Dragged before a hostile tribunal, Marie Antoinette faced accusations ranging from squandering the treasury to conspiring with foreign powers against revolutionary France. The trial, conducted with predetermined outcome, reflected the Terror's logic that the monarchy itself was a crime deserving death. She was guillotined two days later.
The courtroom in the Palais de Justice buzzed with a crowd eager to see the woman revolutionary pamphlets had spent years vilifying as 'Madame Deficit,' a foreign-born spendthrift blamed for France's financial ruin and moral decay. The charges leveled against her included wild accusations of orgies and incest with her own son, fabrications designed to strip away any sympathy.
Marie Antoinette, worn down by months of imprisonment and grief after Louis XVI's execution earlier that year, defended herself with unexpected composure. When accused of exhausting France's treasury on pleasure, she reportedly replied that if the people lacked bread, it was not from any want of her feeling for them.
The tribunal's verdict was never in doubt. Revolutionary tribunals of 1793 operated as instruments of political will rather than justice, and the queen's Austrian birth made her doubly suspect as both aristocrat and foreigner. Two days after this hearing, she climbed the scaffold, reportedly telling her executioner 'pardonnez-moi' after accidentally stepping on his foot—a small, human moment before the blade fell.