709. The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3)

In what conditions was Marie Antoinette - once the most glamorous woman in Europe - imprisoned for over a year, before and after the execution of King Louis XVI? Why were the French Revolutionaries divided on her own fate? And, how did she finally face the guillotine on October 16th, 1793? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss one of the most shocking moments of the French Revolution, and the death knell to the monarchy: The execution of the former Queen of France, Marie Antoinette. Join The Rest Is History Club: Unlock the full experience of the show – with exclusive bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to every series and live show tickets, a members-only newsletter, discounted books from the show, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at the⁠⁠restishistory.com⁠⁠. To read our new newsletter, sign up at: ⁠⁠therestishistory.com/newsletters⁠⁠ _______ This episode is sponsored by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Try Claude for free today at http://Claude.ai/restishistory. _______ Advertise with us: ⁠[email protected]⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Wise. It's only when you start moving money between currencies that you really think about the exchange rate, the fee, and what might be hidden away in the small print. Whether you're living abroad, paying someone overseas, or just trying to manage your money across borders, you want a fair exchange rate, an easy transfer, and no surprises along the way. Wise keeps things simple. Wise is a smart way to move the currencies you need around the globe. It works in more than 160 countries and with over 40 currencies. Most transfers arrive instantly. Wise uses the mid-market exchange rate, like the one you see on Google, with no markups or hidden fees.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  So when money needs to move, you can see the rate, know the fee, and get on with it. Join millions saving billions on hidden fees by downloading the Wise app today. Be smart, get wise. T's and C's apply.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  For thousands of years, humanity was defenseless against it. But thankfully, we live in a time of incredible ingenuity and American scientists and partners around the world are fighting back with support from the Gates Foundation.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Yes, so they're creating a new generation of bed nets that kill up to 90% of mosquitoes. That leads to a 50% drop in malaria, saving lives and protecting vulnerable communities. The Gates Foundation, partners of human potential. Search gatesfoundation.org/mosquito to learn more.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by AutoTrader. Now, if car shopping feels like a massive faff, buying your car online at AutoTrader makes it way easier, really.

• 2:13Speaker 00

  So you can shop loads and loads of cars online, you can compare prices, you can check the financing and trade-in options, and of course, you can do it from wherever you are. You start online, go to the dealer for your test drive, and finish wherever works for you. Your information, your data stays with you, so there is no starting over. Plus, you are working with local dealers and there are real people there to help.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So buy your car online on AutoTrader, really.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  It is now 16 or 17 years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness at Versailles, and surely never lighted on this orb which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution. And what a heart must I have to contemplate without emotion, that elevation and that fall. Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought 10,000 swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insults. But the age of chivalry has gone, that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. So that's one of the most celebrated pieces of prose ever written about the French Revolution. It was written by the Anglo-Irish politician and philosopher Edmund Burke, often seen as one of the godfathers of conservatism.

• 4:19Speaker 00

  Burke wrote those words in 1790, so very early on in the revolution. He was prompted by the tumultuous events really of 1789, the March on Versailles by a mob of market women and of revolutionary militants, the attack by night on the apartments of the Queen of France, which had sent her running barefoot to the bedchamber of her husband to seek sanctuary, and the removal of the royal family to Paris, never to return to Versailles. Tom, to Edmund Burke, as to so many like-minded people across Europe, this was practically sacrilegious, wasn't it?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, because the French monarchy was the most splendid, the most magnificent in the whole of Europe. It provided a role model for every other royal family, and it stood at the apogee of an entire society that was founded on kind of loyalty and manners and notions of honour, which ultimately reached back a millennium and more to the very beginnings of the French monarchy amid the collapse of Roman Gaul. Its roots are that deep. And now to Burke and to people who read Burke and admired his sentiments, it seemed that everything that was most glorious about that monarchy and about those traditions were being reduced to kind of arid politicking about rights and money, which is essentially

• 5:38Speaker 01

  the issues that were current in 1789 and 1790. But of course, for the monarchy, and specifically for the King and Queen of France, it gets a lot worse after 1790. I think for admirers of everything that royalism could be, the Queen of France, the heroine of that passage, that very florid passage that you read, stood as a much more potent symbol of the French monarchy than the Queen's dull and plodding husband, Louis XVI. Because the Queen was, of course, Marie Antoinette, a figure who was famous across Europe for her glamour. She's a woman who was perpetually setting new trends with her clothes, her hairstyles, her whole way of life.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  She was, on one hand, bred into the height of luxury. She wasn't just the wife of the King of France, but the sister of the Emperor of Austria. But she was also a woman who had found herself stifled by the formalities of court life at Versailles. She had worn the most expensive jewels in Europe, and in fact, diamonds got her into quite a lot of trouble over the course of her time on the throne. But also, famously, in the petit trien, her hideaway in the grounds of Versailles, she played at being a shepherdess. This was a woman who was incredibly mobile in her tastes, in her sense of fashion. She's always at the cutting edge of what is modish.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  And I think that she is viewed by historians of fashion as not just a representative figure of the Ancien Régime, the regime that gets toppled in the French Revolution, but of ideals of fashion that will emerge in the 19th century and which are still very current in France today. So in that sense, she's a kind of trendsetter because she is a woman who, by always changing her dress, is establishing the idea of fashion as something that is never stable, that is constantly evolving. She is the face of the future as well as of the past.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  But arguably, far more striking is Marie Antoinette's role in the propaganda of the 1780s that leads to the French Revolution, isn't it? Because she's loved by lots of people, but she's absolutely detested by others.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Oh, by far more. I mean, I would say she's much more detested than loved.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  She becomes the personification of what people see as the injustices, the inequality of the Ancien Régime. So in the 1780s, as people are complaining about high taxes, as massive problems with the harvest, people running out of food and so on, the sort of stories of her extravagance are repeated in ever more lurid terms. And there's this sort of vein of scatological and pornographic criticism on Marie Antoinette, which to a 21st century reader is actually pretty shocking.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I mean, a lot of what is reported about Marie Antoinette in the 1780s and then into the 1790s is grotesque, and I think one could say misogynistic fantasy. It is repeated by her enemies and believed by hundreds of thousands, that she is a woman who loves literally to bleed the people dry, that she is a kind of vampireess. She maintained at the expense of the state, a legion of leeches who go out and bleed the poor dry. It is also said, as you know, that there's this pornographic element, that she is a kind of compulsive adulteress, that she's a nymphomaniac, that she's a lesbian, that she practices incest with her own children, and that she goes out murdering the children

• 9:02Speaker 01

  of paupers just for kicks. And all of this is believed. She comes to seem like a kind of monster from the pages of the Marquis de Sade. And so this has a knock-on effect on the way that her own children are seen, because it is assumed that she's infected the royal bloodline with her own monstrous evil. There's a pamphlet in which she is made to cry out, "A daughter of crime, I now give birth to it," in turn. And so there is the sense that her children, and particularly her sons, who are in the line to inherit the throne, that they are infected by this kind of taint of evil that Marie Antoinette embodies.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  But while you have all the very, very aggressive pornographic misogynistic stuff about her, and it's hard not to feel sympathetic towards her, at the same time, the revolutionary sort of militants who in the early 1790s are saying, "Well, look, this woman is a bad person." There's no smoke without fire, right? She has been very extravagant. She has been the personification of the inequality of the system. And crucially, when they accuse her of plotting against the revolution, conspiring against them, consorting with foreign powers against the French people, they're not wrong.

• 10:10Speaker 01

  So on the one hand, she is accused of being Madame Deficit, the woman who single-handedly has bankrupted France. I mean, this is very deeply believed. That's not true. But clearly, she has been very extravagant at a time of mass poverty. I mean, that's what Versailles is all about. It's kind of hardwired into the entire system. And as you say, she does conspire against the revolution. I mean, what would you expect? She's a queen. She hates it. And she experiences the revolution as a kind of escalating process of humiliations and restrictions placed on her, placed on her lifestyle that previously had not had such restrictions. As we heard, she'd been brought from Versailles to Paris in 1789. They try and escape, they get to Varennes, they are discovered and brought back.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  And then finally, in September 1792, the monarchy is formally abolished. And so she finds herself stripped of her very rank as queen. So it's not surprising that she should have conspired against the people and the revolutionary ideology that was inflicting this on her. So as you say, she did, in the wars that the French Republic are fighting against foreign enemies, she did conspire with those foreign enemies. She did pass on sensitive military information to foreign agents, and she did absolutely want to see the monarchy restored. She is complicit in... What at the trial of Louis XVI had been framed as treason. That is why Louis XVI ends up going to the guillotine.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  And this happens on the 21st of January, 1793. And when it happens, Marie Antoinette learns of the death of her husband by the sound of cannon fire ringing across Paris. And everything for her seems collapsed into ruin.

• 11:57Speaker 00

  So let's paint the picture now. So we are in January, 1793. Where is she and what's her situation?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  She is in the tower of a medieval fortress called the temple. And she had been kept there with her husband and with her immediate family. With the execution of Louis XVI, executed as a common criminal. You know, this is the heir of Clovis and Louis XIV. She now lacks a husband. So in a sense, she, I guess, feels that the responsibility for raising her children are now completely on her shoulders. She is firmly under the guard of people who never lose an opportunity to rub her nose in the loss of her royal status. When she had been moved into the temple, she had been brought royal bed sheets and obliged to pick out with her own needle the emblems of royalty on it, you know, the crown and so on.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  The guards refused to show her any respect. She is now obliged to show marks of respect to them. And all her titles have gone. All the, the markers of respect that had been a feature of her life, not just at Versailles, but growing up as a young girl back in Vienna. And her captors now refer to her in the wake of her husband's execution merely as le vœve capé, the widow capé, because Louis XVI had become Louis Capé. Capé being the name, the founding father of the kind of dynasty centuries before. And in fact, Louis wasn't a capé, he was a bourbon. But it's a kind of deliberate insult.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  So her world has completely imploded. Her husband is dead, her baubles are gone. Everything that she took for granted has been ripped away from her. You would assume that she would sink into some form of depression or breakdown. I mean, that would be human nature, right? But she's more resilient than people expected.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I actually think that even her enemies think that she, she has a quality of insolence, they would say, that means that she never gives up. Her admirers would say that she has a kind of an indomitable ability. Over the months that follow the death of her husband, she makes clear that she is not surrendering to depression and a lack of purpose in almost every way that she can. Her focus now is, is her family. And there are four members of that family left to her in the tower with the death of Louis. So there is her husband's younger sister, Madame Elizabeth, as she's called, and her two children. And the eldest of these is a daughter, Marie Therese Charlotte. And she's very grave, she's very shy, and her mother calls her la sérieuse, the serious one.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  And she had turned 14 on the 19th of December, 1792, at the time her father is executed. That's her age. The younger of her two children, who she has with her, is the Ersdau d'offant, so the heir to the throne. And this is a little boy called Louis Charles. And he had become the d'offant on the 4th of June, 1789, with the death of his elder brother. I think perhaps it's forgotten that one of the reasons that Louis XVI is distracted in the build up to the fall of, of the Bastille is that he is a bereaved parent. He has lost, lost his beloved elder son.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely right. His parents were crushed, they were crushed by the loss of this child. And it took them out of the picture at a crucial point in the beginning of the revolution.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Louis Charles had been four at the time. And so by the time his, his father is executed, he is seven and he turns eight on the 27th of March, 1793. And all things considered, he's quite a sunny child. I mean, you think of everything he's gone through, very sunny, very affectionate. He has blue eyes, he has blonde hair, very like his mother. And Marie Antoinette adores him. Well, she calls him her, her chou d'amour, her cabbage of love, which is kind of cutie pie, I guess you say it in English. You know, she, she adores him. But he is also, of course, in her opinion, much more than just her own, you know, her, her beloved little boy. He is Louis XVII, the new king of France.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  And Marie Antoinette has treated him as such the moment she heard those cannons ringing out over France to announce the death of her husband. So that evening, she had bowed before him, before her, her, her son, who at that point was only seven, and set him at the head of the table. He is now the king. And she had sought to replace her husband, who had been teaching his son in the, the kind of the disciplines and the academic studies that he thought was appropriate to a king. So Marie Antoinette does her best to replace her husband and to teach her son maths, history, geography, all the, all that kind of thing. And also to pray, because he has to be raised as, as a Catholic, as the king of France. And so she teaches him to pray.

• 16:32Speaker 01

  Sadly, Louis Charles confesses to her, whenever I pray to God, it is always my father that appears to me. So he's obviously haunted, haunted by the death.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  That's very telling, isn't it? What about the guards? Because of course, those, the other people that they're basically sharing all their days with, the people who are in charge of looking after them. And the people who, as you've said, you know, they've made Marie Antoinette unpick all the crowns with needle and thread and all that kind of thing. So they're not exactly benevolently disposed towards these children.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  No, all of this is absolute anathema to them because to them, Louis Charles is not Louis XVII because the monarchy has been abolished. So they will call him Louis Charles Capé. Capé is seen as being his family name. So that, that's his official name now under the French Republic. But if they're feeling abusive, they will call him, you know, son of the tyrant or the wolf cub or worse things, as we will see.

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Right.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  He's a very charming boy by all accounts. And so some of them are charmed and some of them do offer him kind of little kindnesses in the way that, you know, you do to a young child. I think the problem for Louis Charles is that this kind of war of wills that is constantly going on between Marie Antoinette and the, the revolutionary guards who have her under their control, means that he's always in the crosshairs of that conflict. And this conflict, it's taking place within their prison, but it also, it is echoed out in the broader world, beyond the great walls of the temple. Because out there, among royalists in France, but also among the, the monarchies of Europe that are, are trying to throttle the French Republic in its cradle.

• 18:07Speaker 01

  All these implacable enemies of the revolution, they view Louis Charles Capé as Louis XVII, as the legitimate king of France.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  So to go through them, there's the foreign opponents. So we've talked about them, the Austrians, the Prussians and so on. Now, of course, the British. There are the émigrés. So there are all the princes, the aristocrats and whatnot, who went across to what's now Germany initially. They're a source of enormous kind of provocation and angst for the revolutionaries. And now there are all these people in France itself. So of course, there are lots of latent royalists, but we had, we talked last time, there is now a rebellion in the Vendee, west central France, south of Nantes. The royal and Catholic army, as it calls itself, people who wear these kind of white cockades, who are shouting vive le roi, long of the king, as a kind of battle cry and whatnot.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  And the king, and that is Louis XVII.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. So for the revolutionaries, these are their implacable opponents. These are the people, they're, they're an existential kind of arch enemy. And the very person that is the focus for all these movements is right there in the temple prison, under the revolutionaries' noses.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  This little boy. And these fears of a kind of revanchist monarchy are turbocharged by what we've been emphasizing throughout this series is the key event in the spring of 1793, which really kind of lights the touchpaper of the terror. And that is the defection of General Dumouriez. He is leading the French revolutionary armies and he turns coat and goes over to the, the Prussians and the Austrians. And his plan, very overtly, which he had tried to rally the French army to, wasn't just to overthrow the revolution, but to install Louis XVII as a constitutional monarch and essentially recalibrate the revolutionary regime as a kind of British style constitutional monarchy.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  It's the failure of that project that leads him to defect to the Austrians. And so it's not surprising that when the news of that reaches Paris, and bearing in mind the general mood of, of paranoia, the anxiety about conspiracies everywhere, that lots of, of patriots on the streets of Paris, the enragés, the people who are enraged by everything that's going wrong and starving and hungry and poor, that they should have detected in this conspiracy, the malevolent puppet hand of Marie Antoinette.

• 20:27Speaker 00

  Clearly, Marie Antoinette is not in a position to be masterminding a conspiracy because she is shut up in this prison. And presumably, the people who are actually running the revolution at this point, so let's take Robespierre. Robespierre, he must recognise that Marie Antoinette, there's no need to kill her because, or to put her on trial or whatever it might be, because she's completely powerless. I mean, they can just basically keep her as a hostage. She's very useful to them as a hostage, I would have thought.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Robespierre and Danton both completely recognise this. So Robespierre, I mean, he's a massive conspiracy theorist. We talked about that in our previous episode, and he is definitely anti-monarchist. He voted for the execution of Louis XVI, but completely, he can recognise that Marie Antoinette is now, you know, she's no threat to the revolution whatsoever. She is a broken, defeated woman. As we said in the last episode, the focus of Robespierre's anxieties and energies now are the Girondes. Those are the ones that he sees as the arch-conspirators. Those are the ones who need to be brought down. And so he doesn't really have any time for Marie Antoinette. It's kind of wasted energy.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  And Danton is, by the summer of 1793, he is, I think, interested in the possibility of compromise. He seems to have had back channels to the Austrians. Rumours will develop that he's actually been in in personal contact with Marie Antoinette. None of these rumours, I think, are true. But he's seen, I think, by the Orages as being soft on Marie Antoinette, definitely. Because out on the streets of Paris, as we've said, inflation is rampant, price of bread is going through the roof. There are lots of people who may not be as abreast of the kind of political and geopolitical dynamics of the situation as someone like Robespierre or Danton. But they feel things are going terribly, which they are. Marie Antoinette is the person who's been blamed for years and years and years for everything that goes wrong in France.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  And so they continue to do that. And there is one guy in particular who is, serves as their spokesman. And this is a journalist called Jacques Ebert. And he is quite like Marat. He's a man who had recognised early on in the revolution the potential that the press offered to journalists who could make themselves the voice of the people. Ebert, like Marat, had turned his journalism into a kind of instrument of very violent political activism.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  So the difference between Ebert and Marat, I would say, is that, I mean, with Marat, it is pure vituperation, populist vituperation, incredibly aggressive, blood-soaked, all of this. Ebert is similar, but more kind of demotic, more vulgar. He's speaking much more, I think, you know, Marat strives for elevated language. I mean, not that it's terribly elevated, but Ebert doesn't do that at all. He's trying to reflect, as he sees it, the mood on the streets in the voice of the streets. So it's incredibly scatological, aggressive, pornographic. And of course, that echoes the tone of all those pamphlets that had attacked Marie Antoinette in the 1780s.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And I think crucially, comic. I mean, he's funny. His abuse is enjoyable. He's taken on the persona of this, this guy, Pierre Duchenne, who is a foul-mouthed stovemaker from kind of theatre. And he's taken on his voice. And Ebert himself, predictably, is from a bourgeois background. I mean, all these kind of citizen journalists are. But it enables him to be as filthy and shocking as he likes, kind of gives him a licence. And the royal family have been his, his particular targets for years. So even back in the, the early months of the revolution, Ebert had been shocking and delighting revolutionary sensibilities by abusing the royal family. It's a time where it was not the done thing to abuse the royal family.

• 24:09Speaker 01

  He's always having a crack at Louis XVI. He called him the royal cookhold, a fat pig. He's a man as timid as a mouse and as stupid as an ostrich. Ebert will give it to the, the royal children. So the things he says about Marie Therese, who is, you know, just a teenage girl, describes her as being designed like the spiders of the French Cape to suck the blood of slaves. Unsurprisingly, the real object of his venom had always been Marie Antoinette, the Austrian monster, the royal whore, just kind of endless stream of vituperation aimed at her. And he targets her really obsessively. And it's been estimated that one in seven of the articles that he published over the course of the revolution was about Marie Antoinette. She's very much inside his head, I think.

• 24:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, and this, we mentioned the sexual content of this. The sexual content is uppermost, isn't it? So this is pure kind of pornographic misogyny. What it does is it turns her from a flesh and blood human being that people might feel sorry for to a kind of creature of nightmares, almost.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  It completely dehumanises her. And it also serves to keep her in the public eye, even once she sees to be queen, being bottled up behind these kind of eight massive doors in, in her prison. It keeps her in the public eye as someone who is so monstrous and cunning and fiendish that of course she is the person who is running this mass conspiracy. And so in the, the spring of 1793, when Dumouriez goes over to the Austrians and the French Republic seems on the verge of collapse, Ebert is all about Marie Antoinette. He's saying, she's the person to blame. She is the person who we, we need to dispatch. He says, liberty is hanging by only a hair. So Marie Antoinette, of course, always famous for her glamorous hairstyles.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  At this point, however, the Committee of Public Safety don't take any notice of this.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  They've got much bigger fish to fry.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  Exactly. I mean, they're facing a massive crisis on the frontiers, national economic emergency. I mean, they've got better things to worry about than one woman locked up in prison, pretty safely in prison.

• 26:03Speaker 01

  Yes. So they're not particularly anxious about Marie Antoinette. She's not the focus of their, of their attention. But having said that, they don't completely ignore the warnings that Ebert and the, the kind of, you know, his fellow radicals are giving. You know, as we've said, that there are royal conspiracies afoot. You know, royalism has led to kind of a, you know, mass counter-revolution. And so the issue of what to do with the surviving members of what had once been the royal family is an issue. I mean, it's not a priority, but it is a problem that does need solving. As we pass into the summer of 1793, various measures do start to be taken. So in April, the Convention orders a kind of mass police sweep

• 26:44Speaker 01

  against possible supporters of the monarchy and particularly aristocracy. And obviously, members of the House of Bourbon, the ex-royal family, are the key people who the revolutionary authorities feel need to be apprehended. And the most, the most prominent of these is Philippe Egalité, the Duke of Orleans, as he had been, the cousin of Louis XVI and who, as a deputy in the Convention, had voted for his cousin to be executed.

• 27:13Speaker 00

  I think we agreed, didn't we, he's one of the worst people who's ever lived, isn't that right? Didn't we, with Bosie Douglas? I mean, he's just a terrible person, Philippe Egalité. No?

• 27:22Speaker 01

  Well, I think we've described him as the Prince Harry of the revolution.

• 27:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, case closed.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  And the problem for him, and there's actually no evidence at all that he was involved in any counter-revolutionary conspiracies. I think he backed the revolution. He was all in favour of Egalité. I think he believed it. The problem for him is, as you said in the first episode, that when Dumouriez went over to the Austrians, he took with him Philippe Egalité's second son, the guy who, in due course, is going to become King Louis Philippe. And that means that from this point on, Philippe Egalité is a, is a marked man. So he gets arrested in Marseille, gets in prison there, and then in due course, he gets brought to Paris. So things aren't looking good for him. Meanwhile, what about Marie Antoinette herself? So three months after those series of arrests, the arrest of Philippe Egalité and other members of the, the elite aristocracy, guards come to her.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And it's the night of the 3rd of July. And this is the moment that Marie Antoinette has been dreading from the moment that she and her family were brought to this terrible prison because she is separated from her beloved son. So the guards turn up at 10 o'clock in the evening, while Marie Antoinette is sewing by candlelight and her son is curled up asleep next to her. And Marie Antoinette immediately realises what is happening. And so she stands over her son and blocks the access of the guards to Louis Charles. And Marie Therese, who in due course, spoiler alert, is going to be exiled by the revolutionaries. So she, she gets expelled from France in 1795. And this enables her to write up reminiscences of what happened, which are, you know, crucial evidence for what's going on.

• 28:56Speaker 01

  And Marie Therese wrote later that her mother told them they would have to kill her before they could tear her child from her. And the standoff continues for an hour. And only when the guards say, look, let him go, or we are going to kill you and we're going to kill him and we're going to kill your daughter as well, only then does, does Marie Antoinette finally give in. And again, to quote Marie Therese, bathing him with her tears and overwhelmed with a sense of foreboding that she would never see him again, she gave him into the hands of the guards. And the guards then lead the little boy away and the door is slammed in his mother's face. And Marie Antoinette can hear him being led down a spiral staircase from the room directly below them, which had been Louis's room the day that he had been executed. That was the room that Louis had been taken to the guillotine from.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  And, you know, the little boy knows this entirely. He is locked up in that room and Marie Antoinette can hear his sobbing rising up through the floorboards.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  I mean, for any parents, just an absolutely horrendous, horrendous experience. I mean, you can't imagine anything worse.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Terrible. And all that she knows about his fate is that she can hear him weeping. She knows nothing else. She has no idea what is happening to him. It is a complete mystery to her. That's what's happening with the royal family. But meanwhile, in the Convention, so effectively the kind of, you know, the, the government of France, the deputies there are preparing a much more public assault on the legacy of monarchy. And on the 31st of July, 1793, a lawyer named Bertrand Barré

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Hands up in the National Convention and we have already met him because he is the guy who in due course on the 5th of September will proclaim that terror is the order of the day. And we didn't really say who he was then. So just a bit of detail on him. He's a man with a very formidable reputation. He'd been the first man to be elected to the Committee of Public Safety. So that's the kind of measure of the reputation that he has. And he's the chief spokesman of the committee in the convention. He'd been a lawyer, very celebrated for his eloquence. Robert Palmer, in his classic book on the Committee of Public Safety XII, who ruled, gives a fabulous character sketch of him. Barré could

• 31:08Speaker 01

  throw a spell of words over any usual topic, a battle, a conspiracy, a guillotining, a statistical report, a democratic idea, always fluent, always forceful, sometimes soberly expository, sometimes passionately excited. And this is a guy who, he'd been on the kind of the outer margins of the aristocracy when the revolution began. So he, he's adapted himself very fluently and successfully to the new order. He's a very fluent, very plausible man, but also in the opinion of his detractors, you know, a complete opportunist. And so in other words, this makes him the most reliable weather vane in the whole, the revolution.

• 31:49Speaker 01

  If you want to know the way the wind is turning, see which way Barré is turning, is basically the idea.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  He's a brilliant politician. He basically works out where the centre ground is, where the momentum is heading, and he makes sure he's, he's always there. He is the person who serves in your cabinet, you know, if in contemporary politics for kind of 10 years, he's reliable, he's the safe pair of hands, he's always there. And he miraculously always agrees with what the Prime Minister of the Day believes. I mean, that's basically what he is.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  And as prime ministers rise and fall, he's a kind of constant. And what he is pointing to in the summer of 1793 is the fact that it is time to eradicate from France every last trace of the monarchy, to remove all the symbols that still adorn the cities and the cathedrals and so on. They've all got to go. You know, France has to be a country that is recognizably revolutionary and republican in its outward show. And this is a process that had already begun. So squares or streets that had previously been named after kings, they've been given new names. The statues of kings have been toppled. And above all,

• 32:58Speaker 01

  what he is proposing is the systematic elimination of every last trace of monarchy from the basilica that is and always has been its great shrine. And this is the Basilica of Saint-Denis, which stands just to the north of Paris. And ever since Frankish times, it has been the royal necropolis. It had been massively expanded in the 12th century. Essentially, it's the first great masterpiece of the Gothic style. And it is essentially the Westminster Abbey of France. This is where kings for generation after generation after generation have been buried. Their monuments are everywhere. And the convention says, yeah, this is a brilliant idea. Let's crack on with this. And on the 1st of August, 1793, they officially

• 33:40Speaker 01

  approve Barré's proposal. Six days later, a crowd of workmen and soldiers in red liberty caps turn up outside Saint-Denis. They break into the basilica and they begin the work of demolition. And they begin at the beginning. They go for the first king to be buried there, who's a guy called Dagobert I. He'd founded the abbey. He'd been buried there back in 638, so so long ago. And then basically they work their way very systematically through what's effectively 1100 years of French royal history. And there are so many kings, there are so many monuments, that it's not until October that the great task is completed.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  It's incredible, incredible operation of destruction, isn't it?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely massive. Every monument is smashed, every sarcophagus, every kind of casket containing hearts or whatever. And over 100 royal corpses are exhumed. The workmen dig two great trenches beside what had been the chapel of the Valois. So the medieval kings who had fought Edouard III and Henry V and so on, that chapel has been demolished. Now there are these two great trenches and all the bodies of the kings and queens get dumped into them. And the older corpses, you know, have obviously, you know, they've crumbled away. So Barré had described them as the impure ashes of tyrants. And these impure ashes, I mean, it's easy to dispose of them. But the more recent ones, I mean, it's a much more unpleasant job because particularly the Bourbons, the dynasty

• 35:06Speaker 01

  to which Louis XVI had belonged, they've been buried a few decades before, a few centuries before. They are still in a condition of putrefaction and the stench is absolutely revolting once they start digging them up. It's an absolutely hideous scene. The, the workmen have to burn vinegar and gunpowder to combat the, the nauseous vapors that are rising up from these desecrated tombs. But eventually the work is done. Every last trace of France's royal past is erased from Saint-Denis. With this, the basilica can be put to a more practical and purposeful use. And so it serves as a warehouse for, for grain and for flour.

• 35:48Speaker 00

  The irony, the one thing that the French didn't have enough of in the 1780s, and they blame monarchy for not giving them. And now that's why the basilica is storing. All right, but they may have taken out the symbols, but there are some living people remaining, of course. There are the counterrevolutionists in the Vendee who are still proclaiming their loyalty to Louis XVII, as they call him. And of course, in the temple, there are those members of France's royal family, still there, standing, living affront to the ideals of the new republic. We'll find out what happens to them, the tragic story of Marie Antoinette and her son after the break.

• 36:30Speaker 01

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps, many of them started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that, Tom, at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus, great pioneering voyage of discovery, and it is of course the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure for the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 37:14Speaker 01

  Anthropic asked 100,000 people and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 37:30Speaker 00

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 37:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realizes, or rather, everybody else realizes, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is of course the Americas. So, you know, Anthropic knows the importance of questions and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure for the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  So they asked over 100,000 people and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile. Right now, all of Mint's plans are $15 per month, even unlimited. So go to mintmobile.com/history.

• 38:58Speaker 00

  Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 months, plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50GB may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20GB of hotspot, capable device required. Availability, speed and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com.

• 39:26Speaker 00

  Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So, the republican government in Paris is locked in a life or death struggle against what it sees as the forces of royalism and reaction and counter-revolution. And as we have heard, the national convention have stripped from the great basilica in Saint-Denis every last trace of monarchical history. And that same day that they voted the 1st of August, they moved Marie Antoinette from her prison in the temple late at night for the first time. She's been there for a year, hasn't she? And there's an ominous moment as they take her out. She bangs her head on the lintel

• 40:07Speaker 00

  and one of them says, are you hurt? And she says, nothing can hurt me now. There's a sort of sense that like, basically, she's fallen as low as it's possible to fall. But of course, there's further to go.

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Oh, there is, there is. So she is being transferred to central Paris. So she heads westwards across the capital and then over the Seine, and she's brought on to the Eile de la Cité, where Notre Dame stands. And it's here, in the early hours of 2nd of August, 1793, that she arrives in her new home, which is the Conciergerie. And we mentioned it briefly, but just to give a bit more detail about it, this had served as a royal prison since the 14th century, and it occupies the, the kind of the lower level of the building complex, the Palais des Justices, that also houses the revolutionary tribunal.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  So that had been set up back in the early hours of the 11th of March, at the urging of Danton, to try cases without appeal. And the more prisoners that there are for the revolutionary tribunal to try, so the more the Conciergerie comes to serve as the kind of the central holding pen for the terror. And the widow Capet, Marie Antoinette, is one of these prisoners, and she is processed in the Conciergerie as a common criminal. You know, she's not being arraigned as a former queen. She's just a criminal like anyone else. She's kept in a small cell on the ground floor, and the description of it, it's small, damp and fetid, without a stove or fireplace. There's also no window. And actually, one way in which Marie Antoinette is an exceptional prisoner is that she's not allowed any exercise.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  All the other prisons are allowed out to see the sky, to see the blue sky above them and to stretch their legs. Marie Antoinette is not. She's kept in, in her cell permanently. And the cell is, is very bare. There's a pallet on which she can sleep. There's a chair and a table, and there's a bucket for her ablutions. There is a screen that runs halfway across the room, only barely five feet high, so very easy for people to look over it. And on the other side of the screen for Marie Antoinette are two guards who are constantly there. She's never without these two guards. And they sit there, smoking, drinking, playing cards, you know, abusing her, whatever. She's, so she is never alone. And on top

• 42:24Speaker 01

  of that, there is a grill in her prison door. And so for a fee, visitors can go and open that grill and peer inside and gorp at the Austrian whore. So, you know, one of the great spectacles of revolutionary France, kind of see this, this monster reduced to the level, basically, of an animal.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  And there are a lot of people who are keen to do that, aren't there?

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, because even in the squalid depths of her downfall, Marie Antoinette remains complete box office. You know, she's still what she, she's been for decades, the most famous woman in France by far. And she is the one prisoner whom royalists dream of springing. You know, there are various kind of chevaliers who make the attempt while she's in the Conciergerie to zero effect, but she remains the queen of their hearts. And of course, she's the one prisoner whom true patriots, true revolutionaries want to see brought to the guillotine. So as at Versailles, so now in the depths of the terror. You know, she is still a star. However, I think for the Committee for Public Safety, she's still unimportant. She's a distraction. The head of the Hydra that they want to cut off is

• 43:30Speaker 01

  not Marie Antoinette. It's the Catholic and Royal Army in the Vendee. That is the real royalist monster that they are anxious to see destroyed. And this is because all spring, all summer, the Royalist Army in the Vendee has been on an absolute roll. So we heard in our previous episode how this had helped to prompt the great levée en masse of the 23rd of August, this unprecedented introduction of mass conscription in France, the first great mass conscription of the modern age, and which in the long run will provide the revolution with manpower beyond the dreams of the Ancien Régime. I mean, kind of within a year, double the size of the army that Louis XIV had commanded.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  700,000 men in uniform. Extraordinary.

• 44:17Speaker 01

  Fast, vast force. But in the immediate term, it's still proving inadequate to suppress this counter-revolutionary uprising in the Vendee. And so accordingly, as well as a mobilisation for total war, the Committee for Public Safety mandate an outright policy of extermination. They say that forests have to be cut down, that all crops have to be burned, that livestock have to be seized, that the rebels basically have to be starved into submission, and that the rebels themselves, if they're found, have to be hunted down like beasts. They have to be exterminated without mercy, as though they are, you know, wolves, bermens, to be eradicated completely. So this is the policy that's going on in the west of France, far from Paris. But to the mass of soncolot in the suburbs of Paris,

• 44:59Speaker 01

  the Enragés, the poor who are starving, hungry, their suspicions, their hatreds, they're being amplified by Jacques Auber, people like that, these kind of incendiary journalists, even this policy of extermination is not felt to be enough. If you're an Enragé in Paris, essentially what is happening in the Vendee is far away. You don't really have a handle on it. You've never been there. You don't really know what's going on. What you do know is that there are members of the royal family who are still alive, and there are ex-aristocrats who are on the scene. And you have people like Auber saying, these guys are conspiring against you. And so a mood of mingled panic and hatred is motivating

• 45:40Speaker 01

  the Enragés, the, the soncolot, to demand the most extreme penalties against them, against these aristocrats. They're demanding that every aristocrat in France be hunted down, be branded, be chained in groups of six, and be used by the army on the Vendee as human shields. And obviously, they want Marie Antoinette shaved by the National Razza, which is Auber's phrase for a guillotining. And for them, this is the priority. And Auber is shameless in kind of whipping it up. But just to say about Auber, I mean, his role in all this, he's not just an agitator. He does also have direct political agency. Listeners to our previous episode may remember that on the 5th of September, a demonstration had marched

• 46:23Speaker 01

  on the national convention. And this was the march and the occupation of the convention that had inspired Barrère to stand up and say that terror should be the order of the day. And the leader of that demonstration, the guy who had led the, the Enragés into the national convention, was a man called Gaspar Chomet. And he is not just a close friend and ally of Auber, but his immediate superior in the Paris Commune. And the Paris Commune is basically the municipal government of the city. And both men have official ranks in the commune. They rank as procureur de la commune. And this means that they are essentially the chief legal and administrative officers in Paris. And this is why Chomet had been able to play the prominent role that he did in the events of, of the 4th and 5th

• 47:05Speaker 01

  of September. And it is also why Auber has been in a position to do much more than merely abuse the royal family in print, because as a procureur, he has the prisoners in the temple under his direct charge. And even though Marie Antoinette has been transferred to the Conciergerie, which means that she has now passed out of his authority, Auber does still retain responsibility for the remaining three prisoners. So just to remind listeners who these remaining three prisoners are, there's Madame Elisabeth, the younger sister of Louis XVI. There is Marie Treize Charlotte, 14 years old, the daughter of

• 47:47Speaker 01

  the ex-Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. And then there is her younger brother, only eight years old, who is to royalists Louis XVII and to revolutionaries Louis Charles Capet. And this is the little boy who, on the night of the 3rd of July, had been forcibly removed from Marie Antoinette, his weeping mother, led down the spiral staircase and placed in a cell of his own. And the person who had given the orders for this to be done was Auber.

• 48:15Speaker 00

  And he did it for two reasons, didn't he? First of all, he's hoping that they will get the boy to talk, that they can get testimony from the boy. The boy will inadvertently say things that they can use against his mother in a future trial. So that's thing number one. And then thing number two, of course, I mean, we've seen it through history, there are lots of little boys in medieval English and Scottish history who have become pawns or puppets, or have become the focus for rebellions and uprisings. And he, Auber is not wrong to think that what the boy that he calls the son of the sheep, you know, that he could be politically dangerous for the revolution. He could be a focus for, you know, public uprisings and whatnot.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, I mean, I think there is a parallel from English history that haunts the revolutionaries. But it's not a medieval king. It's Charles II, who, Charles I, his head had been chopped off, the monarchy had been abolished. But Charles II was always lurking on the scene. And of course, you have the Restoration and the monarchy is restored. And I think that is the nightmare that haunts people like Auber, and actually, all the revolutionaries. And so the issue of what to do with this little boy is a very pressing political problem for the revolutionaries, because they can't really put him on trial, as they'd put his father on trial. I mean, he's just a little boy. Nor can they adopt the Richard III approach. So to quote Deborah Cadbury, who's written a comprehensive, and I have to say, very harrowing biography of Louis Charles, called The Lost King of France,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  a revolutionary led by high ideals, she writes, could not openly countenance the outright murder of a small boy. I mean, I think that's, that's true. They can't behave like a kind of medieval usurper. So what to do? And Ebert has a solution, which he has agreed with Chomet, his immediate superior. So effectively, this now has kind of institutional approval. And the first kind of aspect of the policy that Ebert is introducing is to break the little boy, to brainwash him and to turn him against his parents and his heritage as a former Dauphin. So Ebert says, the little whelp must lose the recollection of his royalty.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  And the plan is to install in the little boy the tastes, the language, the educational standards of a sans culotte, and also to deny him all creature comforts, to keep him hungry, to deny him sleep. And if he should fail to survive the rigors of his new life, then, you know, what a shame, what a pity. You know, they won't have murdered him, but he will be removed from the scene if he just fades away. And so with these policies in mind, they appoint a new tutor for the Erdoile Dauphin. And this is a guy called Antoine Simon. And he is a very different kind of tutor to the kind of tutor that the young Dauphin had had at Versailles. So Simon is a cobbler and he loathes the rich. He loves the revolution.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  And he had always, until this kind of bombshell appointment, been the complete failure in everything that he'd ever done. He can't even hack it as a cobbler. He's always kind of going bankrupt. He's always being evicted from his homes. He's not a very competent person at life, I think. Even his associates describing his manners as quite brutish. So he had a gruff, short way of talking and insolent gestures. He's also effectively illiterate. And so all of this makes him absolutely perfect from the point of view of Ebert.

• 51:30Speaker 00

  I have to say, from the accounts you read, he comes over as an absolutely dreadful man. But on the other hand, you might say, well, a lot of the accounts we read are coloured with royalist propaganda. So there is that slight issue, isn't there, that hangs over all this?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Not entirely royalist propaganda. So there are accounts as well from people who were there before and during the terror and survived the terror.

• 51:52Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  Again, they might be party pre, but I think the consensus of witnesses is pretty clear that Simon is not Rory Stewart.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  Well, who is?

• 52:03Speaker 01

  He's not the kind of person you would necessarily appoint as a royal tutor.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  Rory Stewart, of course, tutored William and Harry.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  He did. Yes.

• 52:09Speaker 00

  His methods, I suspect, are very different from Simon's because Simon is very much a practitioner of tough love with the accent very much on the tough.

• 52:17Speaker 01

  You say that. I mean, Rory Stewart went to Eton and there is perhaps something of Eton in the 19th century about the education that Simon gives the poor prince. So he's obliged to wait at table on Simon and his wife to polish their shoes. Basically, he's a kind of lackey. He's a fag, I guess. These young boys who have to serve their superiors at Eton. You could perhaps frame it that. I think it's slightly more brutal than that. I mean, certainly it's a very different kind of education to what the Dauphin would have had at Versailles. He is also, his appearance is transformed. So his blonde curls, which Marie Antoinette had loved so much, they're shaved off. He's put in trousers, so no culotte for him. And he's made to wear a red cap. And Simon is delighted and he cries out, finally, Capet, you are a sans culotte. And Simon also, I mean, he's not completely useless.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  He does teach Louis Charles some things. So he teaches him how to sing revolutionary songs, teaches him how to curse and teaches him how to blaspheme. And Marie Therese, she hasn't actually witnessed this, so again, this is probably hearsay, but it does seem to be true. Simon taught him to swear dreadful oaths against God, his family and aristocrats. And we have the report of a commissioner who visits him. You know, this is not a royalist. And he reports, I think, what's quite a shocking detail. Louis Charles heard his sister and aunt scraping chairs in the cell above him. He cried out, haven't those [bleep] women been guillotined yet? You assume that he's saying this because he thinks that it's going to please Simon, who otherwise will probably beat him. But I mean, it's still quite an upsetting thing to say about your sister and your aunt, I think.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  And of course, there is no maths, there's no geography, there's no history. And Marie Therese, again, he was permitted only the most unspeakable books and every effort was made to corrupt him. And what does this mean in practice? Well, I think, I mean, I think trying to answer this leads us to quite a dark place. And so anyone who is listening to this with children, I would press the pause button. It also touches directly on the fate of Marie Antoinette because you said that Ebert is keen to get evidence that can be presented against her in a criminal case. You know, Ebert is the guy more than anyone else who's been pursuing her and portraying her as this kind of monstrous sexual deviant, a woman who has incestuous tastes. Listeners can probably imagine what it is that Ebert is trying to extract from her son.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  So charges are officially laid before Marie Antoinette, the widow Capet, she's termed, on the 3rd of October, 1793. And on the 14th of October, she is summoned before the revolutionary tribunal to answer them. And initially, there'd been multitudes of allegations. You can imagine, you know, all the things that revolutionaries might bring against Marie Antoinette. But ultimately, they've been boiled down to three charges. And these are firstly, that she had dilapidated the French finances in a terrible way. And Marie Antoinette responds to this by acknowledging that perhaps she had spent more than was entirely wise on the petty trienor. She has this brilliant phrase, I was dragged into expenses little by little.

• 55:13Speaker 00

  We're all familiar with that.

• 55:15Speaker 01

  We're all familiar with that. But the more grotesque claims, essentially that she'd been so extravagant that she'd bankrupted the French state, she repudiates in a tone of great indignation. And the problem for her prosecutors are that there is no evidence for this. And the reason there's no evidence for it is that, you know, the evidence doesn't exist because Marie Antoinette hadn't bankrupted the French state. It was supporting the American tax rebels that had done that. They also charged her with betraying national secrets to France's enemies. And here, she was definitely guilty. She had definitely done that. So she was guilty of treason, I think, by the standards of the court.

• 55:49Speaker 00

  No question. She is talking to the Austrians all through, is it 1792? Absolutely no question that on the, you know, when it comes to the sort of national security angle, Marie Antoinette had encouraged Austrian relatives to march on Paris. And had they got to Varennes, remember we did the episode about the flight to Varennes? If they'd got to Varennes, if they'd got out, and there's an episode that people often ask about and they say, gosh, what would have happened? The result would have been a civil war in France.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  So a lot of people would have died. I mean, a lot of people died anyway, frankly, but, you know, they'd have died differently.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  But Dominic, here is the thing. This accusation must have come from one of her husband's former ministers. And it is hearsay because there is no written evidence for it. I mean, actually, there is written evidence for it in the archives of various monarchies across Europe, but the prosecutors don't have access to this material. So they kind of know that she's guilty, but they don't have any written proof. There's no smoking gun. There's the accusation that she had set alight civil war in various parts of the Republic. And this is plainly ludicrous because she'd been in the temple when the revolt in the Vendée broke out and everybody knew it. So actually, the evidence against her is a little thin. It's not as overwhelming as the prosecutors had hoped.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  And this is why, recognizing this, Ebert drops a bombshell. And it's an additional corroborative statement proving the fact that Ebert thinks Marie Antoinette deserves death. You know, it might seem as though it has sprung from the kind of the darkest, most depraved depths of his journalism, but it has been signed, and this is completely devastating for Marie Antoinette, by her own son. And this statement alleges, and I quote, "The young Capet was surprised by Simon in an act of self-abuse." It describes how he had been taught to masturbate by his mother and his aunt. And worst of all, again, to quote this statement, "There is no doubt from what Capet's son

• 57:41Speaker 01

  has said that an act of incest was committed between mother and son." And Marie Antoinette is so stunned by this that at first she doesn't know what to say. It just leaves her silent. She's so appalled by it. And then she's pressed by the president of the tribunal to answer the charge. And, and she says, "If I did not respond, it was because it would be against nature for a mother to reply to such an accusation. On this, I appeal to all the mothers who may be here," said the women who were watching in the gallery. And briefly, in the courtroom, astonishingly, there is a surge of sympathy for her. And that evening at dinner, Robespierre, who's been, you know, he's been informed what's happened, is furious and he cries out, "That imbecile, Ebert, enlivening her last moments

• 58:26Speaker 01

  with a public relations triumph." You know, to Robespierre, it seems a disaster, but actually it's not. Ebert knows his audience and the news of what he is alleging sweep Paris. And they confirm all his supporters, all the Orages, all the sans culotte, in their darkest suspicions of her. And sure enough, Marie Antoinette. Is convicted and the guilty verdict is brought in in the early hours of 16th of October. And as the verdict is read out, she shows not a trace of emotion. And she's returned to her cell at 4:30 in the morning. And there she writes letters to her two children. In these letters, she tells them, you know, basically forgive your enemies, don't harbor grudges. Then at dawn, a guard comes and orders her to change out of her widow's weeds,

• 59:11Speaker 01

  her, her, her black dress into a white dress. And the guard insists on watching her as she changes. And then at 10 o'clock, the executioner Henri Sanson arrives and he binds her hands very, very tightly behind her back, so tight that, that it's painful for her. And then crops her hair, which by now is white and tangled. So very different to how she had looked at Versailles when her locks were being teased by Monsieur Leonard. And of course, the reason that Sanson is doing that is to expose her neck.

• 59:41Speaker 00

  So at this point, Tom, she's 37 years old. So she's not an old woman by any means, but she must be after all these month, long months of incarceration, plus the years of stress.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  She looks really aged.

• 59:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, she must cut a haggard figure.

• 59:53Speaker 01

  This brings her no sympathy in the court because it is a staple of pornographic literature that rouais, when they are uncovered, they immediately lose their looks. And so this seems to confirm Marie Antoinette's reputation as a kind of character from Dangerous Liaisons, something like that. All her hair has gone now, it's been cropped. And then she's led out into the courtyard and she sees that she is to be taken to the scaffold, not in a carriage as her husband had been, but in a tumbril, like the common criminal that she is, in the opinion of the revolutionary tribunal. So she's going to be, you know, this Habsburg, this former queen of France is going to be taken to her execution in a rubbish cart. And she's so shocked that she feels a violent need to relieve herself.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  It's at this point that the kind of the tight knots around her wrists are loosened so that she can relieve herself against the wall of the courtyard. And everyone stands and watches her as she does so. And then she's put up into the tumbril. And it's not far to the Place de la Révolution, where she's going to be guillotined. But so many crowds have gathered to watch and to jeer her on her final journey that it takes her an hour to get there. And the painter David watches her go by and draws a very famous sketch. If you haven't seen it, you can Google it. It shows her kind of haggard, aged, her hair cropped, of course, but weirdly a kind of enduring defiance. Her face is composed, her chin is slightly raised. And everyone agrees that when she mounts the

• 1:01:21Speaker 01

  scaffold, she does it with a kind of impressive show of cool, which some attribute to courage and her enemies attribute to what they see as her habitual insolence.

• 1:01:30Speaker 00

  Well, can I just make a, a contrast here? Ebert, the man who hounded her to her death, he will be mounting the scaffold in the next episode. And he cuts a very different figure.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  Boiling like a baby.

• 1:01:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, dies like a dog.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  She's executed, her head is exposed to the cheers of the crowd and her clothes are stripped off her. According to an account published years later, so may not be entirely reliable, but it has a smack of truth. Her clothes are sent to a hospital where they are to be worn by women who are never to know whose clothes they had once been. And of course, she, her body is dumped in a, a paupers grave. And to lots of patriots, with the death of Marie Antoinette, perhaps even more than with the death of her husband, it seems that a new world has been born. And so a pamphlet is published shortly after her execution, which expresses this in the most exalting terms, Frenchmen, Republicans, you have purged the earth of a monster who was its abomination. And on one level, this

• 1:02:25Speaker 01

  is obviously a massive exaggeration because purely on the symbolic level, of course, it was the death of Louis XVI that had been the key moment. And you can see this in the way that Robespierre responds to Marie Antoinette's execution. So when Louis XVI had been taken to the guillotine, Robespierre had been in his room in the, the house of the duplay, and he had solemnly turned his back on Louis' carriage as it had rumbled past. Marie Antoinette, he pays no attention to it at all. It's a nothing event to him.

• 1:02:51Speaker 00

  Well, politically, it doesn't have that much significance, does it? I mean, it doesn't change the balance of power in the convention. Marie Antoinette, at this point, has no political power. She's a leftover from a, a bygone age.

• 1:03:01Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And, and as we said, for Robespierre, it's all about the Girondins. And actually, their trial is going to begin eight days after Marie Antoinette has been guillotined. I mean, that's the focus of all Robespierre's energies. And actually, even in the Vendée by this point, where royalism really had presented a serious threat to the revolution, the tide of war is at last starting to turn in favour of the revolution. So on the 17th of October, which is one day after Marie Antoinette's execution, republican forces meet with the main Vendéen army at Chollet, and they win a massive victory there. So this is just south of the river Loire. Just to give a kind of a, a quick synopsis of what happens in the months after in the Vendée. In December, the Vendé, the Vendéens are beaten again at, at Le Mans. There's kind of massive street fighting.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  The battle basically takes place in the town itself. And so huge numbers of civilians get slaughtered as well, an absolute kind of bloodbath. And then there's a final defeat for the Vendéen forces on the 23rd of December. And this effectively marks the end of the rebellion. So that basically is the royalist threat to the revolution out of the way. But in Paris, royalists do continue to be sent to the guillotine, but increasingly, the more that they get sent to the guillotine, the less even the kind of, you know, the most anti-royalists among the Songcoulot feel that, you know, they're, they're no real threat at all. So just to give the names of some of those royalists who are, who were sent to the guillotine, Elimte Gouge, the famous feminist, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen, we did an episode on her. Her Declaration

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  of the Rights of Women was a kind of celebrated plea for equal rights. And she had the famous and ironic slogan, woman has the right to climb onto the scaffold, she must equally have the right to climb onto the tribunal. And this Declaration of the Rights of Women had been dedicated to Marie Antoinette. Elimte Gouge had also publicly opposed the execution of Louis XVI and the turn of the revolution to terror. So that was enough to condemn her. So she never climbed the tribunal, but on the 3rd of November, she did climb the scaffold. And that was the end of her. Then three days later, on the 6th of November, Dominic, surely for you, the greatest moment in the entire French Revolution, Philippe Galité goes to the guillotine. And to give him credit, he has dressed very elegantly

• 1:05:10Speaker 01

  for it. I, I kind of like that in a prisoner. And he's supposed to have quipped that he had known better days. So I quite like that as well. So he, he, he dies well. And I think the saddest death, and the one that is felt to be most pathetic, really, even the tricoteurs feel a bit bad about this, is Madame Elizabeth, the younger sister of Louis XVI. She's executed on the 10th of May, 1794.

• 1:05:32Speaker 00

  For no good reason.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  For no good reason at all. She's part of a, a kind of batch of 24 prisoners who are being executed en masse. And they're executed in ascending order of rank. And so she is the very last person to be executed. So she has to sit there watching all the other prisoners being killed. And I think, you know, even people on the street feel this is a bit much. And actually, Robespierre, he's blamed for this, even though he hadn't wanted Madame Elizabeth to be executed. And he complains about it the next day to Barrer and says, you see, it is always me. I'm always being blamed for it.

• 1:06:04Speaker 00

  I'm the real victim in all this.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  He's the real victim, yeah. And by this point, you know, the reason that people feel that, that Madame Elizabeth shouldn't really be executed is because the job has been done. You know, there is no conceivable comeback for the Ancien Régime now in France. And I think that Ebert, by hunting Marie Antoinette to her death and by casting her at her trial as someone haunting the darkest fantasies of the Marquis de Sade, you know, he had actually known what he was doing, despite, you know, Robespierre thinking that it was mad behaviour. Because what it did was to brand the French monarchy as something monstrous, as something contemptible as well, something grotesque. And the mud of

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  that does stick. And it means, you know, in the long run, I think it, it dooms the French monarchy. There are attempts to bring it back, but it never really succeeds. I think it has been made to seem kind of ludicrous.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  I'm not sure I agree with that, actually. French monarchy returned in 1815 and it lasted till 1848. I mean, that's 33 years. That's quite a long time.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  I think the foundations are rotten through.

• 1:07:09Speaker 00

  I know it's a different beast, but I don't think it's inconceivable that France could have a monarchy today. I mean, 33 years is a, you know, a someone's lifetime.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I think it's inconceivable. I think it destroys the mystique that ultimately a monarchy in the 19th century required, you know, even posing as citizen kings doesn't really help the, the years of it. The magic of it is gone. And that's basically what Burke was saying as well. I think that, that Ebert trashes it so completely that ultimately the filth can't be cleaned away. And not only that, he has also played his part in, so if he's killed the French monarchy off, he's also played the part in another literal death. And this isn't an execution before the gaze of the people, but one that is silent and squalid and veiled from every human eye, actually.

• 1:07:55Speaker 00

  And this is a terrible story.

• 1:07:57Speaker 01

  This is the darkest and, and one of the saddest stories in the whole revolution, I think. So on the 19th of January, 1794, the seigneur, the cobbler and his wife are dismissed from the temple. They are no longer the tutor of the former Dauphin. And two days later, the by now eight-year-old Louis Charles Capet is walled up in that room where his father had been when he was taken to his execution. He's walled up in a corner of it. So he's kind of imprisoned in effectively what is now a very small cell. It has no natural light, there's no windows. And in fact, there is only a single grill. That's the only kind of access point through which meals can be handed. These meals are deliberately

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  not very filling. They're basically a, a couple of bowls of soup a day with a husk of bread, perhaps like a lump of, of kind of gristle and, and meat. No lantern is allowed after dusk. So he spends hours and hours in pitch darkness. He's allowed no change of, of clothes. So he is wearing the same clothes day after day, month after month, that he was wearing when he was first immured in this cell. And there are no toilet facilities. So people can imagine. How, as the months go by, how squalid his living conditions are. And in fact, the room becomes so filled with vermin that there were occasions where the poor boy would not eat his meals

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  because the food would attract the vermin. The vermin would then leave him alone and allow him to snatch a few hours sleep. And a guard notices this and says, well, why aren't you eating your food? And the boy replied, well, what would you do, my friend? I want to die. And so in due course, he does, because he is kept in the cell for six months. And then he's released, but he never really recovers from the, the kind of horrific experience of his solitary confinement. For those six months, he had been covered in his, his own excrement, his own waste, his clothes kind of rotting away on his body. And when he comes out, he is so covered in sores and pustules, and he's got tumors and parasites.

• 1:10:06Speaker 01

  And his only joy really is his, the tame birds that he keeps as pets. And there's kind of bitter irony there because Robespierre, as a small boy, had kept birds as pets. And Robespierre had actually paid a visit to the temple, very Robespierre. He paused and started looking at the bookcase. But he only speaks to Marie Therese. He doesn't, he doesn't go and investigate what, what is happening to the, to this boy. Perhaps if he'd seen him and seen him with his birds, he might have, it might have been a little spark of fellow feeling. I don't know. Louis Charles never, never recovers. He fades away. And on the 7th of June, 1795. So by this point, of course, the terror is over. That's why he's been released. He starts crying, calling for his mother, and he still doesn't know that Marie Antoinette has been sent to the guillotine. And then the following day, he starts struggling to breathe and then he dies.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  And I suppose you could say that from beyond the grave, because by this point, Ebert himself is dead, that Ebert's work is done.

• 1:10:57Speaker 00

  The boy was 10 years old.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  10 years old when he dies, yeah. So no heir of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette will return to Versailles. Louis XVII will never play the part of Charles II. He will not be restored to the throne. And I think that the monarchy, essentially, as it had been constituted for centuries and centuries and centuries, has perished more surely amid the darkness of that cell than it, than it had done on the scaffold. But Dominic, we've been saying how Ebert is going to be getting into trouble. So what about him? And what about Robespierre? What's, what's been happening to them and to the course of the revolution? Well, poor Louis Charles Capet has been fading away in the darkness of the temple.

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  And those questions, we are going to be answering, aren't we, in our next episode?

• 1:11:44Speaker 00

  Completely. So next episode is a very, very dramatic one. It is the showdown between Robespierre and Danton. A duel for the ages, a duel that's become a symbol of extremism versus moderation. And we are approaching, of course, the climax of the reign of terror. So a lot of guillotining, a lot of political drama, a lot of excitement to come. Now, if you want to listen to that episode right away, and indeed the next two episodes on the Revolution's War on Christianity, and the fall of Robespierre that brings the terror to an end, you can actually listen to those right away, but only if you're a member of The Rest is History Club. And if you want to join The Rest is History Club, there is brilliant Bombshell news.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  We now have a website never before mentioned on the show. It's therestishistory.com. And also, for the first time in human history, we are offering a range of supplementary benefits.

• 1:12:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:12:36Speaker 00

  That come along with ad-free listening.

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  Unreal.

• 1:12:38Speaker 00

  And early access and all these incredible things. Absolutely incredible. So merci Tom, et au revoir.

• 1:12:44Speaker 01

  Bye, everybody.

• 1:12:44Speaker 00

  À bientôt.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters. Tremfya offers self-injection or intravenous infusion from the start. Tremfya is administered as injections under the skin or infusions through a vein every four weeks, followed by injections under the skin every four or eight weeks. If your doctor decides that you can self-inject Tremfya, proper training is required. Tremfya is a prescription medicine used to treat adults with moderately to severely active Crohn's disease and adults with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis. Serious allergic reactions, increased risk of infections or lower ability to fight them, and liver problems may occur. Before treatment, get checked for infections and tuberculosis.

• 1:13:38Speaker 02

  Tell your doctor if you have an infection, flu-like symptoms, or need a vaccine. Explore what's possible. Ask your doctor about Tremfya today. Call 1-800-526-7736 to learn more, or visit tremfyaradio.com.

• 1:13:54Speaker 00

  Is history anything more than the story of heroes and villains? Of course it is, but not in our brand new The Rest is History book, A History of the World in Fifty-One Heroes and Villains. Now, in this book, we have picked out some of our very favourite characters from the last few years of The Rest is History. So we've got Genghis Khan, we have Cyrus the Great, we have Marie Antoinette, and obviously we have Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. Now, some of these people are friends of the show, some of them are unwanted acquaintances, some of them are downright foes of the show. But we had one rule, they had to be interesting, and there had to be interesting stories about them.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  So now is your chance to pick a side, to polish your armour, to don your very best First World War general's moustache, and to decide whether you are on the side of the heroes or the villains. A History of the World in Fifty-One Heroes and Villains is available now. It makes a wonderful Christmas present. I cannot recommend it to you more highly. If you don't buy a copy, you will probably regret it till the day you die. Goodbye.