On the morning of the 16thher October 1793 Marie Antoinette, previously Queen of France, was found guilty by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the three main charges against her: embezzlement of the State treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason by transmitting information to the enemy – that is, her homeland, Austria, during the War of the First Coalition (1792-1797), with which the great monarchies of Europe attempted to contain and defeat Revolutionary France. Her trial had suddenly begun on 14 October, and unlike her husband Louis XVI, who had been given weeks to organize his defence, she was given only a few hours to prepare.
Worn out by her detention at the Conciergerie and visibly distressed by the violent separation from her son Louis Charles, dressed in black (as her husband had been executed months before), Marie Antoinette appeared in the Great Hall of the Revolutionary Court before various citizens who they wanted to see the infamous “Austrian wolf” up close, and she sat in the defendant’s dock. There followed many hours of testimony and questioning of 40 witnesses who were supposed to have seen with their own eyes the senseless orgies the queen was accused of organizing in Versailles.
Among other things, Marie Antoinette was accused of embezzling public money during the construction of her private residence (the Petit Trianon), while she was thought to have instigated King Louis XVI to carry out the daring “escape to Varennes”: an unsuccessful attempt of the royal family and their court on 20-21 June 1791 to flee Paris and head for the pro-royalist stronghold of Montmendy, near the Franco-Belgian border, from where they would lead a monarchist counter-revolution. One of the most outrageous accusations, however, was that of incest, which the Rebels seem to have fabricated by forcing the royal couple’s son Louis Charles to claim that his mother was sexually abusing him. Hearing this accusation, Marie Antoinette was visibly shaken, making an emotional appeal to the mothers in court – who appeared to sympathize with her.
The trial lasted until 11 at night, when it was adjourned. It started again the next day at 8 am and lasted for 16 hours. Unlike her husband, the accusations and evidence that the Revolutionary Court supposedly had at its disposal could by no means be described as conclusive. In fact, they were more like rumors that went from the empathy and popular resentment towards the person of the Queen that had already existed since 1874 and had been created on the occasion of the so-called Queen’s Diamond Necklace Affair, in which the Queen had been accused of defrauding the jewellers. of the Crown as she refused to pay for a very expensive diamond necklace (in fact her signature had been forged by a fraudster and she had never been interested in buying the necklace). The unsubstantiated rumors of perversion and libertinism, the great extravagances, her involvement in the theater and above all her Austrian origin at a time when France had highly competitive relations with the neighboring kingdom, had made the young queen highly disliked by the increasingly impoverished French people.
Thus, her fate was predetermined. The widow of Capé (as the deposed King Louis was called) would be sentenced by the Revolutionary Court to death. In her remaining hours, she wrote a letter to her husband’s sister, Madame Elizabeth, in which she expressed her great regret at leaving two of her remaining children behind. She also wrote a letter to her children, asking her eldest daughter Maria Theresa to forgive her brother for the lies he was forced to tell. It is said that these letters were never delivered to their recipients, but were found under Robespierre’s bed after his execution.
Just before noon on the 16thher October, the former queen prepared for her last public appearance: she wore a simple white dress and her hair was cut very short. Unlike her husband, she was not given the “luxury” of the covered carriage, but was forced to cross the route from the Conciergerie to the Place de la Révolution (now de la Concorde) seated with her hands tied behind her back , in a cart, passing through the enraged crowd who hurled insults at her.
At 12:15 p.m., Marie Antoinette Josephine Joanna was executed before the Parisian crowd. Her last words are said to have been “Excuse me, sir. I didn’t do it on purpose” (“Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès”), addressing her executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, because she accidentally stepped on his foot while climbing the scaffold. Her death marked the beginning of the Terror.
Column editor: Myrto Katsigera, Vassilis Minakakis, Antigone-Despina Poimenidou, Athanasios Syroplakis
