Phillippe’s servants and stuff, so they all kind of match him, their sort of leader at this time. 

Foreign troops arrived, and they were wearing cockades because just everyone does, I guess, they were wearing black cockades, and the people in Paris were suspicious and paranoid, and they decided to, as Camille Desmoulins had encouraged them to, arm themselves with weapons. So, they’re like, “Where are we going to get weapons from?” So, the people in Paris, the mob-type people, they went running and just looting anywhere that they knew there were weapons. So, like gunsmiths’ stores, armorers ‘ shops, the supplies for the royal soldiers; they just broke into these places and stole weapons and gunpowder. July 14th, a mob of 50,000 people forced its way into the main armoury for the French guards, who were the troops responsible for protecting the king and keeping public order. 50,000 people! They went in, they broke in, and they took out all the weapons and all the ammunition stored there and redistributed those to all the people in the street, including cannons to civilians. So, the stockpile of guns… There were so many that they had to get volunteers to get rid of them all, there wasn’t even enough people to give them all to. There were so many guns. So, they were now an army, really, the mob. And they’re like, “You know what? We need more guns.” So, they headed to the Bastille prison. 

Quick facts on the Bastille, which I mentioned earlier, that was where suspects in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace had been held, and that sort of increased its notoriety because people in the mob sided with Rohan and Jeanne de la Motte, and so they thought like, “Oh, this is a place where people are held who we actually support.” And prison reform had been a popular topic for a while among the Enlightenment people, writers of the time, and the Bastille prison was seen as a symbol of just like a despotic king, about a tyrant, about like everything that was wrong and horrible with the monarchy. There were only seven prisoners actually in the jail on this day. There had previously been eight prisoners, but one of them had recently been transferred. The person who was transferred, the Marquis de Sade, which is where the word sadism comes from, and maybe we’ll do an episode about him later. Anyway, Marquis de Sade used to, up until very recently, he would go for his exercise on the top of the towers, and he would yell at the crowds from the top of the towers, (and then also, when they wouldn’t let him there anymore, from his cell window), he was yelling, “The authorities plan to massacre the prisoners in the castle,” so he was really rallying people up as well. 

The governor of the Bastille was a man named de Launay. When people started stealing guns and weapons, he’s like, “I feel like they’re going to come here, so let’s protect the Bastille.” And so, he’d recruited 32 additional Swiss soldiers, in addition to the 82 soldiers who were his usual guards at the prison. So, the prison had, like, I guess, a moat, or it had a drawbridge. So, he pulled up the drawbridge and closed all the entryways so nobody could get into the Bastille because he knew that the Bastille was unpopular with the Revolution-type people, but he also knew there was weapons that people would want, and he also knew that this is the only remaining royal stronghold in central Paris. They had also just received 250 barrels of gunpowder, which people knew about, and they wanted to go there and get. 

So, that morning, 900 people started off the day assembling outside the Bastille. De Launay, the governor, let two of them in to negotiate, but they couldn’t reach a compromise. The revolutionaries wanted the guns and the gunpowder to be handed over, but de Launay refused to do so unless he got authorization from Versailles. So, they took a break from the negotiations, and they were just about to renew the negotiations later on, like at 1:30 in the afternoon, but the crowd outside was impatient and angry, and they just started storming the Bastille, pushing towards the main gate. So, the guards at the Bastille, everyone’s kind of confused, not sure who’s on what side. It’s a really confined space, and so this chaotic fighting kind of broke out. The two sides, both with guns, started firing at each other. So, that’s like, the next two hours. 

3:30 PM. Royal forces came, so people who had been in the French army but had switched sides to the Revolutionary/Third Estate side, came to reinforce the crowd. They brought with them trained officers as well as cannons. They discovered their weapons were not strong enough to damage the main walls of the fortress, so then they began to fire their cannons at the wooden gate of the Bastille. By now, 83 people in the crowd had been killed, and another 15 had been wounded and would later die. Only one of the Bastille guards had been killed and returned. At this point, the Bastille is defending itself as best as it can. De Launay attempted to negotiate a surrender. He threatened— They have this 250 pounds of gunpowder, he’s like, “I will blow up… We will suicide ourselves,” if his demands are not met. “You guys need to surrender or we will blow us all up.” 

In the midst of this, of de Launay’s kind of a glass-stitch attempt, the drawbridge suddenly came down, and revolutionaries were able to get in. De Launay himself was dragged outside into the streets and was killed in a purge-style by the crowd, the same way, a few weeks ago, the Princess Lamballe episode, he was just ripped limb from limb by the crowd. Three officers and three soldiers were also killed during the course of the afternoon, and then de Launay’s head was put on a pike and it was paraded through the streets, which just is a thing people did, from then on, quite a bit in the French Revolution. The Swiss guards, who he had called in to back up his people, were not wearing their regular uniform coats, and so they were mistaken for Bastille prisoners, and they were actually able to escape. The guns and gunpowder were seized, and the seven Bastille prisoners were set free. Who were those seven? Well, four of them were counterfeiters/forgers. One was “a madman.” One was an aristocrat who had been found guilty of incest and actually had been put in jail because his family had asked he be held there because he was such a danger to them and their family. And then, also a man who had attempted to murder Madame de Pompadour by anonymously sending her a box of explosives. So, these people just disappeared into the streets, and we don’t know what happened to any of them again, they were freed. 

Meanwhile, 50,000 people with muskets… That’s too many people. The ordinary police could not tamp down these people and also the ordinary police had joined their side anyway, but the mob realized, “Oh, we’re an army. We have the power of an army and so we need to have a general. We need an experienced, competent general to lead our army. How about this guy? The Marquis de Lafayette,” from the musical Hamilton. So, he had been in America during the American Revolution, he was now in France, and he had been friendly… he’d gone to Versailles, he’d visited with Marie Antoinette and with Berry and everything. But he had fought with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in the American Revolution, so his whole thing is just “Rights to the people, I love a constitution.” He supported Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions, and he’s like, “Let’s just do this revolution but in a gentlemanly type way.” So, he became the commander-in-chief of the National Guard of Paris, which is kind of what this army turns into. 

Ryan Phillippe is just like, “This is great. My whole plan of becoming the new king is working out great.” So, he was paying for outfits for everybody, for army outfits, getting everybody guns so that they would support him as their new king, or whatever his goal was at this point. And so, because you have Ryan Phillippe and Lafayette in the National Guard, these are two very popular guys among the mob, so more and more people were defecting from Berry’s army into this new army. And Berry knew that Ryan Phillippe was really leading this whole thing, which is true, and he was. 

So, a lot of things happening very quickly. We know that this is not how Berry best thrives. When the day had started, like, remember this was the 14th. When the 14th had started, he just was doing his regular thing. He’s a guy who likes his routines; he went out hunting, and he has this diary that he keeps where often all that he writes is how many things he shot or not while he was shooting. And so, all that he wrote about this day, July 14th, was “Rien,” which means “nothing,” which just means “Didn’t shoot any deer today.” That’s all he recorded. 

Anyway, but what he did do, that he didn’t write in his diary… So, once he heard what was happening in Paris (the French Revolution breaking out), he hurried back from his hunting and called a council meeting in Versailles to be like, “Tell me what to do,” because he’s, again, not great at decision-making, and he likes to have other people help him. The whole royal family’s future was now in peril, so it wasn’t just his advisors there with him. His brothers were there, Artois and Provence, Marie Antoinette was also in this meeting. They all agreed that they weren’t worried that the monarchy itself was going to be overthrown entirely, but they were worried that Ryan Phillippe was going to have a coup and take over himself. So, Berry, ultimately, after getting opinions from everybody, he’s like, “Okay, I’m going to withdraw our troops from Paris,” which is what the National Assembly, had wanted. This is part of why the war broke out, because they were so mad about the troops having been sent into Paris, so he agreed to get rid of them, but it was kind of like two days too late, really. 

People in Paris wanted Berry to come to Paris and congratulate them on whatever they were doing, and Marie Antoinette was like, “Okay. What about instead of you going to Paris to probably be murdered, what if we as a family escape to the border of the Habsburg Netherlands,” to this place called Metz, where members of Marie Antoinette’s powerful family lived, and they can work from there to squash the revolution from a safe distance where they would be protected. And Artois, which is Berry’s younger hot brother, was like, “Yes, I agree. That’s what we should do.” Because he knew Artois and Marie Antoinette were kind of the two most hated people in the royal family, and they both knew they would be at the most risk of being torn limb from limb by the mob. But Berry is just like, “Eugh, you guys, I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” 

So, while he was just not able to decide what to do, Marie Antoinette just started packing up her shit. She assumed that they were going to flee, and so she packed up her jewels because that’s what you need. Not because of, like, “I need to look pretty,” but because “These are valuable and we can use these to pay for army or troops or ships or whatever.” But Berry’s other brother, Provence, was like, “No, if we escape, that’s like we’re surrendering to the coup. That’s like giving legitimacy to Ryan Phillippe. And once he’s in place as the new king, it’ll be impossible to take it rid of him.” 

So, eventually, Berry’s just like, “What to do? What to do?” And he decided that, okay, Artois, his younger brother, and then also the Duchess of Polignac, the governess of the royal children, Marie Antoinette’s bestie, they could both flee with their families because he knew that they were, like, top targets of the mob. Marie Antoinette was the one who got to call Gabrielle Polignac and her husband to her rooms, and so she told them, “There is yet time to rescue you from the fury of my enemies. If they attack you, it’ll be much more because of hatred for me than for you. Do not be a victim to your affection and to my friendship.” And the Polignacs didn’t want to go, they didn’t want to abandon her, but she begged them to go and absolutely saved their lives by getting them to leave at that point. But Berry was like, “I’m going to stay in Versailles. I will go to Paris, and I will compromise with the revolutionaries.” Marie Antoinette is just like, “What the fuck are you doing? They will never let you return. They are going to murder you.” And he’s like, “This is what I’ve decided to do, and I’m going to do it.” 

And so, it became generally known that Berry was leaving to Paris, everybody in Versailles kind of learned that this is what his plan, so there was a panicked exodus. People just fled Versailles, servants and lots of people, because they’re like, “Oh, this is it. We’re fucked and we’re all going to be murdered, so I’m going to run away.” Marie Antoinette didn’t even know which of her servants had left and had stayed until the next morning, when she called for them, and she was told that their rooms were empty, the doors were locked. Madame Campan, her lady-in-waiting who did stay, wrote “Terror had driven them away.” Understandably. Understandably. Marie Antoinette did not flee. She knew that Berry needed her; he could not survive without her there to support. She also didn’t send her children away because if she had and news of their departure had been disseminated, then it would sound like this was an attempt to subvert the Revolution because her son, her one remaining son, is now the Dauphin and he’s the future king and stuff. So, Berry remained, her new friend, her new close friend, Madame Élisabeth, Berry’s sister, also remained, she refused to abandon her brother. The Aunts, who cares about them? Guess what? They also stayed, and so did Berry’s brother, Provence. 

The next day, this is like a day, July 14th, Bastille. Couple more days. Now it’s July 17th, and Berry went to Paris. So, he was escorted by Lafayette and the National Guard. He went to make this speech, to congratulate the people of Paris on their Revolution, I guess. So, he had a prepared statement that he read with a sad and anxious look. He said that he indicated his readiness to do everything in his power to quiet their minds and restore tranquillity to the city. And then the mayor of Paris handed him a red and blue cockade, the symbol of the Revolution, and Berry pinned this to the top of his hat, on top— He already has his white cockade on because that’s like, the royal family has a white cockade. So, it’s like, white cockade, red and blue on top of that, and that is how the tri-colour, red, white and blue cockade was born. Lafayette described it as a fusion of the people mixed with the monarchy. It’s the red, white and blue. 

So, then Berry stepped onto the balcony to show everybody, “Hey, it’s me, I’m wearing a cockade.” And people yelled at him for the first time in ages, “Vive le roi!” “Long live the king!” et cetera. It said, “These cheers work like a tonic on him. The King breathed again,” this is Madame Campan writing, “The King breathed again at that moment and with tears in his eyes, exclaimed that his heart stood in need of such shouts from the people.” And he was still alive. He went back to Versailles. His family assumed that he would be murdered; they were so happy to see him, like, they all came rushing down to embrace him all at once. 

And then it’s kind of like things… Like, in any sort of series of intense crises, there’s quiet moments. And now it’s a part where this is kind of like, “Okay, maybe everything’s going to be fine,” type moment. What happens fashion-wise, as I’m sure you can imagine, hats, and also outfits. The red, white and blue becomes everything. So, women are wearing a red, white and blue dress. People were like, you know, that series of season of Sex and the City where Carrie wore really big fabric flowers for a while? The rich, wealthy, Versailles-type people are wearing huge cockades. It’s just like, “Oh, cockades. So cool right now. Everyone’s doing this.” Even the Aunties ordered red, white and blue ribbons to trim their dresses with. They ordered a bunch of cockades for themselves. And you’re like, “Wait, why are the royal family wearing their cockades? Why are Versailles people?” And it’s because it’s a Hater Nation. Because a cockade is like an anti-Marie Antoinette fashion statement, and even in the midst of everything that’s happening, the Aunts and other members of Hater Nation still hate Marie Antoinette. They’re like, “We will side with the revolutionaries because that’s against Marie Antoinette. That’s how much we have always hated her.” 

So, by now, it had been two months since Marie Antoinette’s son had died, and so just because of societal cultural rules, she stopped wearing her black mourning colours, she could wear colour again. She did not wear the tricolore; she would have been very easily able to get her hands on some of the three-colour hats and cockades because Rose Bertin was making bank selling elegant cockades from her store, the Grand Mogol. There was a new trendy colour, Pantone’s colour of the year, Foullon’s blood. So, it was a shade of red named for a 70-year-old nobleman called Foullon who had been murdered by revolutionaries. So, everything’s getting pretty grisly in Paris. 

Marie Antoinette did not wear Foullon’s blood colour; she did not wear the tricolore. She also, there’s a trend to get necklaces or earrings set with stones from the Bastille, like Bastille stone, which is like rock, it’s not jewels. Anyway, she did not get Bastille earrings. There’s also, of course, a hat called the bonnet à la Bastille, which is a hat shaped with towers on it, like the Bastille has, white satin towers. There’s also a hairstyle/pouf called the coiffure à la nation, which is a hairstyle with tricolore ribbons in the hair. These are all the trends that are happening, and for once, the trends are happening, and Marie Antoinette is not starting them, and she’s also not following them. 

She’s dressing with consistency, and she’s dressing in a way, like at the parade at the Estates General, she’s just like, “I’m the queen and I’m going to dress like the queen. Everyone’s dressing the same, and that’s kind of fucking things up, so let’s just restore queenly dressing.” So, she started wearing diamonds every day. She had been in the Petite Trianone, clean girl era for a while, and then she got into her mother era, and then the dressing simply. First time since all of that, she started dressing very queenly with lots of jewels. These jewels are communicating her role as queen to represent, to remind everybody that a gap existed between her and them. But the lines have been blurred, partially by her, because when she started wearing the fuck dresses, like the casual dresses, everybody could dress like that. Or even with the poufs, she was wearing the poufs, and then the actresses were wearing the poufs, and it was hard to tell what anyone’s station was in life. And she was just like, “Let’s make these stations very separate again,” but it’s like, you can’t unring that bell. 

So, there were these sort of old-time Vogue magazine-type things, almanacs that came around. In a 1789 issue of one of these, it presented a headdress called the Bonnet of the Three United Colours, which, it was explained like, “Here’s how it looks in here, so you can make it for yourself.” But it also explains, “This represents how in France, we no longer have class distinctions.” Everyone’s the same in France now. So, it was a white helmet-shaped bonnet with a huge cockade on it, as well as it featured a golden sword, like on this headdress. The sword represents the aristocracy, and then a blue spade, which represents the Third Estate, and so the two of them together make a cross. So, it’s like the three estates all together in a bonnet. And there’s also the pouf à la tricouleur, the pouf with a cockade in it. And suddenly, women were also wearing fuck dresses again, like this became a way for women to differentiate themselves, the women of the like “new France” to show “We’re different from the silk and velvet and fur that the royals wear.” 

So, olden days Vogue suggested wearing your long fuck dress, your white, muslin gown called the chemise à la constitution, maybe you can embroider it with little red, white and blue bouquets with a wide red sash, and then you look like the patriot that you are. This is around the same time that previous Vulgar History subject, Theroigne de Mericourt, was on the scene, being a notable revolutionary with her outfits. She wanted women to be able to join the National Guard, and because they weren’t allowed, she made her own faux uniform out of, like, she wore this blue coat, a white scarf, and a red cap on her head, which kind of harkens back to Marie Antoinette when she would wear the androgynous masculine riding clothing that people thought was kind of so scandalous at the time. Even Theroigne de Mericourt’s outfit made its way into olden times Vogue as an outfit for a woman patriot. 

In August 1789, things are happening quickly. The Assembly, the new governing body of France, founded on the tennis court, they declared absolute freedom of the press, and this just led to even more shitty pamphlets and articles coming out about Marie Antoinette because there’s no law against it anymore. There had already been so many when there was a law against it, now there’s no law. So, she just becomes even more this, like, everyone is united in hating her. That’s kind of what’s bringing together all of Paris. The rumours were the usual ones we heard before about she’s this, like, insatiable nymphomaniac who has all these orgies, she has all these lesbian lovers. There’s also rumours that she was secretly running the government, and also, remember the whole thing about she was from Austria and she was not trusted. She was the Autrichienne, as the Aunties called her when she first showed up. So, there were rumours that, because her brother was the Holy Roman Emperor, she was secretly running France, and she was going to allow Austria to invade. She had red hair, if you… I forget that sometimes because all the paintings she has the powder in her hair, so it’s gray or white. But she had red hair, people knew she had red hair, Madame du Barry used to call her “Carrots”, Anne of Green Gables coded. Anyway, because Marie Antoinette had red hair, she was compared to the famous evil redhead person, Judas from the Bible, a famous traitor; all people with red hair are traitors, apparently. 

The Aunties were, of course, paying for these pamphlets, still. Again, cartoons came out showing her as a harpy, showing her as the ostrich. There’s this one cartoon of her, I think it’s more of an ostrich because she’s like the autrichienne, which technically means ‘the woman from Austria,’ but also sounds like the ostrich bitch. So, there’s this cartoon of her as an ostrich, stomping all over the newly released Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is a document that Thomas Jefferson, in town from America, had helped Lafayette and the others to write. All the stuff I’m talking about, this is around the same time that Thomas Jefferson is in Paris. We did two episodes about Sally Hemings, who was with Thomas Jefferson at this time. So, this is around the time that they all left because they were like, “Nothing good is going to happen here, and the winters are cold, and let’s just go back to Virginia.” You can listen to those episodes later to learn more about what happened, and how macaroni and cheese was invented, and things. That’s the timeline of all this happening. 

So, people were hating Marie Antoinette. It’s like, they hated her at the beginning of this episode, they hated her midway through, the whole Madame Déficit, now they hate her even more. Hatred of Marie Antoinette is just building to an extent that no one could have ever seen coming. It’s bananas. So, there were calls within Paris for them to invade Versailles to capture the king, bring him to Paris and imprison or kill Marie Antoinette. Lafayette, who’s the head of the National Guard, he’s like, “No, I’m just here for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and for constitutional… Let’s write a constitution, not murdering the queen.” So, he was so cool with the people at Versailles to some extent, so he was able to warn Berry’s bodyguard, a man called the Comte de Saint-Priest, that this attempt was coming, that people were going to come to Versailles to try and kidnap them. 

So, Saint-Priest only had 800 bodyguards in his squad. He arranged for 1,000 more people to be transferred from Flanders to Versailles. This unit arrived September 23, 1789. Two days later, Axel von Fersen shows up as well. And when this guy shows up, like to me, in this story, I feel the relief Marie Antoinette must have felt to just be like, “Augh! Thank God. This guy knows what’s going on, this guy gives good advice, he’s also hot. Maybe my lover, maybe my child’s father. Thank God he’s here. Someone with sense.” So, she was very relieved to have him there again. Saint-Priest noticed that Axel von Fersen continued to enjoy free access to her apartments and had frequent rendezvous with her at Petite Trianon. He had use of an apartment at Versailles, so this is where people who think that they were lovers— Which, I honestly don’t know what I think. I want them to have been because I want her to have had an experienced, skilled lover with her, if that’s what she wanted, because Berry was not that. And Axel von Fersen, like, before they got caught up with each other, was a fuck boy and would have certain skills. There’s a new TV show coming out, I don’t know when, it’s called The Von Fersens, and it’s about Axel von Fersen and his sister. I don’t know what his sister was about. Maybe I need to do an episode about her, but it’s a Swedish TV show coming out soon. Exciting. In the movie, the Sofia Coppola movie, he’s played by Jamie Dornan in his screen debut. Anyway, Marie Antoinette got ten days with her hot boyfriend, and then everything goes to hell. 

The problem begins when these thousand people come from Flanders to be their backup soldiers. As so many things in this story, what happens is like, “Well, etiquette demands that we do this, so let’s just do it even though it’s maybe not a good idea.” Tradition dictated that the Flanders people had to have a party in their honour by the local army people. And so, the bodyguards that Saint-Priest was in charge of, they hosted a banquet, October 1st, for 200 officers of the Flanders people. I guess there’s two units. Anyway, a bunch of the Flanders soldiers were invited to this party, and it was held in the great Theatre of the Palace, the only room large enough to hold everyone, I guess the tennis court was not an option. There was a lot of wine because they’re French people and they’re having a nice time. 

Marie Antoinette and Berry were not there, it was just going to be a soldiers’ only party. But the troops kept yelling, “Vive le roi! We want to see the king and queen.” And so, one of the commanders went and were like, “Berry, Marie Antoinette, I think it would be great for the morale if you guys came out and said hi.” And Marie Antoinette thought, like, “Oh, I’ll bring out the children too, to really bring home like, look, you’re protecting us, we’re a family, I’m a mom.” And so, they came out to where the party was happening, and the troops were so happy to see them, people are clapping, they’re just like, “Long live the king, the queen, the dauphin!” and the troops were all wearing white cockades to represent that they support the monarchy, or some of them wearing black cockades because that was just what they wore is kind of like, mercenary troops. 

After this party, Hater Nation— They never sleep, they never sleep! They’re on guard 24 hours a day. Rumour spread that Marie Antoinette had come out in this party, and she encouraged everyone to stomp on tricolour cockades and yelling about like, “Down with the Revolution and stuff.” I think people were also like, and it was kind of an orgy also. So, everyone was like, “Oh, the bodyguards are anti-revolutionaries, and the royal family is triggering this all.” So, this party turns into a huge scandal that everybody’s really horrified by, that sounds like Marie Antoinette was stomping on cockades, which, like, we know how seriously these people take cockades. 

How did these rumours spread? Who would have spread these rumours, who was at Versailles at that time? Members of Hater Nation got word to Ryan Phillippe, who, so Hater Nation themselves, Ryan Phillippe, other men mostly, disguised themselves as peasant women, like Rochester in Jane Eyre, and they went around to taverns near Versailles and in Paris and just told the story like, “Did you hear? There was a party at Versailles and Marie Antoinette was stomping on cockades,” and just getting everybody really riled up against Marie Antoinette and Berry. And then, these fake peasant women, who were actually Hater Nation, got the actual peasant women really upset. And when I say peasant women, I mean the Market Ladies who, if you listened to the episodes we did about the French Revolution, like they don’t fuck around. They will murder you with their wooden clogs, they are the Market Ladies, and they’re incensed. They’re so mad about this cockade stomping. 

So, October 5th, the British ambassador in Paris was just like, “Oh, what a nice day.” He wakes up, he looks out his window, and he says: 

I was much surprised and at first much entertained with a ludicrous sight of a female army proceeding very clamorously, but in order and determined step toward Versailles. I do not exaggerate when I assure your grace that there could not have been less than 5,000 women who, armed with every weapon they could possibly pick up, proceeded on this expedition.

But then he says that his “enjoyment faded quickly when he perceived they were followed by numerous inhabitants besides many detachments of the armed bourgeoisie.” And in fact, it’s Market Ladies, it’s the National Guard, and Lafayette is there as well, although even though he’s the one who kind of told Berry like “Heads up, this might happen,” but Lafayette’s not really in charge of the National Guard. They basically said, “Come with us or we will kill you,” and so Lafayette came along as well. 

So, at Versailles, Saint-Priest heard that this was happening, like people, someone rode out there to tell them like, “Hey, guess who’s coming? Tens of thousands of Market Ladies and also the National Guard.” And so, he heard eight hours in advance that they were coming. That’s how long it takes to walk there, I guess. Berry was again just, like, out doing his normal shooting, and they were like, “Berry, return to the palace. Shit’s going to go down.” So, Saint-Priest recommended that Marie Antoinette and the children should be sent out of town to this royal estate at Rambouillet, about 40 miles southwest of Paris, which would be easier to protect them because Versailles is kind of more open. And the whole thing with Versailles is like it’s open to the public all the time anyway, but Rambouillet would be more easy to protect, like more self-contained. So, Saint-Priest was like, “The queen and the kids should go there, and Berry can stay here with the bodyguards to meet the mob and try and negotiate this down.” But half the council, of course, were like, “No, we should stay put,” the other half of the council was like, “Yes, we should do this.” 

So again, it’s just like, Berry, not good at making any decisions, is just like, “What should I do?” Because there’s no majority people giving advice. And so, the people who said he should just stay were like, “Well, the women probably just want to present you with a petition. It’s probably no big deal.” So, he didn’t know what to do, and he’s just like “Marie Antoinette!” and he went to find her. I think she was in Petite Trianon, just like, hanging out with her chickens or whatever. And she was like, “What do I think we should do? I think you and I and our children should get the fuck out of here.” But he’s like, “I’m staying.” So, she’s like, “Well, then I’ll stay because I can’t leave you alone.” And so, Marie Antoinette, Berry, their children, like they just stayed at Versailles because that’s what… They’re like, “Maybe this will go okay.” 

And so, the Market Ladies, these hangry women coming down with like weapons and the Market Ladies had pikes and, like, I don’t know, I feel like sharpened brooms, and switchblade knives, and their own wooden clogs, and makeshift weapons, but they were there with the National Guard who had all the guns they had gotten from the Bastille and other places. They were just walking. It’s a real sort of zombie vibe where you’re just like, this bad thing’s going to happen in eight hours because they’re walking pretty slowly. So, at Versailles, they’re just like waiting to happen. 

A member of the National Assembly who was at Versailles that evening said of Marie Antoinette, “Everyone except Marie Antoinette seemed terrified.” Marie Antoinette, according to this person, said, “I know that the people have come from Paris to demand my head, but I learned from my mother not to fear death. I shall await it with resolution.” So, this is really where the Maria Theresa (Marie Antoinette’s mother) genes are really kicking in for her. It had been raining also. So, these zombie Market Ladies are walking there for eight hours in the rain, just like, gaunt, starving, furious. They arrived at around 7:00 that evening. They announced their presence at Versailles by shouting, “We shall bring back the queen dead or alive.” 

This is another, like, in terms of hating of Marie Antoinette, like they came to Versailles because they heard that she stomped on cockades, and they wanted to murder her. The Market Ladies and the National Guard, they’re not like “Down with the monarchy! Let’s have a constitutional democracy!” They were like, “Fuck this woman, she stomped on cockades,” is what is motivating them. 

So, a note from Lafayette came just shortly after these first Market Ladies arrived. And what Lafayette (who was in this march, remember, but he’d sent this message secretly ahead), wrote was that he was aware that this was happening, and he was bringing some other troops from the National Guard to protect the royal family. He advised the royal family, like, “Just wait until I get there and I will protect you because this is all kinds of fucked up.” So, the royal family’s servants, helpers, locked the gates to the palace, and then they sent out the bodyguards and the Flanders soldiers. 

At around midnight… So, this happened, they locked the gates, and then the Market Ladies and their attendants, those National Guard members, couldn’t get in. Lafayette and the National Guard themselves arrived at around midnight, like the good National Guard, and so at this time, Lafayette went to speak to the king, and he’s like, “You can trust me. I give you my personal guarantee. I’m loyal to you. My troops are loyal to you.” And so, the royal family trusted him, and then they just went to their separate bedrooms to sleep for the night. 

Lafayette stayed awake all night, posting sentries, and he didn’t lie down to rest until 5:00 in the morning. But as much as Lafayette thought he had taken care of everything, he had not, because when Market Ladies are on the scene, nothing’s going to stop them. By the time he went to sleep, the Market Ladies knew he’d gone to sleep, and then, when he was asleep, the mob reassembled. As dawn broke, the soldiers who Lafayette had said, like, “Guard the royal family,” broke that promise and opened the gate. 

At this point, the mob enters Versailles, and they’re storming in, and they know their way around, because remember, Versailles was open to the public. The Market Ladies were there all the time anyway. So, they were looking in every room to try to find Berry and Marie Antoinette; they called them the baker and the baker’s wife for, like, bread-based reasons. Royal guards were there, royal guards, tried to stop them. The royal guards were attacked with muskets, daggers, and broomsticks. Two soldiers were killed in this first millet. Their heads were put on pikes and carried around, which is just like, that’s just what you do in this time and place. Some people claim Ryan Phillippe himself was in the mob dressed in his cosplay as a regular person, leading the way to Marie Antoinette’s bedroom. I would not doubt that, but I also think he might want to stay out of a mob that could quickly turn murderous against him. But certainly, the people there were Ryan Phillippe supporters, and Marie Antoinette was absolutely their main target. 

So, the mob broke through the doors. To get to her room, it’s like, there’s an outer room, then an outer room… There’s a series of doors you have to get through to get to her bedroom. So, the mob broke through the first door and massacred two of her bodyguards, and they screamed, “To the queen’s apartments! We’ve come for the queen’s skin so we can make ribbons for our cockades.” And that morning, there were four ladies in waiting on duty. One of them was the sister of Madame Campan, who was one of the memoirists who we know all these things from. Madame Campan related what her sister did. Upon hearing these cries of like, “We will skin Marie Antoinette to make cockades of her flesh,” Madame Campan’s sister, 

Flew to the place from which the tumult seemed to proceed. She opened the door and beheld one of the bodyguards holding his musket across the door, and attacked by a mob who were striking at him. His face was covered with blood. He turned around and exclaimed, “Save the queen, Madame! They have come to assassinate her!” 

And so, Madame Campan’s sister ducked back through the door, slammed it shut, pulled the bolt up against it, and then she did the same with the next room into the queen’s inner rooms. Marie Antoinette was asleep in bed, but she woke up the queen to say, “Get up, Madame. Don’t dress yourself. Go to the king’s apartment.” She didn’t have time to dress at all, so she got up in her nightgown and headed out. 

There was a secret passageway. Way, way back, when she and Berry were first married, and they were trying to figure out how sex worked, there was a whole thing where Berry would have to walk all the way across in front of public people to get to her room, and that gave him so much stress and anxiety that he couldn’t sexually perform or whatever. So, they made a secret sex tunnel between Marie Antoinette’s room and Berry’s room. And so she was, “Okay, let’s go through the secret sex tunnel,” and that’s how she escaped from her bedroom from the mob. 

She ran down the hallway with Madame Campan’s sister and other people to Berry’s other end, but his door was locked from the inside, and he was so afraid that it was someone trying to break in. It took her 10 minutes to convince them to open his door on that side, but he did. And legend has it that overnight, this is when Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white from the shock. She was 33 years old, and she’d had hair issues for a while. She certainly had white hair later on, but I think she might’ve had graying hair before this. Anyway, if her hair turned white, that would be completely understandable from the shock and horror of all of this. 

So, she was gone. They couldn’t even see that there even was a secret sex door. So, the Market Ladies got into her room, she’s gone, and what they did, she was not there, but they had so much fury and hatred for her that they just trashed her room. They like, stabbed her bed, broke her mirrors, just taking out all their fury. They blamed Marie Antoinette for everything that was wrong with the country and wrong with their lives, and if she wasn’t there to murder, then they were going to just destroy her room, which represented her. 

Meanwhile, so Marie Antoinette is, she made it to Berry’s room. Her children also were there, their governess, who’s no longer Madame Polignac, it’s this new person. Madame de Tourzel is the new governess, and she does a great job, I’ll talk about her more in the next couple of episodes. Anyway, so Madame Campan wrote about this. “The queen saw her children again. The reader must imagine this scene of tenderness and despair.” So, at this point, she’s got the one son and the one daughter. She’s there with her husband, they’re all alive. 

Lafayette woke up by now, and he got some soldiers who he trusted to calm down the mob a bit and prevent further massacres of the bodyguards. He, Lafayette, was allowed to go to Berry’s rooms to personally protect the royal family. Saint-Priest, the head of the bodyguards, wrapped him… So, Lafayette is there with them, and then Saint-Priest, the head of the bodyguards, put on a disguise, like, a fake jacket, I don’t know who he took it off of, and then he snuck inside of the royal suite as well. He described Berry in that room “in a state of stupefaction, which is difficult to describe or even to imagine.” So, Berry was just having one of his overly stimulated shutdown-type moments, but he’s alive! But there’s still people outside. So, they’re safe in this royal room, they’ve got guards who they can trust, but the mob is still there. 

The people outside demanded to see the king on the balcony, and so he went out, and then they demanded to see the queen, so Marie Antoinette went out as well. Lafayette went out onto the balcony to try and calm them down, but the crowd was just yelling, “To Paris! To Paris!” They just wanted the king and queen to come back with them to Paris. There were even some musket shots fired from the courtyard, which apparently, shockingly, struck nobody. And when Marie Antoinette was standing on the balcony, one onlooker recalled that her courage and just her nobility, and remember her whole thing, her perfect posture, the way that she could stand so elegantly? People found that she just looked so impressive that it did kind of calm people down a little bit. Eventually, the royal family agreed to go to Paris because they really had no choice. And so, they’re like, “Okay, we’ll come with you to Paris.” When Marie Antoinette saw Saint-Priest through this whole situation, now they had to go to Paris, she saw him and she said, “Oh, Monsieur Saint-Priest, why did we not go away last night?” And he said, “It was no fault of mine.” And she said, “I know that well.” This was their chance to escape, and they did not. And now they know that. 

Royal carriages were prepared, which takes a while, they have a lot of stuff to bring. And the royal family set off in the early afternoon in this wild procession. So, it was the royal family in their carriages, but also Market Ladies, the National Guard, carrying heads on pikes, like just bananas, wild procession. As well, the procession included huge supplies of grain from the store rooms, which that was part of the Market Ladies thing was they had believed rumours that Versailles had secret amounts of grain and bread that they were keeping to intentionally starve the people of Paris, which it’s like, not really, but they were keeping a lot of grain and bread there to feed themselves. So, they’re taking that with them to Paris as well. This was a 12-mile journey, which moved extremely slowly because of the amount of people who were there who were walking. So again, it’s like, eight hours to get into Paris. Usually, it takes a lot shorter. 

So, Lafayette and the other soldiers are ostensibly guarding the royal family, but a lot of people still want to mess with them. Mob members swarmed around and clung to the carriage wheels. I don’t know if they’re just, like, “Eeeee!” going around in circles, or just kind of slowing it down or whatever. The severed heads of the two bodyguards were carried on pikes at the head of the procession just outside the window of the king and the queen’s carriage. And the mob was cheering, “We are bringing back the baker, the bakeress, and the little baker boy!” 

Marie Antoinette was reported as making a point of speaking calmly to the people outside of the carriage during this whole thing, just trying to reassure them, “The king has never desired anything but the happiness of his people. Many evil things have been told to you about us, they were said by those who wish you harm.” So, she was saying these things. Berry was still nonverbal at this point. At one point en route, the procession stopped at this one town where there were hairdressers who they forced to style the dead guard head’s hair into powdered poufs and then held these up to Marie Antoinette’s window, I guess it’s kind of like… I think it ties into the whole baker and his wife, flour thing, maybe harkening back to when she was wearing her flour-covered poufs and people were starving for bread. They were just like… Anyway, they just wanted to fuck with her. They held up these heads on pikes of her actual bodyguards. When one person lunged too close to her in the carriage, Marie Antoinette said, “Somebody get that sans-coulottes away from me!” This was meant as an insult. But you might know, if you know about the French Revolution from this podcast or other things, the revolutionaries called themselves sans-coulottes, which means not wearing coulottes, which doesn’t mean they’re not wearing pants. It means they’re wearing long, flowy palazzo pant trousers, not little knickers, not little coulottes. Marie Antoinette actually, by saying, “Get that sans-coulottes away from me,” inspired them to start being like, “We’re going to own that ourselves.” You know, taking a phrase that people used as an insult, but turning it into a thing of pride. So, again, the trendsetter, Marie Antoinette, she popularized sans-coulottes. 

In one of the carriages behind was her bestie, Axel von Fersen, who was coming along just to support her, really. The Aunties were also there, Provence, Berry’s younger brother was there, and other members of the royal household. Axel von Fersen later recalled, “God keep me from ever again seeing so afflicting a sight as that of those two days.” It was a traumatizing time for all. 

As for Marie Antoinette, it had been 48 hours of terror, absolute mayhem. She was convinced she was going to die for most of it. This only really solidified her determination to pursue the strategy that she’d been trying to get Berry to do from the beginning of this unrest situation, which was to get the fuck out of there, to withdraw, to raise an army somewhere safe, to get her family to help out, and to return with sufficient force to reestablish Berry on his throne as the king. Next week, we’ll see how that goes for her. 

So yeah, this is Vulgar History, Marie Antoinette Month. The next episode is going to be the next part of the Marie Antoinette story. I do want to also mention that I have a Patreon that you can join. One of the perks you get when you join the Patreon… Well, actually, I’ll tell you everything. So, if you join the Patreon for free, you just get updates from me, which are nice, and free things that you can get. And then, if you join the Patreon for $1 or more a month, then you get ad-free episodes of this podcast, and you also get them early. If you can’t wait for the next installment of Marie Antoinette, join the Patreon at $1 a month. 

If you join the Patreon at $6 or more a month, then you also get bonus episodes of my series of Vulgarpiece Theatre, which is where I talk about costume dramas. And at the end of this month, at the end of September, I’m going to be talking about Sofia Coppola’s movie, Marie Antoinette, which I haven’t rewatched yet. I’m going to watch it close to when we record, towards the end of the month. And I’m excited to now that I know all these characters. And actually, yeah, I was just going to say… What I understand, I think the movie ends at about this point of the Marie Antoinette story. So, I guess I could watch it now because it doesn’t continue on to what happens to her next. Anyway, you can join the Patreon. 

You go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, and you can join at any of those different levels. You can also get a free trial, which you could do to just, if you want to listen to the Marie Antoinette Sofia Coppola episode, just wait until the last week of September and do a free trial and listen to it and then peace out, and I won’t judge you. But you can also get access to, we have a Discord for everybody at the $6 a month or more level. And if you want to just get in the Patreon in general, that’s one of the perks you can get when you pre-order my book. Because guess what? I wrote a book! 

It’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen, it comes out next February. And if you like this podcast, you will like the book because it’s told in a similar, well-researched yet fun-loving style. It’s also about a queen whose first language was German and who was sent off to a court where everybody was haters, Caroline of Brunswick. It’s a really interesting story, and I’m glad that I was able to write this book. I hope that you read the book. 

But anyway, you can order the book if you live in Canada or the U.S. from any bookstore. You can get all the links to buy it at RebelOfTheRegency.com. And if you pre-order the book, and pre-order just means order it now, even though it comes out in February, and you send me the receipt, then I will send you some treats. You can get a free paid membership to my Patreon so you can get the episodes of Vulgarpiece Theatre and other things. You can also get a free paid membership to my Substack, and you can also get Caroline of Brunswick paper dolls. So, all the details for all this stuff is at RebelOfTheRegency.com. I do want to mention also the audiobook is available for pre-order as well. If you’re a bookseller, librarian, reviewer, or journalist, you can also request an early copy of my book on NetGalley. So again, RebelOfTheRegency.com is where you can get all that information. 

Next episode, we’re going to be talking about Marie Antoinette’s imprisonment era and what does she do next, now that she’s in her Maria Theresa mode of just getting shit done? She’s got Axel von Fersen with her there; he’s a helpful person. Thank god she actually has someone useful around her for once. But next time, we’ll see what happens to our girl next. There’s going to also be a special guest on next week’s episode, but you’ll find out who that is next time. So, until then, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWwriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. 

References:

Join the Vulgar History Patreon to watch this episode as a video!⁠⁠⁠⁠

—

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Preorder info for Ann’s upcoming book, Rebel of the Regency!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

—

Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠common.era.com/vulgar⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠commonera.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and use code VULGAR at checkout

—

Get Vulgar History merch at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vulgarhistory.com/store⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (best for US shipping) and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vulgarhistory.redbubble.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ (better for international shipping)

—

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Support Vulgar History on Patreon ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

—

Vulgar History is an affiliate of Bookshop.org, which means that a small percentage of any books you click through and purchase will come back to Vulgar History as a commission. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Use this link to shop there and support Vulgar History.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices