The Final Day

October 16, 1793, dawned gray and cold. Marie Antoinette had spent her last night writing, praying, and preparing. When guards arrived to cut her hair and bind her hands, she submitted quietly. She had requested to wear black mourning for her husband but was forced into a simple white dress—ironically echoing the muslin gowns that had once scandalized Versailles.

The tumbrel ride to the Place de la Révolution took an hour through packed streets. Unlike Louis XVI, who rode in a closed carriage, Marie Antoinette was displayed in an open cart. Artists sketched her; Jacques-Louis David's cruel drawing shows a haggard woman, mouth downturned, staring ahead. Yet witnesses also noted her straight posture and composed demeanor.

At the scaffold, she accidentally stepped on executioner Sanson's foot. Her last recorded words were "Pardon me, sir, I did not mean to do it"—maintaining courtesy literally to the end. The execution was swift. The crowd cheered, but some observers noted less enthusiasm than at the king's death. Perhaps satiation with blood, perhaps recognition that killing a defeated woman lacked glory.

Marie Antoinette's body was thrown into an unmarked grave in the Madeleine Cemetery, quicklime hastening decomposition. The woman who had lived in unimaginable splendor ended in a pauper's burial. Yet even this wasn't the end of her story. The image of the queen at the scaffold—dignified, composed, meeting death with courage—began its own journey through history.

Revolutionary authorities thought executing Marie Antoinette would end her influence. Instead, it transformed her from failed queen to martyred mother, from symbol of aristocratic excess to victim of revolutionary excess. The very qualities that made her vulnerable in life—her femininity, maternity, foreign birth—made her sympathetic in death.