Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is part five in our Marie Antoinette series. We’ve been heading here for a year and a half, if you’ve been in this for the whole multi-part, Season Seven. But also, I know a lot of people joined just for the Marie Antoinette of it all. So, this is part five, big finale. What’s going to happen? I think we all know what’s going to happen. But how we get there is interesting.

And actually, before we get into the episode episode, I have two important announcements. The first one is that if you’re in or near London, England, the V&A Museum has an exhibit on right now called Marie Antoinette Style, and it’s a celebration of her iconic, groundbreaking style. I mean, we’ve talked in previous episodes about her clothes maker, Rose Bertin, her hair guy, Monsieur Léonard. But really, it was her vision. She was the one who was pushing the boundaries of what a queen could wear, what a woman could wear. She had her horse girl pants era; she had her big fancy dress era, which a lot of people think about; she had the fuck dress, the muslin, simple dress era. So many eras. She was such a style icon. And a lot of her stuff that she actually owned, we don’t know where it is, but we’ll talk about, towards the end of this episode, what happened to her stuff. The things that still exist are a lot of things that she sent as gifts to people or were recovered in different ways. So, there are some of her actual objects there; some of her cool mechanical furniture, some of her shoes, some of her jewelry is there, as well as a lot of stuff that’s been inspired by Marie Antoinette, like costumes from the Sofia Coppola movie. I think there’s an Alexander McQueen era dress.

Anyway, I’m dying to see it. I live in Canada. I don’t know if I’ll be able to see it, it’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. So, that’s why I say if you are in or near London, England, between now and March 2026, please go. When you go, you’re going to take pictures, send those pictures to me on Instagram @VulgarHistoryPod, or you can email me at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. I want to vicariously enjoy this through you. Thank you so much.

My second announcement is that I want to say that coming up later this week, we’re going to have a special author interview episode in a couple of days that’s connecting America’s founding father, Benjamin Franklin, with Marie Antoinette and also with Canadian history. That’s coming up on Friday. Next week, like today, this is the finale of the Marie Antoinette series, but we’re getting right into our next series, which is going to be about goth icon, Mary Shelley. It’s going to be a month-long October Halloween Month celebration of Mary Shelley, and that starts next week. Just so you know, because the Marie Antoinette season is over, I’m still here and we’re still having a nice time.

And one more thing I wanted to let you know before you get into it, also, is that because this series went a bit more episodes long than I anticipated, which I really should have known, but I didn’t. I thought this was going to be three parts, but it’s five parts. Here we are on part five. So, I’m going to be doing a wrap-up, like a season-ending wrap-up for the Marie Antoinette series, but also for all of Season Seven, which has been this revolutionary series. That’s going to include giving out some awards along the lines of, like, the Las Culturistas awards, just for our favourite moments, our favourite people. That’s going to be on Patreon, and actually, today, when you’re listening, if you go over and join the Patreon, you’ll be able to hear that. I’ll be giving out various awards, including the prestigious Jewelled Tortoise Award for the best friends, the people who are really there supporting the heroines of this season. So anyway, join the Patreon. If you go to AnnFosterWriter.com, if you join for free, you’ll be able to hear that special wrap-up episode as well. And then next week, we’re getting into Halloween season.

With all that said, am I putting off the inevitable? Kind of a little bit, because this is, like, a rough episode, y’all. But we’re going to, as I like to do with this podcast, be right there in the moment, you know, not talking like we know what’s going to happen, but as it happened for Marie Antoinette. How did this all unfold? I do want to shout out again, I guess for one final time, because this is part five, my wonderful references, the books that I used to really put together this season, which I appreciate so much. So, firstly, In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette and Her Daughters by Nancy Goldstone. Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser. Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber. Marie Antoinette: Teen Queen to Guillotine by Melanie Burrows, which is a new book, just came out. You should order it. Or any of the other books, but just because that’s a new one. And here we go.

So, previously on Marie Antoinette, parts one through five, as well on Vulgar History, Season Seven parts, I don’t even know, one to 25. The American Revolution. Marie Antoinette comes to France. She becomes the queen. Everybody is shitty to her. The French Revolution starts. The family tries to escape on a party bus. Monsieur Sauce is there. They come back to town. People have grease rags on their heads. Things, not looking great for our girl. And we’ll pick up from there.

So, the thing about the last episode, if you heard Marie Antoinette part four, the Flight to Varennes, they tried to escape, the plan went badly for numerous reasons we talked about in that episode. And it’s not just like they didn’t escape and they were forced back into Paris, but it really lost the momentum for the royal family in general, for Marie Antoinette, for her husband, Louis XVI (who, on this podcast, I call Berry). The concept of monarchy, not doing great at this time. If they had succeeded, that would have given them a different kind of momentum; it would have really re-energized their supporters. And they did have supporters. There were people within Paris, within France, who wanted to restore the power of the monarchy. There were people all over France who wanted that, especially their relatives and their friends, like, the royals in other countries, wanted them to succeed. The émigrés, which is the French word for immigrants, but they’re always just called the émigrés, not sure why, which were the rich people who fled France to not be killed; they wanted the royal family back. There was a lot of support for the royal family back.

But because the escape attempt went so spectacularly badly, a lot of those people were like, “Maybe we should pivot. We want a royal family, but maybe not these two.” It reminds me of after Marie Antoinette and Berry got married, and they didn’t figure out how to have sex for seven years, and then Marie Antoinette’s brother, Joseph, came and talked to them, and then he realized why they weren’t having sex. It was a mechanical issue; they just didn’t quite know what to do in what order. He described them as “a pair of blunderers.” This is kind of how everybody was seeing them now, as a pair of blunderers. It’s like, “If we want to restore the monarchy, these two little neurodivergent nerds…” they’re not the Mockingjay. We don’t have a Katniss Everdeen moment going on. We just have these two, who are trying their best, but it’s just like, these aren’t the two you need in this role at this time.

Also, the fact that the flight to Varennes went so badly, it made everybody less likely to support them. Both I mentioned the rich people, the foreign royals, but also, there were some people on the revolutionary team. The revolutionary team, I want to emphasize, it’s just chaos. No one’s really in charge of it; there’s all these different factions. We’ve talked about that in other episodes. There’s the Jacobins and the Girondins and the Enragés. They’re all various levels of, like, extreme of how much change they want. But there was a substantial amount of people who wanted to have a constitutional monarchy, like what England had then and kind of has now, which is like, there’s a king, yes, but there’s also a parliament, and the parliament kind of makes the decisions and the king kind of rubber stamps them. So, it’s like, let’s have a king, but not an absolute king. And those people were like, “Maybe let’s not have a king.”

So, the royals had lost their support because of the flight to Varennes situation. Everybody, all these different factions, now kind of saw specifically Marie Antoinette and Berry and their son, the Dauphin, who would be the next king, as kind of obstacles in the way of their goals. So, for the revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette and Berry were obstacles because they were in the way of, like, a full-on revolution that got rid of the monarchy because they were monarchs.

For the émigrés and the foreign royals, they just saw them as kind of like, I don’t think that these are the people we want to be the monarchs right now. So, that kind of makes them more want to support some of the other contenders for the royal throne, which are Berry’s cousin, Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions, and also Berry’s brother, his younger brother, Provence, and his other younger brother, Artois. They’re all guys who’ve been kind of wanting to be king, sort of this whole story, like, since they were boys. So, they support the concept of monarchy, but not Berry as the monarch. The younger brother, Provence, he had successfully escaped because he did the reasonable thing; he left pretending to be one guy, like not a royal, just being some sort of English tradesman or something, him and one servant on a horse. That’s much less suspicious than six people in a party bus moving slowly through the countryside. And he actually left France, which is also another successful part of escaping. So, the fact that Provence had actually escaped made people think, like, this guy is maybe going to be a better king.

So, Manon Roland, a person we talked about in a previous episode—she was a lady reporter on the scene, the Lois Lane of her era, except much less fun parties—she recorded in one of her records that “The word ‘republic’ is now being uttered almost everywhere.” So, there’d been a strong pivot from, like, “Maybe a constitutional monarchy,” to now, like, in Paris, the vibe was like, “Let’s just not have a monarch at all,” and outside of France, it was kind of like, “Let’s have a monarchy, but not Berry as king anymore.” So, Marie Antoinette and Berry had lost most of their support because this plan had not worked.

Berry is a person I’ve talked about a lot. He’s not somebody who adapts well with change; he’s not good at making decisions. He likes his routines; he likes things to be predictable and the same. And in all those contexts where it’s just like, “Oh, what if society changes?” This is not his time. He had fully shut down, sort of, emotionally, verbally. He just didn’t talk at all for days on end. He was in a deep depression, and this kind of left, with all the advisors gone, and so many of their helpers not helping them anymore, and their friends, it turns out, weren’t really friends anymore, this leaves Marie Antoinette as in charge of everything. And she’s stepping up, but again, she’s not necessarily the person who’s going to succeed in this situation. But she’s just like, “Someone has to step up, and that person’s going to be me.” All she could do is really just buy time, do anything she could to buy them time. The only thing that seemed possible to help her at this point was that her brother, who was the Holy Roman Emperor or another rescuer, like another foreign country, would come in, burst into Paris and rescue them. That was the only thing that she thought would happen. So, she’s just trying to buy time until it happens and make sure that they’re not executed at the same time.

And just to sort of coincide with other episodes we’ve talked about this past season, we did several episodes talking about the people involved in the Haitian Revolution. So, it was at this time, we’re in August 1791, and this is when the Haitian Revolution began. I believe it was August 21, 1791. And that revolution was many years long, I think it went until 1804, but this is when that happened. And part of why that happened when it did is because— We talked about this a lot in other episodes, we really get in. If you want to learn more about the Haitian Revolution, just scroll back in your app and you’ll see those episodes. But part of why this happened at this time is that… At the time, what we now know as Haiti was called Saint-Domingue, and it was a French colony. As a French colony, when they heard (and by ‘they’, I mean the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue) when they heard that the French assembly had released this Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which said, all men have rights, they were like, “Well, what about us, the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue?” And they, this led, ultimately, this plus a lot of other things I talked about in other episodes, led to the Haitian Revolution breaking out. So, that’s happening at the same time as all of this, just to coincide everything that’s happened in this really chaotic time in history, which continues to parallel our time in history eerily.

Anyway, so the Declaration of the Rights of Man had come in 1789. It is now 1791, September 1791, and the National Assembly finishes making their written constitution. The constitution of the Republic of France, it did things like it abolished all aristocratic privileges, including titles. It established civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and mandated elections. We’ve talked so much about tax law so that everybody would be taxed according to their means. Before, remember, rich people didn’t have to pay any taxes, but now they’re saying that they should. It also created a national legislative body and an independent judiciary. This constitution did maintain the monarchy, but with significantly reduced authority, so it’s the whole constitutional monarchy thing. It’s like, there’s the king, but really, this parliament-type body of elected officials is going to be actually in charge.

So, Berry, the king, really had no choice but to publicly support this. Like, if they wanted to not be killed, he had to say, “Great, love this plan. Let’s do it.” Even though this challenged his whole concept of how everything worked, you know, the divine right of kings and stuff, but at this point, he’s going to sign it because he has to.

Marie Antoinette, at this point, was secretly communicating with the only person with a head on his shoulders in this whole scenario (no pun intended in this guillotine era), Axel von Fersen, the sexy Swedish count. She had found, even though she was there in kind of house arrest in the Tuileries Palace, she found ways to communicate with Axel von Fersen, her maybe lover, but certainly best friend she’s ever had. She confided to him about re-supporting the constitution. She told him, “To refuse would have been nobler, but that was impossible under the existing circumstances,” which it was.

So, Berry went to the National Assembly to be like, “This is great, love it.” The National Assembly refused to stand in his presence, which is the same as how, like, they don’t take off their hats. They’re showing “You’re not special. Men are created equal,” et cetera. This, of course, devastated him. He is going through very complicated emotions, both just as a person who really worked hard his whole life to understand what the expectations were of a king and of him as a person, and to have that whole society just shatter. It’s just like, he doesn’t know what to cling to, he doesn’t know what to think about anything. This devastates him. But he gives his little speech, and this made everybody really excited in all of Paris because they’re like, “Great. Revolution is over and our side won,” basically. There were celebrations everywhere; there were fireworks, there was a hot air balloon decorated with the tricolour ribbons, which reminds me of how last year in the Paris Olympics, they had the torch cauldron was, like, a hot air balloon sort of everything. Everything’s going so well!

So, the royal family, Marie Antoinette, Berry, Madame Élisabeth (his sister), they were allowed out of their house arrest under certain circumstances to attend theatrical performances, where they were cheered for the first time in months because the mob, the Market Ladies, and everybody are just like “The King supports the Revolution. This is great, we’re all friends.” Although they still hated Marie Antoinette herself and especially another sort of side of fact of the whole flight to France scenario, which although they had never intended to leave France, but they had been caught near the border of Austria, this seemed to confirm to everybody, like, they assumed they were headed to Austria (even though they weren’t) and this confirmed to everybody who had suspected Marie Antoinette was an Austrian spy since she arrived at age 14, they’re like, “Oh, she was an Austrian spy. So, fuck her. We already hate…” There’s no changing this narrative at this point, as we’ve discussed before on the podcast.

So, while Marie Antoinette publicly was like, “Yay, constitution! Love this, great,” while she’s just waiting for her family to come and rescue her, she also knew that this wasn’t the end. As much as the mob was like, “Hooray! Hot air balloons, fireworks, the Revolution is over.” Marie Antoinette is like, “I know this isn’t the end. I know that we’re not going to all just like, ‘Here’s a new status quo. Hooray!’” Her main concern at this point, which again, tying back to some other episodes we’ve talked about on this podcast, like Sally Hemings or Julia Chinn, or Nanye’hi, what she was looking forward to was, like, “What does this mean for my children’s future? How can I be assured that things are going to be okay for them?” Specifically, her son, the Dauphin, “What is France going to be like when he grows up and becomes king? I want his life to be okay.” So, she’s still scheming. In public, she’s just like, “Hooray! Yay! The Revolution is great, whatever.” But in private, she would refer, like in her letters to Axel von Fersen, she would say derogatory terms about the National Assembly, calling them the enragés. Although frankly, some of them call themselves the enragés, which means ‘the rabid,’ effectively. And actually, she was writing with Axel von Fersen, and he was so confused that publicly she and Berry had been seeming to support the revolution. Axel von Fersen is like, “What’s going on? Like, why are you supporting the Revolution so much?” So, she had to be like, “Do not be alarmed. I shall never go over to the enragés. I am obliged to make use of them to prevent greater evils. But as for good, I know they are incapable of doing it.”

So, her goal at this point was, like, using Axel von Fersen, as well as Ambassador Mercy, who was another one of her allies, who were mostly, like, they would come into France a bit, but they were kind of travelling around to other European countries, talking to other monarchs and being like, “Support the French family. Here’s how: Invade France.” And she also, in terms of a fashion moment, she had pivoted during the revolutionary era to dressing as queenly as possible. Remember, she had, like, the fuck dresses, and then she moved into kind of like a sort of plain, nun-like outfit. But now she’s dressing as regally as possible to try to be like, “Society has different strata, and I am in the royal one.” So, she wore the royal colours, which were purple, green and white, which were seen as like, “Well, she’s not wearing red, white and blue, so she’s against us,” et cetera. But she’s trying through fashion, because what other power does she have, to just really remind everybody, like, there is a monarchy and I’m part of it, and this is how society works. She wrote to Axel von Fersen that she wants to become “once again, so powerful as to prove to all these beggars that I was never their fool.”

But as I mentioned before, the escape plan didn’t work, and then Berry, like publicly supporting the constitution, made his brothers and the other foreign monarchs and other rich people question if he was the guy to support in this situation because, by accepting the constitution, Berry had made the revolutionary government official. And if democracy was official in France, then that was a threat to all the monarchs in all the other countries, where the same thing might happen to them, and then they would lose their power. And the émigrés, these rich people who had fled France, they had fled and they left behind the property and most of their stuff, and they knew that they’d never get their money and the titles and the property back, as long as France was a democracy, so they didn’t support this move either.

One faction of people who supported the monarchy, but not necessarily Berry as king, his brothers, Provence and Artois. They met up along with their supporters and former finance minister Calonne (who you might remember from the “chapeau à la Calonne”), he hated Marie Antoinette, and so he was happy to support the brothers in this situation. They met in a city south of Cologne where they founded, sort of, this alternate French royal court. One of their ideas is maybe, “What if we named Provence the regent? Say that Berry is incapable of leading, and now Provence is actually in charge from this faraway place.” Their sister, Madame Élisabeth, is still in Paris with Marie Antoinette. They had been close there for a minute. Madame Élisabeth is still with Berry and Marie Antoinette, and she supported them. She supported her other brothers; Berry is her brother, but Provence and Artois are her brothers as well. She supported them in this, which strained her friendship with Marie Antoinette because that’s, you know, she’s kind of playing both sides there.

And Berry, as I mentioned, just like, not functioning well, he was depressed. Part of this was everything that was happening, but also, he really relied not just on routine, but on, like, going out riding. I think the exercise of that, the fresh air, you know, just being able to do that, had really helped him. He was no longer permitted to go out riding since the escape attempt. Now forced to spend all of his time indoors, he just like tried to find “What can I do?” He doesn’t have his lock-making tools, so he’s reading his history books, just like, really getting into the history of England’s King Charles I, who was murdered by a revolutionary mob and in whom Berry found a lot of inspiration and, sort of, hero worship. Because it’s like, who else has been in the situation? Basically, only Charles I. So, he’s like, “Well, how did he handle himself? I’ll try to be like that as well.” He also did some just, like, crunching numbers from his diaries. I think in the last episode I mentioned, Berry had mentioned how many days he spent outside the city in the year 1791, and I thought he just did that analysis at the end of every year. In fact, no. In fact, what happened is he was just sitting indoors, so he was going through his various diaries he’d written, just adding up all the numbers of like, “How many days was I outside of my home this year? How many deer did I shoot this year?” What can you do? He’s just adding up numbers, he’s just keeping himself busy, I guess, because that is soothing to him. So, he’s just like, not up to ruling in the sense of just like, he’s not scheming, he’s not figuring out things to do, he’s just kind of like, how to get by every day.

Marie Antoinette at this point described her domestic situation, being in house arrest with like Berry, who’s just hyper fixated on this thing as “sheer hell.” Just this sucks, everything is terrible. She and the whole family, like when they were served food, they were all terrified to eat because, understandably, they were worried that the food being served to them by revolutionary-type people was poison. She was also certain that the mob was going to come after her again because, remember, the mob had broken into Versailles, that’s how they went up in Paris. The mob came and caught them in Varennes. She’s just like, “I know they’re going to come back and finish the job. This is a Final Destination scenario, and I am going to be murdered by the mob, perhaps à la Brunhild,” the ancient Frankish queen who was executed by being tied… She had to, like, walk through the city in this shame parade, and then she was torn apart by being tied to horses. These are the things Marie Antoinette was waiting to happen to her. And of course, she was right. She gets it. Like, she’s been on how many marches next to the mob, holding her friends’ heads on pikes? She knows they’re not stopping hating her and wanting to kill her, and blaming her for everything that was going wrong. So, here’s how that happened.

March 1792. Her brother, who was the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold, died suddenly of pneumonia. This was two weeks after he had just pulled through, like, the most amazing diplomatic thing, where he agreed to join a coalition of European monarchs to combat the French revolutionaries. This was the Holy Roman Empire teaming up with Prussia, which had been their longtime enemy. People who listened to the Maria Theresa episode know that these two countries did not fuck with each other, ever. So, the fact that the French Revolution had brought them together is, like, impressive. He died, though; Leopold made this amazing deal and then died of pneumonia. And Marie Antoinette was like, “He was probably poisoned,” and I feel like he was probably poisoned, but like, apparently pneumonia.

So, the new Holy Roman Emperor was Leopold’s son, Francis, who Marie Antoinette had never met. It’s her nephew, but first, the Holy Roman Emperor was her brother, Joseph, who she knew, who she had grown up knowing. Then it was her other brother, Leopold, who she knew a bit less. And now, it’s this guy, Francis, who’s never met her. And they were teaming up against, not France, they were teaming up against the French revolutionaries. So, Francis, the Holy Roman Emperor, let the émigrés come into Habsburg territory to assemble troops. This is like, French people teaming up with Austria, teaming up with Prussia to attack the French revolutionary government, which made the French revolutionary government decide that they had to go to war against this coalition, and they needed Berry to, like, stamp the approval for that.

So, on April 20th, Berry, again, kind of felt he had no choice, and he was forced to publicly declare war on Francis. He delivered this speech to the National Assembly, and then wars started happening. The French Revolutionary Army did not do well. This exacerbated everybody’s anxiety. So, Paris is like The Purge at this point. Well, it’s still pre-The Purge, getting close to The Purge, but just everyone’s just, like, constantly on edge; riots happening constantly, you know, heads on pikes, energy, a lot of like wooden clog, murder energy. And the fact that they’re now at war with, like, every country in Europe made everybody be a bit like, “Oh God, what next?” The fact that the French revolutionary government was at war against Austria, one of the people in that alliance, made them even more… Remember the whole like, “Oh, Marie Antoinette is Austrian. She’s this ostrich bitch,” which the Aunts had started? So, they’re just even more suspicious of Marie Antoinette because they’re like, “Well, she’s probably on their side.” And guess what? Bitches. She was! Because you are bitches and you’re trying to kill her constantly. So yeah, she was on the side of her brother and Austria in this instance. She’s like, “Fuck France,” understandably.

In fact, what Marie Antoinette was doing during these wars was she was, like, creeping around (not sure how she did this, impressed that she did this), but she had actually snuck into some rooms or had some people who snuck in rooms and told her and she was leaking information about the French Revolutionary Army movements to Axel von Fersen, who passed this along to, like, Francis and the head of the Prussian army, a certain man called the Duke of Brunswick, who is the father of a certain Caroline of Brunswick, who we’ve talked about on this podcast before, and who I’ve written a book about. More on that later. So, Marie Antoinette: fully a spy at this point. She’s in her spy era, double agent, Josephine Baker energy.

But her schemes… This is giving me Mary, Queen of Scots, a little bit. I did a whole series about Mary, Queen of Scots. I know there’s a lot of new listeners who join just for the Marie Antoinette season, but if you scroll back, I did a multi-part season about Mary, Queen of Scots, and when she was in a similar situation of house arrest, she was nonstop scheming. She was sending secret code letters to her spies; she was putting secret spy messages in her embroidery; she was doing whatever she could. And Marie Antoinette, who is in fact a descendant of Mary, Queen of Scots, if you go back through the family tree, she’s channelling that a little bit here.

Another schemey thing that Marie Antoinette was up to was… Set the context. Two weeks before her brother Leopold had died suddenly of pneumonia, Axel von Fersen had risked everything to come and visit Marie Antoinette at the Tuileries Palace. He risked capture and imprisonment, he slipped into Paris. Like, this guy gets it. Axel von Fersen, well, he can get it, but also, he can sneak into places. He’s good at being a spy in a way that nobody else is. So, he snuck into Paris on February 13, 1792, wearing a wig and carrying a false passport. Don’t know what his fake name was, I bet it was great. He went directly to the Tuileries Palace, and he stayed overnight with Marie Antoinette. Remember, it’s February 13th. He spent Valentine’s Day with her! This is where it’s, like, are they lovers? I believe this is the occasion where people who believed that these two were lovers… So, Axel von Fersen fucks around, good for him, that’s a great energy, and he kept a sex diary. In his sex diary, when he, like, spent the night with a woman or he had sex with a woman, he would write, “I slept over” in French. And after this night with Marie Antoinette, he’s like, “I slept over.” So, it’s like, did you just sleep over, or did you sleep over? Anyway, I hope they had some nice times together on Valentine’s Day 1792.

Anyway, he also checked in with Berry, who knew about Axel von Fersen, respected him and appreciated him. Axel von Fersen later reported from this visit:

I found the king and queen firmly determined to bear anything rather than their present position. From a conversation which I had with their majesties, I believe that I can assure you, sire, that they feel strongly persuaded that there is no way of reestablishing their authority except by foreign troops and foreign assistance.

Which is true. Like, the only way… They’re not going to do this themselves. In fact, while they were together, Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen had figured out a plan, a daring new plan in which— This depends again on other troops doing what they want, but like, hopefully they will. The plan was that the Austrian troops would cause kind of a distraction by attacking somewhere else, which would lure the French troops out of Paris, leaving Paris less defended so the Prussians could come into Paris to free the royal family. So, that’s the plan at the moment, if they can get, like, Francis to agree to this.

Meanwhile, Berry is still… He’s been reading about Charles I, he’s been just like dealing with this depression, all of his big feelings, and he decides that the best course of action for him to do is to die. So, it’s not a suicidal ideation type thing. It’s more just like, he feels like the only thing that he could do that would help is to become a martyr.

So, Marie Antoinette’s lady-in-waiting, Madame Campan, who survived all this and wrote a memoir later, she wrote, I’ll just do a little quote.

The King fell into a state of despondence, which amounted almost to physical helplessness. He passed ten successive days without uttering a single word, except in playing backgammon when he was obliged to pronounce the words belonging to that game. Marie Antoinette roused him from the state so fatal at a critical period by throwing herself at his feet, urging every idea calculated to excite alarm and employing every affectionate expression. She represented also what he owed to his family and went so far as to tell him that if they were doomed to fall, they ought to fall honourably and not to wait to be smothered upon the floor of the apartment.

So, Berry not just wanted to… He didn’t see becoming a martyr as just the best thing he could do to help his family, but he also thought it was the noblest thing he could do, and also that maybe this would help save France itself. The way he was determined to do this was to be executed, like Charles I had been, and he found an opportunity to do this pretty quickly. The way that the government was working now is like the government would say like, “We want to do this,” and the king had veto power, but he knew if he ever exercised it, they would be like, “You’re a tyrant,” and he’d be executed. So, he found a good excuse to do a veto.

May 26th. The National Assembly passed a decree exiling all priests who refused to swear allegiance to France instead of to the Pope. And if you recall from the Flight to Varennes episode, the thing about, like, the Juror priests versus the Nonjuror priests is really important to Berry. So, it’s not even necessarily that he’s like, “I’ll take any excuse to become a martyr.” He’s like, “Fuck this. No.” So, he used his veto against his proclamation, knowing that to do that in this present powder keg of a society would mean he would probably be executed, which is what he wanted. He said, “I expect death and I pardon them in advance.” And like, immediately after vetoing this decree, he called for his priest, saying to his confessor, “Come and see me. I have done with men. My eyes are turned toward heaven.” He’s like, “I am sacrificing myself.” He knew that vetoing this would mean that he would be executed.

And so, there was already a demonstration plan for the next day because it was, by this time, the one-year anniversary of the Flight to Varennes. The mob was already assembling, so the National Assembly was just like, “You! Rioters, who are already assembling, here’s another thing to riot about. Berry just used veto.” They called him and Marie Antoinette, “Monsieur and Madame Veto,” which is like a big, rude thing to say, I guess. And this is what led the already-planning-to-riot mob to specifically attack the Tuileries Palace, which is right in the middle of Paris, it’s on the street, it’s pretty easy to get to, probably pretty hard to guard. This is the afternoon of June 20, 1792. So, tens of thousands of Parisian mob, Market Ladies-type people, and lots of men— I keep mentioning the Market Ladies because they’re my fave, but like, men and women, lots of people. A lot of these people had spent the day drinking heavily because they were celebrating, I guess, the anniversary of having not let Marie Antoinette escape. So, the mob came in, they’ve got their regular makeshift weapons, pikes, axes, homemade weaponry, knives, forks. There were 16,000 National Guards assigned to protect the gates, and they did not stop them because they were on their side also. So, the only people actually protecting the royal family were the privately-hired Swiss guards, who were like mercenaries.

The royal family was just hanging out in Berry’s apartments when one of these Swiss guards came in and said, like, “Berry, you need to go show yourself to the mob. Maybe this will calm them down.” Marie Antoinette wanted to go with him. She said, “Let me go. My place is with the King. I will go and die at his feet.” But he was like, “No, stay with the children.” And Marie Antoinette called to his attendants, like, “Please save the king, please protect them.” And so, he faced off against the mob for two hours. Again, just killing time, but doing what was asked of him. They held out one of the red Smurf hats that the mob liked to wear on a pike. He reached out and he put it on. He just kind of did whatever he could to try to calm things down and just to give everybody time to maybe escape. But this had been happening indoors in the Tuileries Palace, in this one room, and 10,000 people couldn’t fit in that room. The other people who couldn’t fit went trying to find Marie Antoinette because they wanted to kill her.

To protect her and the children, 200 members of the Swiss Guard took the family into a back room. Marie Antoinette and her daughter were put into sort of like, an alcove, so I don’t know, sort of next to the window, or just a gap in the wall or a little nook. And they fully Les Mis-ed this; they put up, like, a barricade of just upended furniture and whatever, they put the Dauphin, this little boy, who’s like, six years old at this point, on top of the barricade as sort of, like, “Maybe this will…” I don’t know, that’s what they did. And then they let the mob in. Marie Antoinette apparently said under her breath, “This is too much. It exceeds all human patience.” But she refused to show fear, like she did before, when she was being brought back by the mob from Varennes, when she went out on the balcony in Versailles. She just has this dignity, her comportment, like, her posture. Even the haters are just like, “Oh my God, the aura, the charisma of this woman. It’s so noble. It’s so notable.” She just stood there, and they were just like your most terrifying elementary school teacher, and they’re all just like, “Oh! Oh, we’re not going to… Okay.”

An observer observed:

If one of those rascals had dared strike the Queen, everyone would have followed his example, and all those who were in the room would have been massacred. Happily, the Queen’s majesty, her air of assurance, overawed the mob.

They tried to get her to wear the red hat as well. And she said no. They tried to get her to wear the cockade. The mob was like, “Ryan Phillippe sent these, bitch.” She didn’t wear the cockade either; she just, like, stood her ground and that made them not kill her, which is really impressive considering how much they wanted to kill her. It took until about 10:00 until the mob, I guess, got bored and just left. The royal family could not believe they had survived. Marie Antoinette wrote to Axel von Person, “I still exist, but it is a miracle.” And so, her entourage encouraged her to wear this kind of bulletproof vest, of just folded fabric that was folded so tightly, it was like stab-proof as well. She tried it on. She had Madame Campan, I think, attempt to stab her with it to test it. But ultimately, she was also like, “No. You know what? If they assassinate me, that will be a blessing because my life here sucks.” She wrote, I think to Axel von Person:

To confront the dangers head on, I could act and mount a horse if need be. But if I acted, it would put weapons into the hands of the King’s enemies. A general outcry would be raised in France against the Austrian woman, against female domination. A queen who is not regent must, in such circumstances, remain inactive and prepare to die.

This is an intense thing going on. Again, she knew her only chance was to keep waiting for the Prussian army, led by Caroline of Brunswick’s dad, to come in and save her. So, realizing that Berry was just, like, prepared to martyr himself, she’s like, “It’s up to me to keep my family alive until we are inevitably rescued.”

She begged, via Ambassador Mercy who she was able to write letters to, she was like, “Get the Prussian army,” Caroline of Brunswick’s dad, “to issue a declaration with the intent of frightening the revolutionaries so much that they refrain from any further violence against the monarchy.” She wanted the Prussians to send a threat, just being like, “Listen up, Paris. Treat the royal family well, or we will kill all of you.” And that is what he did. He issued a proclamation. I’m going to quote part of the proclamation made by Caroline of Brunswick’s dad, the Duke of Brunswick:

The city of Paris and all of its inhabitants, without distinction, shall be required to submit at once and without delay to the King of France. If the chateau of the Tuileries is entered by force or attacked, if the least violence be offered to their majesties, the King, Queen and royal family, we will inflict an ever-memorable vengeance by delivering over the city of Paris to military execution and complete destruction and the rebels guilty of the said outrageous to the punishment they merit.

So, this is what Marie Antoinette wanted him to do. He did exactly what she thought would help, and it did the opposite because the publication of this declaration coincided with news that the Prussians had penetrated the French border. Like, the Prussians were in fact getting closer. And the people in France— Again, this is August. It’s hot. Everybody’s hangry. Like they’re hungry, angry, hangry. The scent of blood is everywhere, people are just used to murder by now, you’re, like, walking over body parts, and they’re just losing their minds. So, basically a week after this proclamation came out, the Tuileries was attacked again, and not just by tens of thousands of people, but by, apparently, everybody. All of Paris seemingly attacked the Tuileries in this second attempt.

So, the Prussians had basically, like, dared the revolutionaries to disobey them, and the people of Paris all believed they were going to die anyway when the Prussians invaded. So, they were just like, “Bring it on!” Everyone in the story at this point is convinced they’re going to die, and so that’s guiding all of their actions, and it’s a really intense story.

This time, the mob was everybody; it wasn’t just Market Ladies with their, like, pikes and forks. This is like, they brought soldiers, they brought cannons, they brought muskets. The royal family was advised, understandably, to flee the palace and throw themselves at the mercy of the National Assembly. And if you’re like “The National Assembly? Isn’t that the same as the revolutionaries?” No! The National Assembly is the former Third Estate, who were just like, “Mer-mer-mer, let’s have a constitutional monarchy.” The revolutionaries are just like, “Fuck this! Kill everybody.” They’re two different groups at this point. The National Assembly, at this point, met in the riding school adjacent to the Tuileries Palace. Marie Antoinette was like, “No, we’re not going to leave. We still have these Swiss guards here with us. We should stay here and fight and not back down.” She said, “You can nail me to these walls before I shall consent to leave them.” But one of the soldiers or assistants said, “Madame, all of Paris is in motion. Action is useless, resistance impossible. Do you wish to render yourself responsible for the murder of the King, of your children, of yourself, of the faithful servants who surround you?” And she’s like, “Okay, yeah, I got it.” And she agreed to go.

So, under heavy guard (there’s, like, 800 guard), they went from the palace across the garden to the National Assembly riding school, where they found temporary sanctuary in, it sounds like, a horse stable? Not sure. Some really small enclosure where the roof wasn’t high enough that adults couldn’t stand in it. While they were rushing across, Marie Antoinette lost a shoe, à la Cinderella, which the shoe is now in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and I’m pretty sure it’s part of the V&A exhibition in London right now, her shoe. So, they escaped. Marie Antoinette, Berry, their children, Madame Élisabeth, and maybe a couple of their servants, maybe not even them. Basically, everybody left behind at Tuileries was killed; the Swiss Guard was massacred. The mob broke in and started murdering everybody; footmen, valets, secretaries, chambermaids, anyone associated with the royal family. Almost all the courtiers who survived that day were rounded up and arrested. This is when the Princess de Lamballe, and the governess, Madame de Tourzel, and her daughter, Pauline, were all arrested and they were confined in a prison called La Force.

So, Marie Antoinette, Berry, and the family had to wait three days in this tiny horse stable riding school, waiting, while the National Assembly debated. For three days! So much goddamn debating. I hate debating parliamentarians. They didn’t have to sleep there. At night, somehow, she was able to be taken to the convent next door, where she could at least, like, change her clothes because they fled with just the clothes on their back, they couldn’t bring anything. They had been given donations by the nuns, not sure. The mob followed her there. So, like, even when she’s trying to go to sleep, the mob was outside screaming, “We want to murder you!” Berry, at this point, said, “What did she ever do to them?” He’s just like… Berry.

Anyway, so they left the Tuileries. The mob trashed her room; they looted all of her things. So, in terms of like, how do we have so little left of Marie Antoinette’s stuff? It’s because she kept having to flee places without being able to pack her things. And then the mob broke in, because the same thing happened to Versailles, and just took all her stuff. So, the other women’s rooms, notably, were untouched. The mob just hated her. They saw her as the personification of all the problems, everything that was wrong with society, everything that was corrupt about the monarchy and aristocracy, like, just her. They hated just her. The following summer, what remained of her clothes were actually sold at an auction.

After three days in this low-ceiling area, the Assembly… Well, they didn’t really decide on their own. So, there’s the Assembly, which is like the National Assembly of France, and then there’s a new government organization called the Commune of Paris. And the Commune of Paris is, like, the super revolutionary guys, and the Commune of Paris kind of bullied the National Assembly into imprisoning the royals somewhere else in a temple or a place called the Temple. So, this is another palace. It’s like a gloomy, medieval castle. Marie Antoinette had never liked it. She didn’t like to stay there; she’d advocated for it to be torn down. Like, she just found it so gloomy, and it’s like, did you kind of know one day you’d be stuck there?

In the outside world… So, part of what had happened on August 10th is that the guards had fired upon the crowd. And so, in a kind of like, fake news sort of thing, what had happened is the mob had invaded Tuileries. The guards had tried to defend the royal family, and a bunch of people got shot. But the Commune of Paris and the revolutionaries were being like, “That was the night that the royal family tried to kill us. They instigated it. It’s the royal family’s fault. They started this whole murder…” And this just made everybody in Paris even more just like… They’re hungry, it’s hot, they’re starving, they’re angry. The Revolution is just not helping anybody. They thought originally like, “Oh, this is going to make things better.” Things are not better. They knew that the Prussians were approaching and were probably going to kill them. So, things just went up, like, a notch. This is like, anyone suspected of being loyal to the monarchy was seen as the enemy. Hundreds of people were arrested, many of them priests, because Berry, when he had done the veto that was to help the priests, so they were like, “Oh, the priests must support the monarchy.” And this is when guess what shows up? The guillotine.

So, a guy named Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin had invented the guillotine, and he presented it to the National Assembly, he’s like, “With the aid of my machine, I will make your heads spring off and the twinkling of an eye, and you will suffer nothing.” So, they’re like, “Great, we’re going to buy a guillotine from you, Dr. Guillotin.” And so, they set up the guillotine in Paris in what was formerly known as the Square of Louis XV, Golf King, it had been renamed now the Place de la Révolution.

And so, in the Temple, this horrible castle they were in, Marie Antoinette and her family, interestingly to me, they’re still in house arrest, but they were still able to order clothing. Which, good! You don’t want to just be wearing one thing for the rest of your life. So, she ordered just the most basic, cheap clothes you could get. And remember, in Versailles days, there were 200 people in the morning helping her with her toilette. Now, the only people around to help her was her 13-year-old daughter, Marie-Thérèse and Madame Élisabeth, her sister-in-law. The only jewelry she had with her anymore was her wedding ring, another small ring, a necklace she wore that had lockets on it with locks of her children’s hair, and the gold watch that her mother gave her way back when she first went to France, which she always kept with her as kind of a token. She paid Rose Bertin (who’s still on the scene, she hasn’t fled yet) small amounts of money just to, but not for new outfits, just to repair her plain bonnets. Léo, the hairdresser, had peaced out ever since the Flight to Varennes because he was involved in it. So, Marie Antoinette’s hair was now… The only person to do her hair anymore was her son’s valet, who didn’t really know about how to do hair, so he would just kind of like, brush her hair and powder it very simply.

Whenever the family left their bedrooms to go for a walk or whatever, when they came back, the guards had scrawled, like, crude drawings and messages on the walls of the rooms, just being like “Death to the King!” or whatever, and all the guards always made a point of wearing hats in their presence to show that they didn’t respect them and sang just dirty songs around them and just made their life… You know when Marie Antoinette had earlier said like “Life here is sheer hell”? It’s like, now it’s worse. Whatever’s worse than sheer hell, is this.

She was not allowed to correspond with anybody because, understandably and reasonably and correctly, they thought that she would scheme with somebody to try and escape. Yeah, she would. So, she couldn’t write to Axel von Fersen anymore. Although Berry was able to get some books sent in so he could read and also provide sort of like, home-based lessons to the Dauphin. The women were allowed to do embroidery, and they were provided with supplies for that. So, people just kept their hands busy, basically. They were forbidden from pamphlets or newspapers because the revolutionaries didn’t want them to know what was going on. But Marie Antoinette, if we know our girl at this point, she’s got the blood of Mary, Queen of Scots running through her, and she’s going to figure it away. So, she kept up her spy sneaky ways.

She had scraps of paper scribbled with code that were brought in and out surreptitiously by people who still supported her, maybe like when she got her clothes deliveries, they would sneak the piece of paper in somehow. She and Madame Élisabeth devised a system, sort of like what people do in baseball with, like, hand signals meant different things. So, the more sympathetic guards at the Temple could provide them with the latest news through, like, hand gestures. Genius. And then also, the town crier would walk by sometimes and be like, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Here’s what’s going on. It’s The Purge.” So, they were able to kind of somewhat keep abreast of what was happening in the outside world. And what was happening in the outside world was war, still happening, between the revolutionaries and this, like, European coalition. So, after the August 10th Tuileries invasion, the Assembly, remember, they were bullied by the Commune of Paris to do this stuff. So, the Assembly had disbanded, and so now there’s a new thing called the Convention Nationale, and they were charged with rewriting the part of the constitution about the monarchy, specifically.

September 2nd, word came out that the Prussians were now within a week of the city. Everyone is just like, you know, “We’re going to dance like it’s the last night in the world.” What is it? The Britney Spears song or the Kesha song, Britney Spears featuring Kesha song. “We’re going to dance till the world ends.” Like, that’s the vibe. That was already the vibe, but now everyone in Paris is just like, “We are going to die in one week! What are we going to do?” And what they did is the September Massacres. This was September 3, 1792; all of Paris, apparently, or just a bunch of them, woke up and began slaughtering a bunch of prisoners. This included 200 priests whose only crime had been to hold true to their religious beliefs, were massacred. People who had been arrested in the wake of the Tuileries, like the servants and stuff, were massacred. And this is where, if you heard the Princesse Lamballe episode, where all the prisoners were brought out, remember she’s in La Force prison, they were brought out in sort of this, like, fake judge situation where they’re like, “Do you support the king or not?” And if you support the king, then you were killed, not by the guillotine, but by being sent outside into a courtyard where the mob would just hit you with hammers. This is when Princess Lamballe is killed, Marie Antoinette’s dear friend, and then the mob mounted her head on a pike, and they wanted to bring this to Marie Antoinette because there were these rumours that they were lovers or whatever. And the pike was really tall, and Marie Antoinette was on the upper floor of this castle, but they were just like, “We want her to see this head!”

So, Marie Antoinette’s daughter, Marie-Thérèse, who did survive all of this, also wrote a memoir. She wrote, “At three in the afternoon, we heard dreadful outcries. My father, having asked what was happening, was told, ‘Well, if you want to know, it is the head of Madame de Lamballe they wish to show you.” Marie Antoinette passed out fully. Marie-Thérèse reported, “That was the sole moment when her firmness abandoned her.” And in the September Massacres, over 1,300 people were murdered, including children as young as eight years old. And then, came word that suddenly, in a reversal of fortune, the French army had got their shit together and won a battle. Caroline of Brunswick’s dad ordered a retreat. Paris was saved and they were not going to be invaded by the Prussians.

And so, September 21st, the newly elected Convention Nationale met in the Tuileries Palace, which, since the royal family wasn’t living there anymore, is now the meeting place of the Convention Nationale. Remember, they’d been working on the constitution and, like, what is the monarchy going to look like? So, they were just like, “We declare the abolition of the monarchy and the official founding of a French Republic.” No monarchs anymore. And their target was the King, who they were already mad at because of the veto situation. One of the people, one of the members of the Convention declared, “We must destroy the very word ‘king’ which remains a talisman whose magical powers are capable of stunning the multitudes into submission.” Robespierre is one of the leaders of this sort of group, and his sort of like, young acolyte, Saint-Just, who we talked about before, who was the hot one, announced that Berry is “an enemy who must reign or die. No man can reign innocently.”

And then, the guy who had… Remember, Berry has had, this whole time, his whole life, one of his hobbies is making locks. So, he had worked with a locksmith who taught him how to make locks, like back in the day. This locksmith, who had worked with him for 20 years and was like, “Oh, you know, I helped him build this strong box and there’s some secret stuff in that strong box, probably.” So, some guys went into the Tuileries, they found this strong box, they opened it, maybe with help of the locksmith, I don’t know. Inside this lock box was secret letters that Berry had exchanged with Mirabeau (remember the French revolutionary leader who was kind of helping them), letters he exchanged with the émigrés, leaders of the foreign coalition. Allegedly, what they found in this box was just kind of all the evidence, the counter-revolutionary agenda, that people had long suspected that Berry had been up to all along. Part of me is like, was that really in the box? This is really convenient. This is kind of like in Mary, Queen of Scots, like “We found this box of letters where she admits to doing everything terrible!” Anyway, you know Berry is going to be executed, and now they have an excuse to do it.

So, for a couple of weeks, they went through these letters, they released them for the widespread populations so that everybody would understand how much the King had betrayed the country. On December 3rd, Robespierre was like, “Berry must be punished in the harshest way possible.” He said:

Regretfully, I speak this fatal truth. Berry must die because the nation must live. I ask that the Convention declare him, from this moment on, a traitor to the French nation, a criminal toward humanity. Marie Antoinette ought to stand trial separately for her own despicable doings.

And so, because there was no more monarchy, he’s no longer, Berry’s real name, Louis XVI, they now called him Louis Capet, like first name-last name, not a royal, because remember there’s no titles anymore. Capet was the surname of one of the French sovereign’s earliest ancestors, and Berry was just like, “Uhh, guys. Actually…” He’s like, mansplaining. He’s like, nerdsplaining. He’s read a lot of history, he’s like, “That’s not actually the surname I would go with, personally,” but they were just like, “Shut up, Louis Capet,” and he was put on trial for treason because of what was found in this lock box.

His trial began December 11, 1792. He only knew that he was going on trial when two guys came to the temple and abruptly separated him in the middle of one of his lessons in geography with the Dauphin. From then on, he was kept isolated and away from his family. He was not used to being spoken to unless he began the conversation. Like, he was not used to people just asking him questions, so he was really unnerved by the whole being treated just like a regular guy, being asked all these questions by people. He was too flustered to respond a lot of the time. It took six weeks, the trial was six weeks long, until they came to their final conclusion.

January 15th, the Convention unanimously found Berry guilty of conspiring against liberty and public safety. So, they found him guilty, and then they had to do another vote of what will be his punishment. This vote… It came down to one vote difference, of like, is he going to be executed or not? And do you know who cast that one vote? Do you know who made it so he had to be executed? It was his cousin, Ryan Phillippe from Cruel Intentions, which really personally devastated Berry and Marie Antoinette, that their family member did that. But he sucked all along, and it’s not surprising to me.

The day of his… So, January 20, 1793, Marie Antoinette and her family heard the town criers being like, “Hear ye! Hear ye! Berry’s going to be guillotined tomorrow.” He was allowed to gather with his family for two hours the evening before, when he was going to be executed at 8:30 at night. The whole family, they rushed towards him sobbing, Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin on one side, Marie-Thérèse and Madame Élisabeth on the other side. Marie-Thérèse later recounted, “He wept from grief for us and not from fear of death.” They stayed just, like, hugging for 45 minutes, just hugging. Marie Antoinette begged that they could spend the night with him, but Berry was like… He wanted what was best for them. He was like, “No, but I promise I’ll come see you in the morning.” Marie Antoinette was like, “Okay, come at seven o’clock instead of eight. You had suggested eight, but come at seven. We want to have as much time together as possible.” But as soon as they had left, Berry told the guards not to allow the family to come down again because their presence was too painful for him. He needed to remain strong for what was to come, which was, like, fulfilling his dream of becoming a martyr. He said, “Ahh, why must I love and be so tenderly loved?” Which is just like, oh, Berry.

Marie Antoinette and the others just waited the next morning. They thought they were going to see him, they were going to be brought down to see him at seven. But they heard the clock’s timing. It’s seven, then it’s eight, then it’s nine and Berry didn’t show up. Then, after nine o’clock, they heard the drum rolls and Marie Antoinette, she later described it as “the movements of men and horses outside their windows.” They knew that that meant that Berry was leaving to be executed. And so, they waited another hour. Like, all they could do was listen. Just past 10:20, there were drumrolls and cannon fire and then cheers, and then they knew that he was dead.

Berry, at the time he was executed, he was 38 years old, and he had ruled France for 18 years. In his final moments… You know, he’d always had so much trouble with public speaking and with saying what he wanted to say, but he tried. It was so important to him to be the king and to continue this legacy of his family. So, he tried to say his final words. He began to say, “I die innocent of all the crimes of which I have been charged.” But then a drumroll sounded and drowned out the rest of what he was trying to say. After the execution, Marie-Thérèse, the daughter, wrote:

Nothing was able to calm the anguish of my mother. We could make no hope of any sort enter her heart. She was indifferent whether she lived or died. She looked at us sometimes with a pity that made us shudder.

Through her weeping and her grief, Marie Antoinette arranged to have new mourning clothes commissioned from Rose Bertin. So, black clothes for all of them to officially show their mourning. She also got a small collection of mourning accessories from Rose Bertin, two widow’s bonnets, which are bonnets trimmed with ribbons and a long veil, like a fichu, which is kind of like a wrap, two pairs of gloves, two pairs of kidskin gloves, one pair of silk gloves, a fan and some black stockings and socks. This was the last shipment she would ever receive from Rose Bertin at the Grand Mogul because later that month, Rose Bertin saw what was happening, knew that her connection with Marie Antoinette was going to supersede the fact that she made cockades for, like, the everyday people, and she fled, Rose Bertin, and she survived as well.

So, Marie Antoinette got these black clothes, which is interesting in a fashion-y way, because remember her mother, Maria Theresa, after her husband died, she wore black for the rest of her life, and that became her signature. But also, although there wasn’t supposed to be a royal family anymore, she was a royal in mourning, and allowing her to become, like, the Widow Capet, because that was the last name that the family had now, sort of was a royal thing to be doing that they were allowing. So, her clothes, the black clothes, preserved the symbol of a monarchy. The Revolution was trying to be like “There is no monarchy anymore. Everybody is just a person.” But somehow, seeing a royal family all in mourning gave them this air, not just of like, people felt sympathy for them because of Berry’s death, but because now it just made them think of like, Maria Theresa and other royals in mourning.

Berry being murdered was huge news in all the other monarchies around Europe. The execution of a monarch was just, like, all the kings in all the countries were just like, “If that happened there, it could happen here. We can’t have this happening anywhere else.” So, at this point, the British agreed to join forces with the other European allies in their war against the French revolutionaries. Spain and Holland also joined several months later. The Pope declared Berry a martyr of the Catholic faith.

People in Paris, there were still some people who supported… Obviously, there were still some people who supported the monarchy, but they did it visibly, which is interesting. Like, it’s a small amount of people, but they started wearing, like, black ribbons and black cockades, arm bands. These were the counter-revolutionary people. Seeing that, that there was sympathy for the royal family and that executing Berry had made people kind of more sympathetic to the royal family, the revolutionary government banned silk, in general, like, the fabric silk, because that was once the pride of the French luxury industry. Remember, it used to be like, “Wear silk!” Like when Marie Antoinette was wearing her cotton and muslin, people were just like, “She’s not patriotic enough. She’s not wearing silk, French fabric.” But now they’re like, No. Silk has too much associations with the royal family. Cockades should now be made out of wool. All cockades other than the tricolour was banned. Citizens, if they saw people wearing deviant cockades, those people could be brought in and murdered.

Green also became banned as a colour because this is when, we did an episode about this, Charlotte Corday, she supported the more moderate revolutionaries, she had stabbed to death the revolutionary journalist Marat in his bathtub. Look for the episode “She Killed Him in the Bathtub” to learn more about that. But she had been apprehended with a green ribbon in her hat, so green was now seen as a colour of counter-revolutionary, so now you can’t wear green anymore. And where it’s like, when you have to ban colours, like, is this a strong, successful government? If you have to infringe on people’s free speech and free colour-wearing to this amount. It’s like, people aren’t supporting you because they support you, they support you because they’re afraid of you, and that sort of support doesn’t last, I don’t think.

Marie Antoinette, for the record, by this point, incredibly ill. She had been ill for a while. She was growing really thin from her various symptoms, and she was hemorrhaging large amounts of blood all the time. This could maybe be, like… She’s 37 at this point, so maybe a perimenopause thing, maybe a stress thing, maybe fibroids, or maybe some sort of cancer. Something is going on, and she dramatically changed her appearance in this time. She just looked way older than 37. A Polish artist, Aleksander Kucharsky, who had become Marie Antoinette’s favourite painter after Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun fled, he was able to sneak into the prison to see her and painted her afterwards from memory. And she looks not great, but accurately to this person who was suffering a great deal.

But also, she’s still around because no one knew what to do about her. There had never been regicide, like, the murder of a king in French history, so there’s no established protocol for the widowed queen. At first, they’re like, if you look back at Fredegund and Brunhilde, like ancient Frankish days, it’s like, well, maybe when a king died, the queen was sent to a nunnery. Like, maybe instead of keeping her a prisoner or being put on trial, maybe she’d be sent off to live with her relatives in Austria, maybe sent to a nunnery. But while they were kind of figuring this out, the political climate affected what the options were going to be.

So, the new government, this like, not very popular government that was forcing people to not wear green… There’s still a war, remember? With every country in Europe. They instituted a Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. This is the part of the story where it’s just like, “Who’s being unpatriotic?” And they’re just like pulling in everybody. They arrested Ryan Phillippe, for instance, because his son had like gone to Austria to meet with some people, and they were like, “That means he’s not a patriot!” And if he’s not safe, then who is? So, at this point, they knew that Marie Antoinette was a figure that, as long as she was still alive, her and her son, people would support the royal family because they were there and they saw her wearing her black clothes. She was sympathetic.

Robespierre, who is in charge at this point, informed the rest of the Convention, “It was time for patriots to rekindle their vigorous and immortal hatred for those who are called sovereigns.” So, at first, this just meant that— Just? I mean, everything’s shitty. But first, this meant that the guards just treated them worse, so they were deprived of everyday necessities, like clean sheets. They were woken up in the middle of the night so the rooms could be searched for evidence of treasonous activity; none was ever found. Some of the stuff they found was just like significant, sentimental things. Like Madame Élisabeth had kept a hat that was Berry’s as a memento of her brother. They also found in Marie Antoinette’s room, a small scrap of fabric embroidered with a crucifix, a crown and Jesus’s arrow-pierced heart. And apparently, this is a symbol of Catholic rebels. So, they’re like, “Aha! She’s a Catholic rebel.” The discovery of this emblem, which I’m just like, did they find it? Or did they just say they found it? Was it in her room? Like, where was it? Anyway, this justified them as portraying her as an agent of the counter-revolution, which like, she was. We knew she was doing spy shit, but they’re preparing to put her on trial, and so they’re just putting together some evidence.

Interestingly, do you remember way back in episode, like, one where Marie Antoinette was 14 years old and she’s going on this long carriage ride to France, and then they went to this pop-up house that had been sort of decorated really quickly with just random tapestries. I mentioned at the time that the tapestries were maybe not totally suitable for, like, you know, portending well of a marriage of a young person. It was images of Medea, this classical figure from mythology, who had murdered her children. It’s quite a story. Anyway, interestingly, this comes back. I think I said then it’s going to come back, and this is where it comes back.

So, they found in Marie Antoinette’s room, a small wax medallion of Medea from mythology. Apparently, she had received this from one of the officers at the Temple, and they brought him in. They’re just like, [stern tone] “Why did you give her this wax figure?” And he’s like, “Oh, I just make wax figures of various things. That’s my hobby.” He’s like, “This is just one of about 4,000 like it that I have at home.” This guy’s just, like, making wax figures. He said most of the wax figures he made were allegories of the Revolution and, therefore, were harmless. But why, of all the wax figures, had Marie Antoinette chosen to keep that one? It’s interesting and mysterious. The image of Medea had no known connotation to, like, political stuff or religious stuff. So, it’s just like, “What does this mean to her? Why would she have kept this?” Potentially, he had given it to her, potentially, he gave it to her because Marie Antoinette had been portrayed as a harpy, as the new Messalina, like, other deadly figures from classical antiquity. So, maybe he’d given this to her as an insult, giving her a medallion of mythology’s most notorious female villain.

But perhaps, and I think, I got this idea from Caroline Weber’s biography, maybe Medea had been someone who interested her. Like, after she was in that pop-up house and she saw the tapestry, she might’ve been like, “What’s this story?” And Medea and that stuck with her. And this is 23 years later after she first saw those tapestries, so to have Medea at the beginning and then also later on in her story. So, maybe she just felt some kind of kinship with Medea as just a woman who had been wronged, a person who tried to wrest control in whatever way she could. Maybe it gave her strength or something? I don’t know. It’s interesting, certainly.

But it also made the revolutionaries— Like, they found this embroidery, they also found this Medea thing. One Republican, like pamphleteer, wrote, “By what magic has this infernal Antoinette taken control of our countrymen’s hearts? Has she held in her possession the secrets of cruel Medea? Yes, without a doubt!” So, they were just using anything, like anything, to just be like, “She’s a villain! She’s a villain! Look!” Anything was evidence, like, “Look, she has a sock. That means she’s evil!” But they found Medea, so they were just kind of trying to make it be like, “This means she is counter-revolutionary.” They just wanted an excuse to put her on trial, and so this was part of the excuse.

And the whole sort of psychological torment that they were putting her under, you know, she was staying strong, even like, she has these medical problems, she’s bleeding out constantly, they’re not giving her new linens to change her dressings for her, like, bleeding that’s happening all the time. But just this poise, this way about her… They haven’t broken her, basically. So, they’re just like, “Here’s how we can break her.” They knew that she was so fond of her children, like a lot of mothers are, but they also knew that she was everything she was doing was to try and make things okay for her son when he was eventually going to become king. So, there was allegedly rumours of a plot to kidnap Marie Antoinette’s son, the Dauphin, and install him as the new king of France. Like, as soon as Berry was killed, her son, the Dauphin, his name is Charles, Louis-Charles, he was King of France. Like, France didn’t have a king, but to royalist believers, he would be the king because the previous king was dead, and so he would be Louis XVII. So, I think there were plots of people to try and kidnap him or free him, liberate him, so that he could be the new King of France. Maybe the guardian would be like his uncle Provence or Artois, or I’d say Ryan Phillippe, but he’s in jail at this point. Anyway, so allegedly, that was their excuse, they said, for why they were separating the Dauphin from the rest of his family.

Six officers arrived in the middle of the night, as always, all these shitty things, they always did them in the middle of the night to just be as upsetting as possible. Six officers appeared to separate him from the rest of the family. Marie-Thérèse, the daughter, she later recorded, she was awakened, and she said:

They read us a decree ordering that my brother be separated from us and lodged in a more secure room in the tower. Hardly had he heard it when he flung himself into my mother’s arms, uttering loud cries and imploring not to be parted from her. My mother, on her side, would not give up her son and defended against the municipals the bed on which she placed him. They, absolutely determined to have him, threatened to employ violence and call up the guard. My mother told them they would have to kill her before they could tear her child from her. An hour passed in resistance on her part. At last, they threatened my mother so positively to kill him and us, all so that she had to yield for the love of us.

So, she was separated from her son. He’s like, six years old at this point— Actually, let me double-check his age because I want to get this right. Yeah, so he’s about eight years old. Little kid, little boy. He spent most of his life in some sort of house arrest, like, with his mother. And basically, now he was removed from all of his support systems. So, Marie Antoinette was just like…. Everything that’s happened to her, of course, she’s beside herself. She would have been beside herself if this was any of her children, but this was like her favourite child. But also, it’s like, he was her petit chou, her little cabbage, her most beautiful child, and also the one who was going to become the next king. Like, her whole hope. Everything in her was just living so that his life would be better, and now she was separated from him.

After this, the only way she could see him was there was a small crack in one of the walls of the room that they were in, and she could see the staircase leading up to the top of the Temple prison. The Dauphin was sometimes allowed up those stairs to go to the roof to, like, have some fresh air. So, she would just stand there for hours, Marie-Thérèse recorded. Marie Antoinette would just stand there looking at this crack just for the instant when she could just see him going up those stairs, or down those stairs. Marie-Thérèse said, “It was her sole hope, her sole occupation.” This was a month because at the end of that month, Marie Antoinette herself was removed from the Temple and taken to the Conciergerie prison for her trial for treason and other things.

So, she was a prime suspect in the counter-revolutionary conspiracy, allegedly. That’s what she’s on trial for, but they’re putting her on trial so they can execute her to make people stop liking the royals, to make people more sympathetic to that Convention, this very unpopular government. So, they allowed her no privacy as she changed from her nightclothes— Like, they came in the middle of the night because they always do. Just to give her no respect, they watched her as she changed. And the only dress that she was able to take with her was her black mourning dress, which she’d been wearing every day because she knew she might be taken to be executed every day, and she wanted to be wearing this dress. So, she just wore this dress every day, just in case. The dress was in tatters at this point. She asked if she could bring some needlework with her; she’d been working on sewing a pair of socks for her son. This was not allowed. She wanted to bring some personal possessions with her, but they were taken away from her. What she wanted to bring with her was her little necklace with the locks of hair from her husband and her children, a miniature portrait of the Princess of Lamballe, and a little pocket mirror she had used to just do her morning get-ready-with-me type stuff. She’s also, side note, incredibly sick. They took her in a carriage from the Temple to the Conciergerie, and she actually bled, like, she hemorrhaged so heavily in the carriage that her skirts and the seat that she was sitting on were all stained with blood. This is a horrible story I’m telling you right now. I’m so sorry, but this is the story that there is to tell.

I do want to mention she’s being treated especially cruelly. Not all highborn, high-profile prisoners were treated this way, just her. For instance, Ryan Phillippe, when he was arrested as a counter-revolutionary suspect— He, at this point, so his real name was Louis, Duke of Orléans. And to be like, “I’m like you, fellow poor people,” he changed his name to Philippe Égalité. Because remember, you’re not allowed to have titles anymore. You know, the French thing, it’s like Liberté, Égalité? So, he’s like, “I’m Philippe Égalité. I’m, like, a total normal guy, too. Make me be your king, please. Thanks!” But when he was incarcerated (he was first incarcerated in Marseille, and then he was sent to the Conciergerie later), he was allowed to maintain an extensive wardrobe full of all the luxurious clothing that he had not worn during his time period of trying to be like every man, like, “Please make me your king.” So, just like, in jail, he was just like, “Yeah, no, I’m like a rich guy. Whatever.”

Marie Antoinette was being treated especially cruelly because she was so hated, because she was such a symbol of, like, decadence and whatever. She was placed in a dank, squalid and sparsely furnished cell at the Conciergerie. I believe this is the place where, if you watch last year’s Paris Olympics Opening Ceremonies, this is where there’s the part where they bring out the, like, heavy metal band and they sing a song, “Ça Ira.” That is a song that was sung by the revolutionaries. It was actually set to the tune of a song that Marie Antoinette used to like, and then they made it into the song, and then they bring out, in the Opening Ceremonies, the sort of chorus of beheaded Marie Antoinettes all standing in the window. That’s the Conciergerie prison. I now understand why people got upset about that because that’s a pretty shitty thing to do.

So, she got to the cell. The things she has with her are her wedding ring, her other ring, the gold watch from her mom. She hangs the gold watch up on the wall, just kind of like a token, she’s had this her whole life, just to give her comfort. But then that was taken away because they’re like, “No, she can’t have anything.” At this point, like she had been stoic for so long and she just broke down when they took away this gold watch. She also asked, “Can I have the needlework? I was working on knitting these stockings for my son,” and they’re like, no, because they were afraid that allegedly that she might hurt herself with the needles. But she was just like, “No, I’m going to make these stockings for my son. Goddamn it.” So, she picked thread— There was, like, a torn tapestry on the wall over her bed, and she picked threads out of it, and using a pair of toothpicks, knitted a pair of garters for her son, which is like, she won’t be stopped, she won’t be broken. She asked the prison concierge to please send these to the Temple, to her son. The gift never reached him. And just so you know, what happened to the Dauphin is that he died under mysterious circumstances in the prison, but we’ll talk about that in a bit. Anyway, a few years later, the garters were given to Marie-Thérèse, and that’s how we know that they existed.

Anyway, so a few days later, a few days after she was placed in the Conciergerie, she was able to get a scrap of paper, and she wrote a note to her daughter. Her daughter had stayed behind. Her daughter and Madame Élisabeth were still back in the Temple Palace. And what Marie Antoinette wrote to her daughter was:

I want to let you know, my dear child, that I’m all right. I’m calm and I would be all together so if I knew that my poor daughter were not worried. I embrace you and your aunt with my whole heart. Please send me some lace stockings, a cotton redingote, and an underskirt.

So, this note got to them. Like, they had supporters; there were still people sending the notes back and forth, and so Madame Élisabeth and Marie-Thérèse fulfilled this request. They found a sympathetic officer who brought a package of clothes to Marie Antoinette at the Conciergerie. Apparently, she was overcome by emotion as she got these items. Her sort of, like, assistant, maid at the conciergerie was this woman called Rosalie, which is interesting because Rosalie was the name that Marie Antoinette had as her pseudonym during the Flight to Varennes. Rosalie was sympathetic to her and brought her a cardboard box that she could store them in, because if there wasn’t a box she would have had to, Marie Antoinette would have had to put this stuff on the floor, and it would have gotten dirty. Rosalie also got her a little red painted mirror that she got from a nearby just trinket dealer because the queen wanted a mirror just so she could, like, do her morning toilette. Rosalie just did what she could; she tried to keep the bed linens changed and clean as much as she could, even though they were, like, covered with bugs. She tried to do her hair as much as she could. There’s another prison employee called Madame Harel who helped do Marie Antoinette’s hair every day with a white ribbon and a touch of powder. So, it’s like anything, it’s like people going through anything. It’s like, you know what, might cheer somebody up? A little lip gloss, like, having your hair shampooed, you know? Just little things to get us through the day.

So, her appearance— It’s like, well, why was her appearance so important to her at this point? It’s like, fuck you. Why not? But also because she was getting a lot of visitors and she wanted to present, like, she knew she was a symbol for the monarchy and she didn’t want to look beaten, she didn’t want to look defeated, she wanted to look at her best. People came to visit her cell at all hours of the day and night. Some people were revolutionary officials who wanted to question her; some of them were just like curiosity seekers who just wanted to see her, but she just always wanted to look, like, as dignified as possible, as good as possible. When she was at the Temple, like the family had been kept in seclusion, they only saw each other. At the Conciergerie, suddenly, it was like in her early days at Versailles, she was being seen at all hours of the day, and she knew that when she was being seen at all hours of the day, she had to present a certain front, especially because they were trying to humiliate her. And she was just like showing like, “I will not be broken.”

On September 4th, prison officials uncovered a plot to help her escape from the Conciergerie. This became known as the Carnation Affair because the guy who tried to rescue her used a carnation to try and smuggle a note into her cell. The discovery of this plan—and this is similar, again, to the Mary, Queen of Scots stuff—it’s like, once they discovered that there are active plans to try to escape, they just clamped down on her even more. And this just made the people, the revolutionary government, crack down even more on her for her time in jail. They moved her to smaller and shittier rooms. She wasn’t allowed to see Rosalie anymore, and instead, she was placed under 24-hour surveillance of a guard who insisted on being present even when she was dressing and undressing.

So, let’s see, I’m just clarifying. Yeah. So, Rosalie was removed, and Madame Harel had been dismissed because she was maybe involved in the Carnation Affair. So, like, who’s going to do her hair? So, the prison’s concierge, Monsieur Bault, would be the person who would do the hair. Marie Antoinette was just like, “Hell no. This guy’s not doing my hair.” And for the first time in her life, she did her own hair. She still wasn’t broken! So, the Republican, the government kept taking even more away from her because they’re just like, “We want you to suffer.” And she’s just like, “Fuck you. No.”

So, she had managed during this time, they took away her gold watch, but she still had her wedding ring and this other ring, and she found comfort in them. Like, I find comfort in rings sometimes. Just as like a fidget toy. Not just like having a thing, but also a reminder of your life and a reminder of like what was good. She would shift the ring from finger to finger, but after the Carnation Affair, they took these rings away from her, and this is when they stopped giving her sufficient clean body linens to stop the blood that continued to flow from her uterine hemorrhaging. So, she’s just, like, dried blood all over her underclothes. You know, earlier on in this episode, she’s like, “This is sheer hell!” It’s just like, this is even more.

So, Rosalie, sorry, I said before Rosalie was dismissed, she was not dismissed. It was the hair person who was dismissed. Rosalie is still at least her maid, like, cleaning up the room. What Rosalie would do at this point is she would strip off little pieces of her own dress and hide them under the bedsheets, so Marie Antoinette could get those to, like, staunch the flow of blood from her uterine fibroids.

And then, Marie Antoinette was summoned before the Revolutionary Tribunal, eight o’clock in the morning on October 15th. She was put on trial, finally. She had no time to prepare; she didn’t know what the charges were, but she knew this was coming eventually. And so, she was seated on a bench at the front of the courtroom. When she first came in, people were shocked at what she looked like because she was so ill, she’d gotten so gaunt, and people remembered how glamorous she used to be, and that’s still how she was portrayed in, like, pamphlets and cartoons. They imagined this fantastically luxurious-looking person, and it’s just this woman who is, like, not doing well, who’s wearing this threadbare dress and is clearly very sick.

So, she was there. She had to listen to them explain all of her alleged crimes. She was allowed to respond every now and then, and the prosecution decided it wasn’t enough to just accuse her of treason. Putting her on trial and executing her was like, it’s like a catharsis for the whole city. She had been held up as the villain for so long. And the reason why they’re finally putting her on trial and they’re going to find her guilty and they’re going to execute her, is because this government is struggling and they need to show that “This person who you hated, we’re going to punish her and that will make you support us, the shitty government,” is kind of what’s happening. So, they had to just remind everybody why they hate her and why the government killing her is good. She was such a propaganda tool at this point. Like, this trial is not about who she is as a person, it’s not even about what she really did. They’re just like, “Remember this woman who you’ve hated for decades? Let’s remember all the things we hate about her so we can all be happy when we kill her, because then you’ll support the shitty government.”

They also wanted to make sure that like… There’s stuff that’s sympathetic about her; she looks sick, people know that she’s a widow, she’s been separated from her son. They want people to not sympathize with her at all, so they have to remember why she sucks, why the monarchy sucks. They don’t want anyone to support her son as the future king or anything. They had to just… This is their chance to just really trash her reputation to try and prop up their shitty government.

There was no evidence against her, of course. It’s like, “Look at this Medea figurine! Look at this cross stitch!” Like, there’s nothing, there’s nothing. So, they just brought in witnesses who were just like, “Oh, I heard this. Oh, I heard someone say this.” So, they brought up the embroidery, they brought up the Medea medallion, they brought up the fact that, like, when they went on the Flight to Varennes, that she wore a disguise, that that was a crime. They talked about that thing where there was, like, where she welcomed the Swiss guards at the time, and then people said that she had like stomped on cockades. They were like, “She stomped on cockades!” They talked about how she nominated people who they didn’t like to be ministers, how she had manipulated the king, especially she was involved with Calonne, that guy who people didn’t like, Monsieur Deficit. They brought up how she was in league with Jeanne de la Motte from the Diamond Necklace Affair. They said that she was directly responsible for the famine, which was caused by weather incidents. They said that she spent so much money in Petit Trianon. They said that they alleged that she had a special dress made to disguise pistols. Remember I said about the August 10th thing, where they were like, they retold it as not just like Paris invaded the Tuileries, but like, that was where the royal family had instigated it by firing upon the populace. So, they said, “She had special dresses made to hide the pistols so she could personally shoot at everybody.”

Marie Antoinette, it’s like, how do you respond to these preposterous things? So, she said like, “I’ve always loved France. It’s my husband’s kingdom. I’ve never wished for anything but France’s happiness.” But then they also brought up the sex stuff, like how she had been rumoured to be this evil nymphomaniac her whole life. They brought up that she was promiscuous, that she was a slut, like she wore the fuck dresses. And then they, this is… This, this… Okay, this is where she lost it. And I’m going to too.

So, they brought up a shocking witness statement that they had manufactured. So, her son, I said he died, he hasn’t died yet. The Dauphin is still, at this point, being held by himself in the Temple. And he has, like, I’m going to say horrible, just like, one of the worst people I’ve ever read about, and I won’t get into the details, but this sadistic guard is watching over this eight-year-old boy. They really wanted the Dauphin to give testimony against his mother, so they physically and emotionally tortured him, they forced him to drink alcohol to get drunk until he would say and do whatever they wanted. And so, the Dauphin had written the statement under these circumstances, saying that his mother had molested him. The statement said, alleged, that “Marie Antoinette had molested her son in order to intentionally ruin his health so that she could become an all-powerful female monarch” is what was alleged.

So, during all the other bullshit accusations, she had just been, like, standing there, her poise, her elegance, she’s just like, “Mm, no. I don’t think so.” But when they read this statement from the Dauphin, which she didn’t know this had happened, she didn’t know that he’d been manipulated into this, like, she was so horrified by this grotesque accusation, she stood up and she said, “Nature refuses to reply to such a charge against a mother. I appeal to all mothers who are here.” And apparently, this was such an emotional outburst, and the accusation was so shocking, and her response caused some people in the courtroom to admire her. Even some of the Market Ladies were moved to tears by the effect of her statement. When Robespierre heard what a sensation it was, like, how her words had moved everybody, he broke— He was at dinner when he heard about this (he wasn’t at the trial, he just heard about it), he broke his plate with rage. He was so mad that, like, people could be on her side. So, even though the charges were bullshit bananas, like, “She had a dress with secret gun pockets,” like whatever. It’s like, the jury and the witnesses had all been chosen because they were people who hated her and would say what the prosecution wanted. And so, where Berry’s trial had taken two months, Marie Antoinette took 20 hours, and she was there for it all. She was awake for 20 hours just listening to this litany of just horrible stuff.

At four o’clock in the morning, the Revolutionary Tribunal formally convicted Marie Antoinette as “A declared enemy of the French nation, the accomplice or rather the instigator of the majority of the crimes of which Berry had been found guilty.” She was found guilty, and her punishment was to be executed on the Place de la Révolution. Unlike him, who had been able to say goodbye to the family and stuff, she would not be able to say goodbye to her family because her execution was going to happen… right away. So, like, it was what? Four in the morning. It was going to happen that day, later that same day. They also told her, like, “You’re not allowed to wear your black dress to the scaffold,” because they knew that that would get sympathy from the crowd, seeing her as this widow. So, she was going to have to find something else to wear. But guess what? Like her ancestor, Mary, Queen of Scots, she had plans for a final outfit reveal.

So, she returned to her cell, and she did not fall asleep. Everything was decided at 4 a.m. Half an hour later, she’s in her cell, she requested a candle, some ink, and some paper. She had not been allowed to have those throughout her stay, but now she was able to get them. And she wrote a letter to her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth. And I will quote to you from part of it. The first part of this, she’s referring to the Dauphin’s testimony against her, the written statement that he had been coerced into doing. She wrote:

I have to speak to you of a thing very painful to my heart. Pardon him, dear sister. Think, at his age, how easy it is to make a child say what one wishes and even what he does not understand. I pardon all my enemies for the evil which they have done to me. I say adieu to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. Adieu, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. I embrace you with all my heart, and also those poor dear children. My God, how heartbreaking it is to leave them forever. Adieu, adieu.

And after writing out the letter, she stretched out on her bed, rolled over to the side, like, turning her face to the wall, and just wept without making any sound.

When day broke, Rosalie, she had tried to feed Marie Antoinette some broth, or just to get her some food. Marie Antoinette refused it and so Rosalie just helped her dress. The guard, this guy who just stood there and his job was just, like, to watch her dress and be a creep, he refused to leave even when she is hemorrhaging blood. When she went to try to change her body linens, she implored him to like, “Can you turn away for decency’s sake?” And he would not because there’s a lot of shitty people in the story, and he is one of them. Anyway, so she changed her bloody linens, and Rosalie did her best to, like, stand in front of her to try to hide her from the guard, just with her body.

She was surprised to see that when Marie Antoinette went to kind of put the used linens in a hole on the wall, Marie Antoinette pulled something else out of the hole in the wall, which was a special white chemise, which is just like a simple sort of nightgown-type dress. She had kept it ready just for this occasion. All of her clothes were just, like, bedraggled and used and covered in blood and dirt and whatever, but Marie Antoinette had kept this one spotless. Remember when she asked for the specific… Like, for Madame Élisabeth to send here a chemise and whatever and whatever? She got that and she kept it secret because she wants to appear in public, spotless, clean. This is her last appearance in public, and she’s going to make a sartorial statement. So, even facing execution, she knew that she could still control her image through her clothing, and she did. So, she put on this secret dress that she had kept hidden. So, she’s just like white on white on white; she’s got a white dress, her skin is really pale because she’s sick, her hair turned white long ago. She’s wearing a white, she’s got a bonnet, she’s got her white wrap, everything is just, like, pristine. This is the statement she’s making, like: I am innocent, you bitches.

All across Paris, people are just gathering in the streets because they want to watch her process from the Conciergerie to the scaffold. And this is where I want to say, and I didn’t plan this, but imagine if I had the very, very, very first episode in this whole long Season Seven was about a woman, an enslaved woman, called Marie-Josèphe Angélique, who had been born in Portugal, and she wound up in Montreal in Canada. She also was executed. And this is a real parallel because Marie-Josèphe Angélique, she was also put in a cart and dragged through streets full of people who hated her to her execution. Marie Antoinette, the same thing. It’s kind of book-ending the season in a way where it’s like, two women, very different lives, very different situations, but the same ending, really.

So, crowds were just out to gather. It’s like, people, for so long… Remember every time that the Market Ladies and everybody broke into the palaces, they went to Marie Antoinette’s room. They wanted to get her. When she was not there, they just stabbed her bed because they hated her so much. So, this is what they’ve been waiting for, for so long, like, watching her be killed. They think that this is going to solve all their problems.

So, this white outfit that she’s wearing, of all the, like, fashion statements she’s made in her life, this is not discussed a lot, but Caroline Weber, in her biography, Queen of Fashion, she mentions that this was maybe the most brilliant fashion statement of her entire career, just showing up in this spotless, perfect white outfit, going to the execution. She’s making a statement without saying anything in the way that she always has with her fashion.

When Berry had been taken to the guillotine, he’d been in a closed carriage, so it wasn’t as much of a spectacle. Marie Antoinette, the scapegoat of everything, apparently she controls the weather, she, like Marie-Josèphe Angélique in Montreal, she was travelled in an open cart just to, again, maximize her humiliation, like, “as though she were a stack of firewood or a mound of cabbages.” This cart moved slowly, and her hands were tied behind her back too. Her hair had already been cut off because you cut off people’s hair before you guillotine them so the hair doesn’t get caught in the blade or whatever. So, the cart just moved slowly; the streets were so full, like, it took an hour to get from place to place. The crowds were jeering at her, where it’s just like, “Girl, she’s used to this by now. Like, whatever.” The vibes are really similar to if you picture an earlier day gone by, you know, maybe someone accused of being a witch would have been treated in this way, like, being pulled through the streets like this. Witchcraft, also, interestingly, another way that people are scapegoated for weather problems.

Anyway, so there’s an artist called David, who we talked about in a previous episode. He’s the one who did the painting of Marat, like, after Charlotte Corday killed Marat, David made this beautiful painting of Marat where he kind of looks like Jesus. So, he’s a big revolutionary guy, David. He did a sketch of her going by in the cart, and it’s a quick sketch. It’s described in this one source as a brutal sketch. Like, it’s not flattering, it’s not a beautiful image. He saw her as pathetic, as this kind of hideous crone. Just like, she used to be so narcissistic and so vain and look at her now. But to me, and some of the people who see this, it’s an accurate-adjacent image, and it just kind of shows like a woman who’s like proud, she’s still got the posture that’s always been impressive about her her whole life, and this aura about her. To me, I see a strong woman who is just like, “Fuck you. Fuck all of you. I’m going to be remembered and none of you are. So, just like, fuck you,” is how I see it. He saw it as just like, “Look at this gross crone,” and it does capture her like profile, which she’d never liked to have portrayed in images, with like, the long nose and the lip and the resting bitch face.

He thought she looked so shitty, but other people were very moved by what they saw. We talked in the Charlotte Corday episode about how she kind of looked like an angel going to her execution, and some people just saw this, sort of like the same thing with Marie Antoinette. They’re just like, “Oh my gosh, she’s so white. The purity, the angelicness of this, like, the way that she’s carrying herself.” This magic power Marie Antoinette had was just her posture and her composure. Some people are just like, “Oh my God, look at her.”

So anyway, she withstood it all with dignity. She did not break, even as she mounted the steps to the guillotine. And I’m not going to say like, Madame du Barry was just like, “Wait! Someone save me! Stop this!” Like, being executed sucks. The way that people behave when they’re being executed, it’s just like… I’ve done a couple of stories like this, Lady Jane Grey, Mary, Queen of Scots; it always sucks. Marie Antoinette, she portrayed herself as she wanted to be portrayed. She wanted to be just like, “I’m still the queen. Fuck you,” and that’s what she gets across. Her last words were she said, “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose,” because she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot while she was climbing up the stairs, which kind of just like… Remember when she was with Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, who was like, the pregnant painter, and she dropped a paintbrush, and Marie Antoinette went to pick it out for her. It’s just like, she’s just nice. She’s just a nice person. And at noon, the guillotine blade dropped. She was 37 years old. It was two weeks before her 38th birthday.

But that’s not where the story ends because we’ve all heard of her. And why is that? So, in the immediate aftermath of Marie Antoinette’s execution, Madame Tussaud, our friend from a previous episode, she was employed to make a death mask of Marie Antoinette. I hope it’s still there. When I was a young person in the ‘90s, I went to see Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in London, and there was the death mask of Marie Antoinette. I have not been back there since, but I understand that the Chamber of Horrors is there again, and I think that the death mask is probably there too. It would mean more to me to see it now than it did when I was a kid, and I didn’t really know about Marie Antoinette. Anyway, the death mask was made. Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave in the Madeleine Cemetery, which was close by. This is just where— Because remember they’re being like, “Everybody is the same. There’s no royals,” so they just threw her in a mass grave with other people executed that day. And that cemetery got full, I guess, because of all the people being executed, so it actually closed the following year because it ran out of capacity for more dead bodies.

What happened internationally? Marie Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina, the Queen of Naples, was furious about this. She offered to help French émigrés fleeing France; she granted a lot of them pensions if they came to Naples. The French Revolution, after this point, devolved into The Purge, which is formally known as the Terror, where it’s just like, again, this shitty government. Without Marie Antoinette there as the thing for everyone to hate together, it all fell apart. And that’s the purpose of a scapegoat. Without her there, a new scapegoat had to be found, and that became Robespierre himself. All the leaders of the Revolution, basically, all were executed by each other. Marie-Thérèse, Marie Antoinette and Berry’s one surviving child, was eventually released from prison in a prisoner swap, and she was sent to join her mother’s family in Vienna, where she married her cousin, Artois’s son, the Duke of Angoulême. She became the Duchess of Angoulême, and she fled after that, and they lived in England for a time.

And then, Napoleon took over because everything is just chaos, and you need someone to be in charge, and no one was in charge. Napoleon took over. First, he’s just like, “Yeah, this is great. I love the Revolution,” whatever. And then he’s like, “What if I name myself emperor? And what if that’s a hereditary title? And what if the next person in charge is my son? And what if it’s basically the monarchy again?” And then everybody got mad about that, and there was another Revolution. He was kicked out, and the Bourbon royal family, Berry’s family, was restored to monarchy. So, as much as people nowadays are just like, “Yeah, this is like the French Revolution!” Through this whole series, I’ve come to understand the French Revolution was just a series of people making wild decisions, utter chaos, and it ended with the monarchy being brought back anyway. So, why did we do any of this?

So, who became king? The little boy who died in prison, the Dauphin, he would have been Louis XVII. Technically, he was the king for that period of time where he was in jail, and then he died. He died as the result of the horrific abuse he faced in the prison, and maybe, potentially, tuberculosis just because he was treated… He was living in really bad conditions, and he probably was susceptible to a lot of diseases, and it’s really sad. For the rest of Marie-Thérèse’s life, sort of like the Princes in the Tower in English history, men would show up and be like, “It’s me, I’m the Dauphin. I actually survived,” and that was really traumatizing for her because none of them were her brother and she lived through such a sequence of shitty things, Marie-Thérèse. She was never okay, understandably.

Anyway, so the new king, when there was the restoration of the monarchy, Louis XVII, who is that? Well, it was Berry’s younger brother, Provence, who long wanted to be the king instead of him. And when he took over with the restoration of the royal family, which again, it’s like, why did the French Revolution even happen? Well, I mean, we know why it happened, but it’s like, what did it lead to? Oh, just the royal family coming back again. Okay. So, Provence became the new king. He had Marie Antoinette’s body and Berry’s bodies exhumed from the mass graves where they were left, this is in 1815. He had their bodies re-interred in the necropolis of French kings at the Basilica of Saint Denis, and there are statues there of them both as well. Marie Antoinette in the statue, interestingly, because this is 1815, she’s wearing more of an umpire waistline dress. It’s like, well, she never dressed like that. But okay, if she was alive, she probably would have at that point.

Then 1824, Provence died of gangrene. He had no surviving children, so the next king became the other brother, Artois, who became King Charles X. His son was the heir. His son is the heir, and there’s also Marie-Thérèse’s husband. So, Marie-Thérèse is now married to the Dauphin of France, making her, like her mother, the Dauphine, which is interesting how that happens. Artois, not a popular king, as you might understand and appreciate, and might have been like this yourself, he was really tyrannical and wanted to not have revolutionaries do anything because he saw how that destroyed his brother’s life and threatened the monarchy. His unpopularity, Artois, as Charles X, led to the 1830 July Revolutions, which is another sequence of revolutions. There’s so many revolutions in the history of France, they just kept happening. But the result of this 1830 Revolution resulted in Artois, Charles X, abdicating of being king. He named as the next king his nine-year-old nephew, but the government at that time was just like, “We don’t think so. We want someone else as king.” And another guy swooped in and usurped the power. Who that person was, was the son of Ryan Phillippe, and he took over as Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, he was called.

So, then it’s 1832. Students in Paris revolt against Louis Philippe, the Citizen King, this is what Les Mis is about. So many people, when I talk about the fact I’m doing this Marie Antoinette series or French Revolution, they’re like, “Oh, like in Les Mis!” And I’m not going to be like, “Oh, actually, it’s a different revolution,” because this is convoluted. But this is what the Les Mis revolution is about, and nobody would know about the 1832 Student Revolution, except Victor Hugo wrote a book about it and it became Les Mis. The schoolboys do not win, as we know from the end of Les Mis, they were all killed.

But then, in 1848, there’s another French Revolution. This time they get rid of the monarchy again. And who is elected is Napoleon’s nephew, who becomes president. And then later he’s like, “What if instead of president, I’m Emperor Napoleon III?” And his wife, Eugénie, who we talked about in a previous episode was a Marie Antoinette fangirl, also a redhead, also loves glamour and knows the power of fashion. And she, because she loved Marie Antoinette so much, as soon as she became empress, she went to Versailles, she wanted to see Petit Trianon. She was just like, “Where’s all the stuff?” Like, how I feel about how I want to see the Marie Antoinette exhibit. Anyway, so she, Eugénie, really set to work trying to amass as much of Marie Antoinette’s furniture and belongings as she could because she was just a fan and she wanted to rescue it. And that’s why at the V&A exhibit now, they have a lot of the things they do. So, thank you, Eugénie, for getting that all together.

And then, in 1871, there’s another revolution. France becomes a republic again and stays that way, and that is where we are now with France, no longer has a king. Although there are people who are royalist supporters, like today’s Bourbon descendants, even the Habsburg descendants. Like, when there was the Olympic thing with Marie Antoinette, with the headless Marie Antoinettes singing the “Ça Ira” song, the Bourbon descendants were just like, “This is shitty,” the Habsburg descendants were like, “This is shitty.” And friend of the podcast, Leah Redmond Chang, who was on one of our earlier episodes talking about Olympe de Gouges, she wrote a really beautiful essay about why that was shitty, and now I understand even more fully, understanding the context of that song, the fact that it was at the Salpêtrière Prison where Marie Antoinette was sent to die, the whole pointlessness of the French Revolution and executing her. I’m like, yeah, that was shitty. That was a shitty thing the Olympic Opening Ceremonies did.

This is the end of the Marie Antoinette episode, and so what we do on this podcast when we reach the end of a biographical episode or series is we score those people in four categories on what is called the Fredegund Memorial Scandaliciousness Scale. So, there are four categories, just to kind of see how everybody adds up in these various areas.

The first category, and this is a tricky one, honestly. I’ve been thinking about it a lot because the first category for Marie Antoinette, well, for everybody, is Scandaliciousness. How scandalous was this person’s behaviour based on the society of the time? And with Marie Antoinette, a lot of it, it’s like, people thought she was scandalous, but it wasn’t scandalous. People thought she was having all these orgies and lesbian relationships and secretly manipulating the royal family and stuff, but she wasn’t. She did do some things that were challenging societal norms, like being the queen and having this political power, being the queen and having this fashion power, having Petit Trianon. The fact that, you know, she maybe scratched to enter a door with not her left pinky finger, but her right pinky finger. People like Madame Etiquette would be like, “Herman, my pills!” There’s stuff she did that… I’m going to discount most of what she did that scandalized the Versailles crowd because that’s a cult and that’s insane.

And then it’s like, she was put on trial for all this stuff, where it’s like, was that scandalous? Like, having a Medea medallion and stuff? But where I do think she did push society, push the boundaries, was some of her fashion stuff was, like, very, in the context that she was in as the Queen of France, was very provocative, I guess. I wanted to just say, there’s stuff she did that was scandalous (positive, that she actually did). But the fact that people thought that she did other things, I don’t want to give her a really high score for Scandaliciousness because I’m defensive of her. I’m like, but she wasn’t scandalous! But she was in a lot of ways; she went to Paris, she went in disguise to balls. She did do things that were shocking to the people of the time and place. I’m going to say 6 out of 10 for Scandaliciousness because she did push the boundaries of what was acceptable behaviour for a queen. In a different context, maybe it wouldn’t have been as shocking, and it wouldn’t have led to the French Revolution and her dying. It’s a tricky one, but I’m going to say 6 because she did do a lot of stuff that really, at this point, in a certain way was progressive, that she was challenging some of the really outdated stuff that Versailles was doing… Yeah. You know, it’s my show. 6 for Scandaliciousness, I’m going to say.

The next category is Schemieness. I think that this is interesting because in the first part of her life, she was not because she did not have to be. Everyone around her was doing schemes all the time, trying to fool her, trying to trick her, and trying to manipulate her, and she was just having a nice time, trying to deal with the fact that she had not consummated her marriage in seven years, that there were all these expectations on her as the queen, but they were all trying to undermine her at every turn. She wasn’t schemey until she was in prison. And this is where she took a real Mary, Queen of Scots pivot, where she’s just writing a secret code, making secret plans, buying the party bus. I feel like her schemieness, again, in a defensive way of me defending her, she’s put on trial because they’re like, “Oh, she was a traitor to the Republic!” And at that point, she kind of was, but not like they thought. Yeah, she was communicating with the other army and telling them what France was doing because France was trying to kill her. So, she was. So, it’s like, that’s schemey, in a way.

But again, I feel like she was schemey in a positive way that I respect, to the best of her abilities. Did her schemes amount to much? Well, she was surrounded by people who were not helping that. The fact that Berry was involved made it very hard to pull off a lot of the schemes that she was up to. I think I’m going to say… [sighs] I’m going to say… Because she did really, like, with the spy stuff and the making the plans and the secret codes, I’m going to say a 6 for Schemieness as well because she pulled it out when she had to. The schemes didn’t all work (most of them did not), but that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t scheming.

Significance, I think, is a 10, but I will talk about that for a bit more. I’m doing this podcast about women in history, and to the average person who I talk to, most of the people we discuss on this podcast, they have not heard of, but they’ve heard of Marie Antoinette in the same way they’ve heard of Cleopatra. These are such famous names. Even if you don’t really know her story, and I didn’t really know her story until I did all the research for this season. I didn’t know about how wronged she was, I didn’t know that she had a pants gender-bending era, I didn’t know a lot about her. Even if you don’t know her whole story, you can picture her, like, it comes to mind. It’s like, the pouf hairstyle, the big fancy dress, the jewels. Even people who think she said, “Let them eat cake.” It’s like, yeah, she didn’t say that, but you know who she is, and you think she said that. She’s so well known right now.

In terms of significance, countless movies and books and podcasts about her. The V&A has this whole exhibition, Marie Antoinette Style, and people are going to go to that because she’s so famous, her style is so famous. I love that for her. I love that she’s being celebrated in this exhibition, where she is often vilified too, still to this day. But she did have an impact on style. Her significance in terms of that, of just showing how a woman in power could operate, how you can use fashion. Empress Eugénie did this as well, following in her idol’s footsteps, how you can get more people buying French silk by wearing French silk, to the point that when you switch to cotton, it threatens the entire industry. You still see this with people today who are just affiliate links in any Instagrammer is saying it’s, like, people want to look like a famous person, and she’s the first person to make that attainable. I work with Rose Bertin and Léonard. Her forward-thinkingness, to me, as a fashion girly, I see her influence is huge.

But then also her significance to all of history. We’ve talked about the French Revolution and the one million reasons why it happened and why she ended up being the scapegoat. She did not cause the French Revolution; there are so many people and weird decisions that came into that, but she was part of that. She’s an important part of how everything unfolded. If she hadn’t been there as a scapegoat, if Berry had married somebody who was less progressive, for lack of a better word, if he had married someone who was more traditional, then maybe there wouldn’t have been this— If he had married someone more traditional and he had a mistress, would people have hated the mistress? Would people still have hated the queen if she wasn’t somebody who was just doing all this house remodelling and stuff? I don’t know. But the fact that she was there was a mandatory canon event, and that’s part of how the French Revolution happened. She’s so intricately connected to it.

She’s a 10 out of 10 Significance, for sure, to me. Both her influence on fashion but also her influence on history, and the fact that everybody knows her name. If you don’t know her story, when you hear her name and you can picture her. If you see someone in costume as her, you know that’s her. I don’t know who’s more famous than her as a woman from history. She’s the most famous woman from history, even to people who don’t give a shit about women from history. Those poor people.

The final category we have is the Sexism Bonus, which is where I think about, like, how much more could this person have accomplished if not for sexism? How much did the patriarchy get in their way and affect what they were trying to do in their life? I think for her, this is a 10 as well. This is truly a 10 for me because the hatred, part of it, was the xenophobia. Part of it was she was Austrian, and that was an excuse to be suspicious of her, to not trust her like the Aunts did. As soon as she came into the country, just because of the long dispute between France and Austria, people hated her. People hated her because she was a woman who was not behaving the way that they thought a woman should. She was a wife who was not becoming a mother, not because of her choice, but just because of circumstances. She was living her own life, independent of her husband in a lot of ways. She was making decisions on her own, and that just terrified people, it confused people, it angered people, and it made it so easy for people to vilify her.

And then you see, like we saw, she was a scapegoat, she was kept alive until the government needed her death to try to prop themselves up. And then, once she died, everything, the whole government, fell apart. This sexist, misogynistic, xenophobic hatred of her was keeping everything running. When she was removed from that, everything devolved into absolute chaos, purge. Hating this woman kept it all going, and we see that in so many other circumstances with so many women in this era. How many movements have grown out of people hating Hillary Clinton or people hating Amber Heard? Monica Lewinsky. When there’s a woman to hate, it really brings people together. There’s something about that misogyny that makes it even more potent and makes it easier for people to hate this person, if it’s a woman. Hating Meghan Markle. The hatred of a woman, and there’s all kinds of other aspects to it too, but anyway.

Had she not lived in such an enormously patriarchal society, we talked about this in the other episodes, especially about the revolutionary era women, the Rousseau of it all, where it’s just like, women, all they should do is stay home, give birth to babies, breastfeed those babies. Women shouldn’t be involved in anything. The fact that Marie Antoinette was seen to be involved in politics even before she was, was just showing she was a cautionary tale. If she could thrive, then that meant that their whole worldview about “Women should stay silent and at home and not do anything interesting,” that couldn’t be believed because she was out there thriving and not being a mother. In a different society, she would have had a very different situation, but also honestly, 100 years before, she would have had a very different situation. It was the worst possible time for her, as a person, to come into France to marry Berry, who is the worst possible person to be the Dauphin, and then everything just kind of happened like it happened. So many things went into it.

Anyway, what I’m saying is 10 out of 10, Sexism, because she was hated so violently in such a sexual way. So many of the pamphlets were just demonizing her sexuality, demonizing her interest in fashion, which, like, yeah, she was spending a lot of money. She was also spending a lot of money on house renovations, and so was Artois, and so were so many other people, but it’s because she was a woman doing this instead of being a mother that she was hated.

Anyway, let’s do some quick math. That’s a 32 for our girl, Marie Antoinette. Where does that leave her? I’m just looking on our Fredegund Memorial Scandaliciousness Scale. She’s not top 10, but I didn’t think she would be because she wasn’t actually that scandalous. The people in the top 10 are people who were murderers, like, leading armies, and she was just having a good time. She has a 32, and in terms of people this season, Marie-Josèphe Angélique, and we’re going to go through this, and if you go to the Patreon right now, there’s the season wrap-up, but Marie-Josèphe Angélique, the first person we talked about this season, has a 35. That’s the highest score of anyone this season. Charlotte Corday, 33.5, because she has more scandal, frankly, probably more Schemieness. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, who is a painter, has a 32. Marie Antoinette has a 32. Sally Hemings has a 32.

That’s where she is, and I think, I don’t know, this scale is subjective, obviously, because I make up all the numbers, but you know, the people at the top are the most schemiest, most scandalous people. If you want to listen to those episodes, just go to VulgarHistory.com and click on “Scores,” and you can see the scores and descending order. Just listen to any of the top people and you’ll get quite a saga. Marie Antoinette, it reminds me of Mary, Queen of Scots, where it’s just kind of like, she is so famous, but so much of it is just like, she was surrounded by haters. What could she do? Mary, Queen of Scots, her ancestor has a 36, by the way, on the same scale. Anyway, wow. This has been very informative for me, very interesting, very terrifying, the parallels between what happened in the French Revolution and what’s happening these days in the world.

Anyway, I want to remind you of two things, or probably more than two things. One of them is, if you’re in or near London, England, go to the Marie Antoinette Style exhibit at the V&A Museum, take pictures of everything, and send them to me @VulgarHistoryPod on Instagram, because I’m desperate to know what’s there and to see what it all looks like! We have a special episode coming up in a few days, which is going to be talking with an author about Benjamin Franklin, who was involved with Marie Antoinette. Remember, there was the hat, the chapeau à la Franklin. We’re going to talk about that and also connect it all the way back to Canadian history. That’s coming out in two days. Next week, we’re starting our Halloween series, Mary Shelley, talking all about her and her whole deal and how she became the goth icon that she is.

If you join the Patreon today, you can hear our Season Seven wrap-up, where I’ll be giving awards to all kinds of different people and events from this whole season. Go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. It’s free to listen to that episode. If you want to listen to more next week, on my Patreon, I’m going to be having a discussion of the Marie Antoinette movie by Sofia Coppola. That’s available to paid members of the Patreon, Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter, which is where you can also see, if you want to see me slowly losing my mind in person, the video of this and other episodes.

Anyway, I also wrote a book. I mentioned during the episode about the Duke of Brunswick, who wrote that manifesto that kind of sped up everything bad happening. His daughter, Caroline of Brunswick, is the heroine of my first ever book I’m having published. It’s called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen. Marie Antoinette, mentioned in that book as well. Anyway, my book comes out next February. You can learn all about it by going to RebelOfTheRegency.com. You can add it to your to-be-read list on Goodreads. If you’re on NetGalley, you can request an early copy of it. There’s going to be an audiobook version of it, there’s an eBook version of it. It’s available right now for pre-order in Canada and the United States. I hope to have news soon about people— Because I know people in other countries want to read it too, and I hope to have news for you about that as well soon.

If you pre-order the book, which is where you pay now and you get the book when it comes out in February, you get free stuff from me. You can get a free membership to my Patreon, so you can listen to that discussion of the Marie Antoinette movie, buy the book, listen to the discussion. You can get a free membership to my Substack to read my essays about things, and you can also get a Caroline of Brunswick paper doll. Like Marie Antoinette, she was a fashion girlie who, when her voice could not share what she thought, her clothes said what she thought. One time, she wore a pumpkin on her head, and the paper doll does have a pumpkin you can put on her head, just for the record.

Anyway, we’ll be back in a few days with our Benjamin Franklin discussion. Next week, we’re starting our next miniseries, a Halloween Month series about Mary Shelley, goth icon. Until then, all my friends, 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/AnnFosterWriter. 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:

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