History
article | Reading time7 min
Relive the last days of the last queen of the Ancien Régime...
The arrival of the Queen in the Conciergerie
Very criticized since the beginning of the years 1780, the queen of France is even more hostile to the Revolution than Louis XVI. She thus quickly concentrates the most frank attacks.
Locked up in the Temple prison with her family since August 13, 1792 after the capture of the Tuileries, Marie-Antoinette was transferred, alone, to the Conciergerie on the night of August 1 to 2, 1793. Her children and her sister-in-law remained in the Temple prison. As for Louis XVI, he had already been executed a few months earlier (on January 21, 1793). She will stay 76 days in the Conciergerie
The conditions of Marie-Antoinette's imprisonment are not well known, as they are tainted by numerous rumors and legends that aim to compare the queen's incarceration to the torments endured by the first Christian martyrs in ancient times.
The former queen is not a prisoner like the others. Deprived of the means to write most of the time, she is also kept under surveillance: two gendarmes watch her night and day, giving her no privacy. This is the ultimate affront for the one who had just made the headlines ten years earlier for having tried to give herself, in the middle of the court, a private space in the Trianon of Versailles.
Outside, the faithful of the monarchy try to organize themselves. But plans to free the former queen of France, such as the "carnation plot", failed one after the other. For safety, Marie-Antoinette was transferred to another cell, located at the present site of the chapel of expiation.
On October 3, the one that the deputy Billaud Varenne called "the widow Capet, the shame of humanity and of her sex", was officially decreed accused. Less than 10 days later, she is questioned by Herman, the president of the Revolutionary Court.
Benjamin Gavaudo - Centre des monuments-nationaux
The trial of the queen
The indictment
On October 14, 1793, the trial opens at the Revolutionary Court in front of a packed room. During twenty long hours, more than forty witnesses parade, leaving the wildest rumors.
Accused of having made a pact with Austria, of having lived in luxury at the expense of the State while the French people lived in misery, denounced for having pushed Louis XVI to refuse the Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was more widely seen as the very incarnation of the Counter-Revolution.
Tired, worn out by her long incarceration, the fallen queen no longer looks like herself. Through the collapse of this royal body, it is the fall of the entire monarchy that the audience comes to contemplate.
Marie-Antoinette is defended by Chauveau-Lagarde and Tronçon-Ducoudray, two very reputable lawyers, but who do not have time to study the case.
The trial seems to have been played out in advance: since the summer of 1789, the queen has been strongly opposed to the Revolution and very early on has sought to convince Louis XVI to seek refuge abroad, betraying her country.
But other attacks also suggest that she had an incestuous relationship with her son, heir to the throne. Totally false, such accusations reveal on the other hand perfectly what Marie-Antoinette had become in the national imagination: a monster whose sacrifice was necessary for the Republic to live.
Condemned to death for high treason in the early morning of October 16, 1793, she was escorted by a double hedge of gendarmes, then transported in a cart to the Place de la Révolution, where a thick and silent crowd awaited her.
Benjamin Gavaudo - Centre des monuments-nationaux
The memory of Marie-Antoinette
The expiatory chapel of Marie-Antoinette
On his return to France in 1814, Louis XVIII wants to reconcile the country with the royal ideology by an attitude of forgiveness. But the trauma of the Hundred Days, in 1815, provoked the resolutely "expiatory" laws of January 1816: banishment of the regicide conventionals, sacralization of the memory of the martyred kings.
The last letter of Marie-Antoinette to Madame Élisabeth, soon known as the "Testament of the Queen", was solemnly read in the Chamber on February 22, 1816, before a general diffusion. But, as early as 1812, the Minister of Police, Count Elie Decazes, then President of the Assizes of the Seine (Paris), shocked by the state of the Queen's cell at the Conciergerie, had drafted a project to make the place a sanctuary, which was not followed by his hierarchy.
In 1816, it was at his instigation that the prefect of the Seine, Count de Chabrol, with the agreement of the prison council and the approval of Louis XVIII, had an oratory erected in Marie-Antoinette's cell.
The architect Peyre was chosen to transform the revolutionary dungeon and sanctify "this place of pain". The access to the dungeon was moved to the back of the prison chapel (now called the Girondins chapel): it is this chapel that is still visible to visitors today.
The so-called expiatory chapel then became an oratory dedicated to meditation and prayer. Its walls are painted in fake black marble with silver tears. The window receives a stained glass window with the queen's figure. Three paintings were added to reinforce the image of Marie-Antoinette that the monarchy wished to deliver to posterity, that of a Christian martyr of the Revolution.
Bernard Acloque - Centre des monuments nationaux
Objects of memory
Presented as testimonies of the queen's imprisonment, preserved as precious objects, or as supports of memory, the numerous objects supposed to have belonged to Marie-Antoinette and presented in the showcases of the Conciergerie have fascinated since the end of the 18th century.
You will be able to see some of the objects supposed to have belonged to Marie-Antoinette during her imprisonment, whether in the Temple or in the Conciergerie (cross-reliquary, water jug, cassette containing her toiletries, camisole and kerchief...) and other spectacular relics such as the chatelaine-reliquary containing the hair of the royal family, from a private collection, or the shoe from the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen that she is said to have lost when she was taken to the scaffold
Other objects illustrate the extent to which the figure of Marie-Antoinette aroused opposing passions, particularly in the nineteenth century, depending on whether she was worshipped or hated, as evidenced, for example, in these showcases an astonishing engraved bone message case depicting Marie-Antoinette on the scaffold and bearing the inscription on the back, on a phylactery, "The Execution of the Austrian Chicken.
Benjamin Gavaudo - Centre des monuments-nationaux
