Noble Blood, a new podcast by author Dana Schwartz, looks into the lives of royals: the murderers and the murdered, the tyrants and the tragic, and everything in between. The phrase, “heavy is the head that wears the crown,” is illustrated perfectly by these stories, since throughout history kings and queens have had to defend their crowns with every tool at their disposal - and they didn’t always get to keep that crown. And in this case, they didn’t even get to keep the head the crown was on. In this debut episode, Dana dives into the death of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, who died by guillotine in 1793.
In 1789, France was in trouble. After having helped the colonists in America with their revolution, the army was in shambles and the country was deeply in debt. But the nobility, who owned most of the wealth and property in the country, rarely had to pay taxes, while the peasants were pinched for every penny. Resentment grew as food became more and more expensive, and the Queen was a convenient target for their anger: she was Austrian, so her loyalty to the country was in question; her extravagant lifestyle and excessive spending made her look tone-deaf and out of touch with the French populace; and she was even accused of adultery and pornographic behavior, underlining her disloyal and untrustworthy nature. In short, she symbolized everything that was wrong with the French nobility and monarchy. Finally the resentment and discontent came to a head. “The streets of Paris...were chaos and anarchy, reeking of blood and sweat and spit, thousands of starving people and desperate bodies pressed together,” Dana says. “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 before a teeming crowd. These trials would go on until sunrise.”
The malice was clear: the Queen’s best friend, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered and beaten to death, her head paraded through the streets on a pike, pieces of her skin collected as souvenirs. The crowd hoisted her head up to the Queen’s window, taunting her to kiss her favorite lady-in-waiting one last time. “Even when the crowd scattered...ready to find a fresher body, Marie Antoinette knew sooner or later that that body would be hers.”
While King Louis XVI was executed in 1792, revolutionists seemed content to keep the Queen under lock and key for a time, stripping away her titles, her property, even her children as she languished in prison. “Her son, seven years old, was now technically the King of France and it was time for him to be reeducated in the ways of the revolutionaries,” Dana says. The young Louis-Charles was kept within earshot of her jail cell, so she could hear him crying as he was abused by his new teacher, beaten “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 him until he agreed that his mother had molested him, forced him to lie with her, that she was a harlot, a degenerate, a monster.”
When she was brought to her trial, she was a sunken, haggard version of the haughty queen the French remembered, and as they read out her crimes, she remained impassive - until they read out the charges about abusing her son. She appealed to the women: “‘Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother,’ she said...For the first time in the entire trial, the women in the room seemed to soften...A hatred, hard as a clenched fist, began to unfurl, but it was too late. Marie Antoinette was guilty of being Marie Antoinette, and so she was sentenced to death by guillotine by the all male jury.”
Listen to the premiere episode of Noble Blood for more on Marie Antoinette’s early life in Austria, her time spent in prison, her final words, and how her death led to the creation of Madame Tussauds Wax Museum.
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