Marie Antoinette and the Stories We Prefer to Tell

The traveling circus of the summer Olympics offers the host nation a chance to tell their national story, and the eyes of the world fall on France this summer. The usual culture war talking points have erupted over the avant-garde performance art at the opening ceremonies, but there has been general acceptance of the headless Marie Antoinette as an icon of France. Her decapitated corpse made an appearance during the “Liberty” section of the show, looking out over the athletes from the Concierge (her former prison). The general disinterest in Marie as a historical woman executed under dubious circumstances is palpable. Salon declared that France is having a “Hot Guillotine Summer” and the artistic director, Thomas Jolly, called the whole section a “tribute…to the guillotine.” Jake Tapper tweeted that headless Marie Antoinette is a “brat,” somehow folding the dead queen into the summer zeitgeist of American pop culture.

The use of the dead Marie Antoinette as a republican icon is something that ought to be carefully considered. It is a willful simplification of the past in order to tell a gentler and more fun story to a modern nation. The French dislike of Marie Antoinette in the late 18th century is well documented and well deserved. Her lavish lifestyle and indifference to the poverty of the French people made her a public enemy when the revolutionary committee came to power. Her husband Louis XVI was executed for treason by guillotine, baptizing the revolution with the thrill of public blood. Marie and her children were imprisoned in the Concierge, initially together, and then forcibly separated. The revolutionary tribunal blamed her for the lavish expenditure of the royal court and for her ongoing communications with rival Austria. However, she was also accused and tried for a host of fabricated charges, including incest with her seven year old son (a false explanation for the wounds the boy suffered while in prison). The child signed an affidavit of this abuse by his mother after being visited in prison by radical members of the tribunal, certainly under pressure and possibly under compulsion. For these things, Marie was executed publicly at the guillotine. Her son spent three more years in prison, where he was tortured by his jailers and died of tuberculosis at age ten. He was not directly executed like his parents, but his death by abuse was a great convenience to the new republic, who feared that his royal blood might arouse sympathies in his powerful relatives across Europe.

The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family is nothing for France to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution run amok. The spirit of her trial was public vengeance and it can barely be considered a legal proceeding. Her child, age seven, was forced to testify under duress and in prison to incestuous rape by his mother. The effort put forth to bring this particular charge against Marie shows that the trial was not solely about her conduct of affairs of state, but rather about humiliating her publicly. Marie refused to answer the charge in the courtroom, saying it was beneath her dignity as a mother. Killing Marie was not an act of justice. It was extrajudicial public revenge and an act worthy of, if not outright condemnation, then at least very careful reconsideration. The imprisonment and death of her son is a clear example of cruelty and abuse to an innocent child for the sake of convenience and as an act of family retribution.

The Olympic torch traveled past the headless Marie and through a staging of Les Miserables’ famous barricades. The French opening ceremonies thematically tied all of these events together for the viewer. In their preferred story, Marie was justifiably killed by a righteous revolution, now remembered in heroic songs and glorified as a time of liberation for the people. Nobody should begrudge a nation’s desire to show the very best of their heritage and culture to the world. However, the conscious rewriting of an event and glorification of a national evil is troubling. A similar editing of national memory played out in the decades following the collapse of the Vichy government, France’s Nazi-collaborating wartime regime.

The United States has been embroiled for decades in grappling with the nuances of its own past. Statues, the names of public institutions, and school curricula all form battlefields over whether the light and dark of our national past are correctly weighed. The history of the French revolution is much less familiar to an American audience beyond its broad strokes. The elevation of Marie Antoinette to a fashionable mannequin of republican victory (accompanied by blood-red banners and a thumping heavy metal band) is the end result of a nation hustling to decomplicate its past. The world would be undoubtedly aghast and horrified if the Russian Olympic committee were to parade the corpse of Alexandra Romanov as a national symbol, a queen also murdered with her children by a revolutionary government. Her death in 1918 was universally understood as a cruel and unnecessary act by the Soviets. Russia has since taken steps to atone for that national blight, including an elaborate state re-burial for the whole family in 1998. France clearly does not feel the same.

The French revolution is a case of both the good and evil that can be engendered by revolution. France and the world should work hard to avoid confusing the two. The vengeful abuse of Marie and her children should not be forgotten. It was an evil unworthy of Olympic glamor.

Image via Flickr