The Fantastic Rule of Marie-Antoinette

Upon reflection, the execution of Queen Marie-Antoinette is actually a rather odd event. It took place ten months after the judicial killing of her husband, Louis XVI, and had to be supported by the revival of fantastic claims about Marie-Antoinette's malfeasant behavior. Indeed, the entire of Marie-Antoinette's “career” as queen can be seen as the product of fantasy. As historians including Lynn Hunt, Joan Landes, and Elizabeth Colwill have discussed, malicious political gossip began in the 1770s around Marie-Antoinette's alleged sexual peccadilloes. The sexual rumors continued into the Revolution, prompting some historians to claim that Marie-Antoinette was a central figure in the exclusion of all women from political participation. But this is a layering of fantasies—contemporary and modern. Some of these fantasies were the work of Marie-Antoinette, who played the shepherdess at the Petit Trianon and whose willingness to accept the realities of French court politics was limited at best. Other fantasies were bent on destroying the Queen by casting doubts on her as a wife and mother. Enemies of the Queen suggested first that she was unfaithful and then that her infidelities undermined the entire monarchy, insisting that sexual malfeasance was matched by fiscal malfeasance and ruinous frivolity. During the Revolution, Marie-Antoinette's death was the result of fantasy as well: She died when she did and how she did because rumors that her son Louis XVII (so considered by rabid royalists and more moderate monarchists alike) was going to rise up and overturn the fledgling republic. Revolutionaries worried mightily that if he gained power, Marie-Antoinette as queen mother would become his regent. To forestall this possibility, the Revolutionary government tried and executed Marie-Antoinette, rendering forever in historical memory a fantasy—of female corruption chastised, of innocence murdered, of motherhood slandered, of monarchy outmoded. Take your pick.