Convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal on charges including treason, Marie Antoinette rode to the scaffold in a plain cart, hands bound, hair shorn. Witnesses noted her composed bearing despite jeers from the crowd. Her execution marked the Terror's escalating war against the old aristocratic order.
She had been queen of France for nineteen years and a prisoner for over a year when the tumbrel carried her through Paris streets lined with jeering crowds. Revolutionary courts had already stripped her son from her, tried her on invented charges of incest, and reduced her once-legendary wardrobe to a single stained white dress.
Witnesses recorded that she climbed the scaffold steps quickly, apparently eager for it to end, and reportedly apologized to the executioner after accidentally stepping on his foot: 'Pardon me, sir.' The crowd's cries of 'Vive la République' followed the blade's fall.
Her death, following Louis XVI's by nine months, symbolized the Revolution's total rupture with the Bourbon monarchy. Later generations reinvented her as both villain and martyr, but the woman on the scaffold that morning was neither the frivolous 'Madame Deficit' of revolutionary propaganda nor a saint—just a 37-year-old mother who had outlived her world.
Key people: Marie Antoinette