September 30, 2025 by Dr. Angela L. Ash
Marie Antoinette enjoys almost universal name recognition for all of the wrong reasons, since the French Revolutionaries successfully cast her as a pretentious, unfeeling, coquettish, and superficial queen, with no regard for the plight of her subjects who were suffering under the pressure of French absolutism. Even as the Revolution’s machine worked to end her life, she didn’t even receive the same kind of quiet dignity as her husband, Louis XVI, whose one-way journey to the guillotine was in a fine carriage. In contrast, hers was in an open cart, thereby allowing all of Paris to throw objects and insults at her in one final humiliating scene. The popular hate for Marie Antoinette, however, is rooted in mythology and misunderstanding.
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