ANTOINETTE ❘ IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF
“HER HAIR HAD
BEEN SHORN AND HER HANDS WERE TIED BEHIND HER
BACK. SOME IN THE CROWD SPAT AT
HER AS SHE PASSED”
In August that year, Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie, where she was imprisoned for more than two months until her trial. You can visit the part where she was held, now a chapel, and see memorial plaques for her and Louis and a little cabinet of memorabilia. The few possessions left, which include a small water jug and a white bonnet, underline how far she had fallen by this point: reduced to one small room with a table, bed, chairs and a bucket, scrutinised at all moments by guards and, eventually, taken upstairs to the courtroom wearing a simple black dress and subjected to mockery and insults, before being found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death.
THE BLOODY END
Clockwise from this image: A 1783 portrait of Marie Antoinette by
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun; the Queen’s Bedchamber at Versailles; Marie
Antoinette created a bucolic fantasy at Le Petit Trianon; the Conciergerie; the Marie Antoinette statue at Chapelle Expiatoire; Jacques-Louis
David’s sketch of Marie Antoinette on her way to the guillotine
October 1789, a mob of market women attacked the palace. Louis XVI agreed that he and his family would return under escort to Paris, and from that moment they lived under a scrutiny which gradually became imprisonment. Marie Antoinette’s next two ‘homes’ no longer exist today. The Tuileries Palace, where the family spent nearly three years under house arrest, was destroyed in 1871. Initially, they continued to be seen in public, attending mass and walking in the grounds, but eventually, on August 10, 1792, events took a terrible turn for the worse. A crowd of 10,000 revolutionaries amassed outside the palace gates and, in the absence of the king, who had departed to speak at the Assemblée Nationale, shots were fi red. A massacre ensued and half of the palace’s 1,000 Swiss Guards were butchered by the angry mob. That night, Louis, Marie Antoinette and their children were taken
to the Temple and this time there was no pretence that they were anything other than prisoners. The Temple, a former medieval fortress built for the Knights Templar, was destroyed by Napoleon, but its outline is traced on the road just outside the 3rd arrondissement’s town hall, and information boards explain the story. Twenty guards kept watch over the
family, held here in damp conditions, as their fate was decided. One terrible night, the head of the Princesse de Lamballe, a loyal friend who had been executed for refusing to sign an oath against the monarchy, was paraded past their window on a stick. In December, Louis was taken away to be tried and it’s thought that Marie Antoinette and the children probably heard the drumming which preceded his public execution on January 21, 1793, and the shouts and jeers of the crowd afterwards.
The artist Jacques-Louis David drew a sketch of Marie Antoinette on the morning of October 16, 1793, being taken by cart through the streets to her execution in the Place de la Révolution, now the Place de la Concorde. Her hair had been shorn and her hands were tied behind her back. Some in the huge crowd lining the streets spat at her as she passed, while others shouted “Vive la République!”. She is said to have mounted the steps to the guillotine ‘with bravado’, pausing only to apologise to the executioner for stepping on his foot. Although Marie Antoinette met her death in Place de la Concorde, there are two more places worth visiting in Paris. Today, her remains lie in the Basilique Saint-Denis, the cathedral on Rue de la Légion d’Honneur (at the penultimate stop on the northern end of Metro Line 13) where most French royalty is buried. Here you can visit a little chapel containing beautiful marble statues of both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. And at the Chapelle Expiatoire, in the 8th arrondissement, there is a memorial chapel, built on the site where her body was thrown after her execution. Inside it are statues of both Marie Antoinette and Louis, together with engraved texts. For Marie Antoinette, the words are from the last letter she wrote, early on the morning of her
execution, accepting her fate, asking pardon for her sins and bidding her orphaned children farewell: “O my God! how heart-rending it is to leave them for ever! Adieu! Adieu!” FT
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