Marie Antoinette. From the Throne to the Scaffold

On Marie Antoinette’s birthday, a court astrologer predicted that she would die on the scaffold unless the princess were married off to Russia or China. But her mother, the haughty Austrian queen Maria Theresa, brushed off the prophecy — either she did not believe the horoscope, or she thought that Paris was worth not only a mass, but a head as well… The prediction came true exactly — on October 16, 1793, at the age of thirty-seven, with her head shaved and her hands bound behind her back, Marie Antoinette climbed the scaffold and lay beneath the blade of the guillotine. Her last words were addressed to the executioner Sanson, whose foot she had accidentally stepped on: “Forgive me, monsieur, I did not do it on purpose…”

Although more than two centuries have passed since then, the fate of Marie Antoinette leaves no one indifferent — she is either adored, with her artistic taste and ability to enjoy life extolled, or hated, accused of frivolity and debauchery; either justified, lamented as an innocent victim of terror, or condemned as a cruel intriguer who brought France to revolution; she was never forgiven for the scandalous statement: “If the people have no bread, let them eat cake,” and to this day people gossip about the intimate details of her family life (it is no secret that Marie Antoinette’s husband, Louis XVI, suffered from phimosis for many years and could not fulfill his marital duty).

In portraits, she has clear blue eyes and the sensual lips of a voluptuary, an aquiline nose, and the haughty, contemptuous gaze of the Habsburgs. What was there more of in her: cruelty or tenderness, stupidity or cunning? Did she really “bathe in the blood of the French,” as pamphlets claimed? Whom did they execute “in the name of the people” on Revolution Square — a fiend from hell in female form, or an unfortunate, confused woman who became the victim of a merciless era?..