The Second Death of Marie Antoinette

In 1793, the infamous Marie Antoinette was moved to the Conciergerie in Temple Prison. A woman who became synonymous with indulgence spent her final months with almost no personal possessions, separated from her children, awaiting her imminent death.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You're listening to Noble Blood, a production of I Heart
Radio and Aaron Minky listener Discretion advised. The streets of
Paris on September third, seventeen ninety two were chaos and anarchy,
reeking of blood and sweat and spit. Thousands of starving

(00:21):
people and desperate bodies pressed together overnight. Hasty tribunals were
built outside prisons for aristocrats to be swept through one
at a time, pulled from their cells in the middle
of the night to stand trial for a teeming crowd.
These trials would go on until sunrise. Marie Antoinette, her

(00:44):
husband Louis the sixteen, and their children were still not
technically imprisoned. Yet they lived in a fortress palace called
the Temple, under something close to house arrest, forced to
wait their days staring at walls, listening to the mocking
man not in his chance, of the guards and the
cries for blood from the street. One of Marie Antoinette's

(01:07):
favorite ladies in waiting, the Princess de Lembaal, was brought
into the courtyard. The Tribunal of revolutionaries asked the Princess
de Lembald to take an oath swearing her love of
liberty and her hatred of the queen. I can swear
readily to the former, the princess said, but not the latter.

(01:28):
It is not in my heart. Those with sympathetic hearts
looked upon the princess with horror. Some whispered to her,
begging her to take the oath and save her own life.
The princess de lemball shook her head. The leader of
the tribunal brought his hand down and shouted. The princess
was thrown to the crowd. Her body was torn apart,

(01:51):
stabbed and beaten. Those with knives cut pieces of her
flesh to keep a souvenirs. Her head they stuck on
a pipe to parade through the city, and so from
cafe to cafe, the princess's lifeless head was placed before
patrons who were told to drink in celebration of the

(02:12):
death of traders. Then someone in the crowd had an idea,
shouldn't the queen get to see her favorite once more?
Should she not get to give her friend a kiss goodbye?
But the princess's head was bloodied and swollen, her hair
madded and thin, and so the crowd brought it to
a hair stylist who was forced to style the decapitated

(02:37):
head until it had the same blonde, cascading curls that
the princess had been famous foreign life. When the head
was recognizable, the crowd brought it to the temple. They
raised the head on its pike until it was directly
outside the Queen's window. The crowd began chanting, demanding Marie Antoinette,

(02:58):
kiss the princess this cold blue lips, look into her
hooded swollen eyes, see her gray skin, her sunken cheeks,
and her perfect, beautifully quoffed golden hair. The meniscus thin
bubble that had kept her safe at Versailles had popped,
leaving Marie Antoinette with only the shutters on her windows

(03:21):
to shield her from having to see her friends grotesque head.
The sounds from the street, though, the taunts and the jeers,
there was no protection from, and even when the crowd scattered,
bored with waiting for Marie Antoinette to appear, ready to
find a fresher body. Marie Antoinette, now, sooner or later

(03:43):
that that body would be hers. I'm Danis Schwartz, and
this is noble blood. Marie Antoinette's first death came when
she was thirteen years old, on an eye and in
the middle of the Rhine between Austria and France, where

(04:03):
she was to begin her new life as a dauphine,
the wife of the country's young prince. She left everything
Austrian behind in an elaborate tent. She was stripped, naked
of all of her clothes and dressed anew all French.
Her Austrian dog, Mops, was taken away. All of her friends,

(04:24):
her ladies, the ones who had taken the week's long
journey with her by carriage here to her new life,
were turned back. Only the little princess, born a new
continued on in a sky blue carriage of gold and velvet.
No longer Maria Antonia but Marie Antoinette. She was the

(04:47):
fifteenth child of the Empress Maria Teresa and was only
gifted with the prize role of Dauphin of France thanks
to random happenstance, an unlikely circumstance befalling her older sister.
Her education up until that last minute betrothal had been minimal,
But even if she wasn't studious, she was beautiful and

(05:08):
charming and agreeable she would be happy in France marrying
the awkward young prince only a few months her senior.
But even if she wasn't, her happiness wasn't the point.
She was a pawn to secure an alliance between Austria
and France. Twenty two years after she became a French princess,
after two decades of decadence in the most cultured and

(05:31):
luxurious palace in the world, Marie Antoinette was alone in
a cell in the heart of Paris, with mobs outside
calling for her head to join that of her husband
and her friends in the guillotine. Marie Antoinette's prison cell
at the Conciergerie was not a place of warmth and kindness,

(05:52):
but the jail keeper, Madame Rochard, tried to make the
woman who had once lived in a palace comfortable. Madame Richard,
who ran the Concert der Jurie with her husband, had
watched the queen hanging a small golden watch on the
wall of herself, the only bit of adornment in the
dark room, where the walls dripped and moaning could be
heard from all hours of the night. It was a

(06:13):
gift from long ago from her mother. The Empress Maria Theres.
Madame Richard had also watched the guards confiscate the watch.
Five days later, the queen was mostly quiet after the
her hands stayed in her laps. She thanked the guards
and they brought her food, and thanked Madame Richard when

(06:33):
the jailer brought fresh flowers to the cell before those
two were banned. One afternoon, to try to cheer up
the queen, Madame Richard brought her own son to the prison.
Marie Antoinette had always famously loved children. She once stopped
her carriage to help a poor boy on the street,
paying for his boarding and education. She had clutched her

(06:55):
own children to her so tightly and for so long
that Versailles had wagged their tongues at her over indulgence.
When Madame Richard's son, fan Fan arrived at the Conciergerie,
Marie Antoinette burst into tears for the first time in weeks.
Her voice rose above a whisper. She wailed while hugging
the boy, pulling her arms tighter and tighter around him.

(07:18):
It was a cry of misery. Fan Fan was seven
at the time, the same age as Marie Antoinette's son,
Louis Charles, imprisoned somewhere far away being re educated by revolutionaries.
When Madame Richard took her son's hand and led him
back into the hall, she confessed to a maid that
she had made a mistake and she would never again

(07:40):
bring fan fun to visit Marie Antoinette. Six months prior,
Marie Antoinette's family had all been together for what would
be the last time. It was the night before the
former King Louis the sixteenth execution, and the man now
called Louis Capette was permitted one last meal. Marie anto
Anette and Louie's younger sister Elizabeth cried the entire evening,

(08:04):
while the children, a boy and a girl, looked up
at their stoic father with wide watery eyes. Promise me,
the ones king said to his children that you will
not seek revenge for those who do this to me.
Little Louis Charles nodded his head. Marie Antoinette would not
stop her weeping. She and her husband had been married

(08:25):
for twenty three years. Louis the sixteenth had never taken
a mistress. Perhaps if he had, things would have been
easier for his queen someone else to deflect the gossip
and attention. But I was far too late to try
to imagine how things might have been different. Louis the
sixteenth had been sent into to death, and his head

(08:46):
would be on the guillotine the next morning. To stop
his wife, and his sister and his children from crying,
Louis promised that he would see them tomorrow morning, that
he would say one final goodbye. This was just good night,
will say goodbye tomorrow morning. He lied. The next morning,
Marie Antoinette, now called the widow Capette, was taken to

(09:08):
a new prison cell. Her son, seven years old, was
now technically the king of France and it was time
for him to be re educated in the ways of
the revolutionaries. Young Louis Charles was ripped from his mother's
arms and taken away, but still within earshot. That was important.

(09:32):
The guards wanted to make sure that Marie Antoinette heard
her son's crying, heard his beatings at the hand of
his new teacher, a cobbler named Simon. Marie Antoinette became
obsessed with trying to catch just a glimpse of her
small son. She would spend days pressed against a wall
in the spot where if she craned her neck. She

(09:53):
could just see him being brought to his new exercises.
The guards would laugh at little Louis Charles, giving him
wine until he got drunk, then more wine until he
got drunker. They beat him until he agreed that he
hated his parents, that the former king and queen were traitors,
and he loved only liberty and the revolution. They beat

(10:16):
him until he agreed that his mother had molested him,
forced him to lie with her, that she was a harlot, degenerate,
a monster. Marie Antoinette heard it all. Eventually she stopped crying.
When she was moved to yet another cell, she accidentally
hit her head on a door frame. A guard asked
her if she was all right. Marie Antoinette answered, nothing

(10:40):
can hurt me anymore. The queen was to be moved
to the prison of the Conciergerie. In the middle of
the night, her guards lifted their bayonet to knock on
the prison door. A young man named Louis Larrivier answered.
When Louis was a boy, he had worked at Versailles
as a pastry cook. He had caught glimpses of the

(11:00):
queen and all of her splendids. The woman before him
now was sallow as wax, dressed all in black. Even still,
it's impossible that the young Louis did not recognize her,
that he could not see the shadow of the woman
who had once been the sun. What is your name,
Louis Larrivier asked her, determined to obey the proper intake

(11:22):
protocols for the woman who is now just prisoner number
two hundred and eighty. What could Marie Antoinette say? Was
she Maria Antonia Josefa Joanna Are, Duchess of Austria, the
dowager Queen of France, or was she just the widow Capette?
There was no answer she could give. Instead, Marie Antoinette

(11:43):
just simply replied, look at me. Marie Antoinette was brought
to her cell. The sun had only just begun to rise.
Madame Richard, a former haberdasher, had managed to get linen
for the Queen's bed and a lace edged pillow, but
the cell was still a cell, damp brick floors and

(12:03):
peeling walls, furnished only by a canvas bed, a table,
and two chairs. Madame Richard had brought a stool from
her own room. There was a bucket in the corner.
The room itself was humid with stinking, stagnant air. Marie
Antoinette began to undress, and Madame Richard offered to help.

(12:26):
Thank you, my child, the queen said, but since I
no longer have any of my household with me, I
will look after myself. When one of the maids brought
Marie Antoinette a small mirror, a little cheap thing with
a red border and an oriental pattern on its back,
Marie Antoinette held both of the maid's hands in her
own and kissed her on the cheek. The small mirror

(12:49):
she kept safe in a cardboard box, and she prized it.
Marie Antoinette watched the guards play their card games. She
requested a needle and thread from broidery, but she was denied,

(13:09):
and so she pulled the frayed edges of the Sells
wallpaper and wove with that. She read adventure novels over
and over again, like the travels of Captain Cook, lent
to her by one of her sympathetic jailers. The queen
still had allies. Technically there was her family in Austria,
but her mother, Maria Terrace, was long dead, and her brother,

(13:32):
the next emperor, was also dead. Now on the throne
was his son, her nephew, a boy who had never
met his aunt. That doomed queen so far away. Marie
Antoinette had not seen her home country since she was
sent away to become a princess of France when she
was thirteen years old. But there were still loyalists in France,

(13:54):
those who tried to imagine ways the queen could escape
to freedom. A former military officer, Alexandre d' rouville, visited
the queen in her cell and dropped a single red
carnation at her feet. Inside the tightly packed pedals, there
was this tiny note. The note had a plan for escape.

(14:16):
The guards could be bribed and the queen could be
spirited away in a carriage to the home of an
ally and then onto Germany. All the queen needed to
do was to use a needle to prick her answer
in one of the pedals of the flower. But before
the plan had even begun, it was foiled. A guard,
knowing that the queen escaping would cost him his own head,

(14:39):
gave the game up. The queen was escorted to a deeper,
more secure dungeon, the kind. Madam Urchard and her husband
were thrown in prison for their lady, replaced by another couple,
grim and brutal. None of the small indulgences the queen
had enjoyed were to remain. If one had bothered to

(15:00):
look at the carnation, after all, that they would have
seen the queen's answer, her response to some self proclaimed
heroes escape attempt that had ended up casting her her
final bits of freedom in tiny letters. With the pin
the queen had punctured the letters of the word negative.

(15:30):
When Marie Antoinette was finally brought in for her trial,
there were gasps from the crowd. They knew the queen
from her glistening portraits and from the propaganda that was
circulated depicting her as a wild harlot, cheeks rouged and
hair stacked. Tie she was drawn as a harpie sometimes
or a silly flamboyant ostrich. The woman before them was

(15:53):
hardly recognizable. In the year and a half she had
been in prison, her hair had gone wiry and gray,
her eyes lifeless, her cheeks were sunken, and her hands shriveled.
She was dressed all in black, in a simple dress
that had been mended over and over, but the shock
of the crowd did not mean mercy. Her husband had

(16:14):
been given time to prepare a case with the lawyers,
as if he might have been declared innocent. There was
no similar show of fairness for the queen. One by one,
the cases against her were listed, that she had manipulated
her husband, that she was treasonous, that she had passed
along information to Austria and communicated with foreigners to sabotage France.

(16:38):
Marie Antoinette remained impassive the entire time, no expression flickering
across her face, until the court reached its final accusation.
On the confession of her son, Louis Charles, Marie Antoinette
was accused of sexual abuse, that she had laid with
him in bed and taught him pernicious practice. Says Marie

(17:02):
Antoinette's composure drained from her and the woman became fire.
One of the jurors turned to the court and said,
the accused has not responded to the facts regarding what
took place between her and her son. Marie Antoine answered,
if I have not replied, it is because nature itself

(17:23):
refuses to respond to such a charge. Laid against a mother.
Her eyes scanned across the entire courtroom, mad and desperate
and determined. I appeal to all mothers who may be present.
A murmur went through the court for the first time
in the entire trial. The women in the room seemed

(17:46):
to soften. They looked at one another a hatred hard
as a clenched fist began to unfurl. But it was
too late. Marie Antoine it was guilty of being Marie Antoinette,
and so she was sentenced to death by guillotine by
the all male jury. Like her first death on an

(18:13):
island in the middle of the Rhine so many years ago,
the second death of Marie Antoinette also began with being
stripped down. Marie Antoinette had not known when her trial
and her death would come, and so she wore black
continually so she would meet her lord in proper mourning
for her husband. But on the morning of her death,

(18:34):
her guards forced her to change into a simple white frock.
She begged for them to leave her to change in privacy,
but they refused. They were assigned to watch her, and
so under the eyes of men who hated her, Marie
Antoinette shed her morning clothes and put on white. Neither
the guard nor Antoinette knew that white, not black, was

(18:57):
actually the historic color for French queen's to wear in mourning.
She asked to relieve herself. The guards did not respond,
and so the queen squatted in the corner as they watched,
and then she was taken out into the street. This
time her carriage was not gilded or velvet. It was

(19:18):
a cart with a cage at the back, and when
the queen sat facing forward, the guards shouted at her
she was to face the opposite way, her back to
the horses. She sat in the open so the crowds
could spit on her and throw cabbages as she passed.
The night before, she had written letters to her family.
Toward daughter, she sent her love and instructions to care

(19:41):
for her brother to her son or remind her to
heed his father's words that he would never avenge their deaths.
This advice would prove unnecessary. Little Louis Charles would die
two years later of prison fever. Marie Antoinette had also
written to her sister in law at Sabeth, asking her
to forgive Louis Charles for his testimony in court. Forgive him,

(20:05):
dear sister. Think of his age and how easy it
is to make a child say what one wants, even
things he doesn't understand. The Queen's famous hair was cut
short at the neck to make the guillotine's journey easier.
As Marie Antoinette stepped onto the platform of her execution,
she uttered her final words. She had stepped on the

(20:27):
executioner's foot by mistake. I'm sorry, sir, she said, I
did not do it on purpose. The blade came down.
A man rushed from the crowd to soak his handkerchief
and blood. Marie Antoinette's body was thrown into a mass grave,

(20:52):
next to bodies of guards who had died in the
attacks on her palaces, bodies of people who had been
crushed to death, and nicks dad fireworks celebrations of her
wedding to the Prince nearly a quarter of a century
before the mass grave were That very prince, who became
King Louis the sixteen, was himself interred. The queen was

(21:14):
among her people at last. A young woman named Marie
Grossholtz was also imprisoned in the Revolution. Marie had once
been the art tutor to King Louise little sister Elizabeth

(21:37):
at Versailles, and it was thought she was still a Royalist.
To prove her loyalty to the revolution, the young woman,
a sculptor, was brought to the grass where Marie Antoinette's
head remained, still unburied. Marie took the bloody head in
her lap and made a wax sculpture of it, just
like the one she had made for the dead King

(21:57):
Louis and for the martyr of the revolution, Shin Marah.
When the revolution was over and Marie Grassholtz made it
through alive, she got married and began touring her wax
sculptures around Europe. Eventually she made it to England and
opened a permanent exhibition on the second story of a
building on Baker Street. Her husband, Frank, remained in France,

(22:20):
but Marie continued to use his surname. It's the name
that became associated with one of the most popular tourist
attractions of all time, Madame Tussau. Noble Blood is a
co production of I Heart Radio and Aaron Mankey. The
show was written and hosted by Dana Schwartz and produced

(22:42):
by Aaron Mankey, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams and Trevor Young.
Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales,
and you can learn more about the show over at
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