Marie Antoinette: the very name of the doomed queen of France, the last of the Ancien Régime, evokes power and fascination. Against the poverty of late 18th-century France, the five syllables evoke a cloud of pastel-colored indulgence, absurd fashions, and cruel frivolity, like a rococo painting, sprung to life.
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The life, and death, of Marie Antoinette is certainly as fascinating. Falling from the Olympus-on-earth of Versailles to the humble cell of the Conciergerie and ultimately the executioner's scaffold on October 16, 1793, the final days of the last royal Queen of France were full of humiliation, degradation, and blood.
This is the story of Marie Antoinette's beheading at the Place de la Révolution in Paris — and the tumultuous events that led up to it.
Marie Antoinette's Life At The Conciergerie
Tucked away in its cavernous halls, Marie Antoinette's life at the Conciergerie could not have been more divorced from her life of luxury in Versailles. Formerly the seat of power for the French monarchy in the Middle Ages, the imposing Gothic palace lorded over the Île de la Cité in the center of Paris as a part administrative center, part prison during the reign of the Bourbons (her husband's dynasty).
Marie Antoinette's final 11 weeks before her death were spent in a humble cell at the Conciergerie, much of which she likely spent reflecting on the turns of her life de ella — and France — took to bring her from the top of the world to the guillotine's blade.
Marie Antoinette wasn't even French. Born Maria Antonia in 1755 Vienna to Empress Maria of Austria, the young princess was chosen to marry the dauphin of France, Louis Auguste, when her sister was found an unsuitable match. In preparation to join the more formal French court, a tutor instructed young Maria Antonia, finding her “more intelligent than ella has been generally supposed,” yet also warned that “She is rather lazy and extremely frivolous, she is hard to teach.”