"Marie Antoinette's Darkest Days" Topic

"This compelling book begins on the 2nd of August 1793, the day Marie Antoinette was torn from her family's arms and escorted from the Temple to the Conciergerie, a thick-walled fortress turned prison. It was also known as the "waiting room for the guillotine" because prisoners only spent a day or two here before their conviction and subsequent execution. The ex-queen surely knew her days were numbered, but she could never have known that two and a half months would pass before she would finally stand trial and be convicted of the most ungodly charges.

Will Bashor traces the final days of the prisoner registered only as Widow Capet, No. 280, a time that was a cruel mixture of grandeur, humiliation, and terror. Marie Antoinette's reign amidst the splendors of the court of Versailles is a familiar story, but her final imprisonment in a fetid, dank dungeon is a little-known coda to a once-charmed life. Her seventy-six days in this terrifying prison can only be described as the darkest and most horrific of the fallen queen's life, vividly recaptured in this richly researched history"

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Amicalement
Armand

(smile)

Amicalement
Armand

they should have let her go to exile in austria rather than murdering her for no reason other than she was the queen

That cake thing….how lie can live on for ever :( (I know Terrament is just joking. I am just referring to the power of lies to live long lives)

and The Hound is right on exile. Her killing was meaningless beyond a symbol. But radicals of all stripes adore symbols. Much more than actual change.

KT,

I've heard two "factual" variations on the saying:

1) She never said it at all; it is actually a line from a play by Voltaire called "The Princess" which was falsely attributed to her.

2) What she actually said was "let them eat brioche", the point being that brioche was taxed everywhere because in Paris it was considered a delicacy (cake, rather than bread), whereas for the great mass of the population in the rest of France it was an essential part of the diet – ie she was actually being compassionate.

Do you know which (if either) is accurate?

Most indicators I have seen /read are for (1) and not false attribution but more like coherent propaganda campaign. I can never know fully. It also had nothing to do with revolutionary frevor. It was anti-Austrianism. The French, elites or people never liked the Diplomatic Revolution. I think they still hated the Hapsburgs more than the UK well into the early 1800s. The Napoleonic wars changed the priority of hatred number one.