They had taken her son from her in July. Now in October they were alleging he had accused her of incest.
On 14 October 1793, Marie Antoinette appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal in Paris. She was thirty-seven, a widow, and a prisoner in the Conciergerie. Her appointed lawyers, Claude François Chauveau-Lagarde and Guillaume Alexandre Tronson-Ducoudray, had been notified at the last minute. They were expected to defend her against a collection of papers they had scarcely had time to read.
Chauveau-Lagarde found her in a room divided by a screen. On her side stood a bed, a table and two chairs. On the other was an armed gendarme. Two small barred windows admitted light from the women’s courtyard. When the lawyer went through the indictment with her, the guard was close enough to hear their conversation. The screen gave her somewhere to sleep. It did rather less for the privacy of her defence.
At the registry, he found a confused mass of documents which he believed would take weeks to examine. He went back to tell her they needed an adjournment. She asked whom they would have to approach. When he answered that it would be the National Convention, she refused. He persisted, reminding her that the accusations reached beyond her to the family still imprisoned in the Temple. She took up a pen and wrote requesting time for her lawyers.
They did not receive it.
The woman the court called the “Widow Capet” had once been sent to France to secure an alliance. An Austrian archduchess married to the future Louis XVI, she had arrived with a family connection which French diplomacy wanted and French suspicion never quite forgave. By 1793, France was at war with Austria. The connection that had helped make her a queen helped make her an enemy.
There were political acts to examine. She had sought support from her brother, Emperor Leopold II, and encouraged the royal family’s flight from Paris in 1791. She had worked to resist the Revolution. Her surviving son, Louis-Charles, was recognised by royalists as Louis XVII after his father’s execution. To his mother he was a child. To the Republic he was also a king waiting for someone to restore him.
That distinction had already entered their prison. Louis XVI had been guillotined in January. In July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and placed in the care of Antoine Simon, a shoemaker charged with bringing him up as a republican. In August, Marie Antoinette was transferred from the Temple to the Conciergerie. Her daughter and sister-in-law remained behind. The family was being dismantled a person at a time.
Louis-Charles was eight. At Versailles, his mother had called him her “chou d’amour”, her cabbage of love. He had become the heir after his elder brother’s death in 1789. By the autumn of 1793, he was a prisoner whose royal identity his keepers were meant to erase, and whose statements could be used against the mother from whom they had separated him.
The prosecution accused Marie Antoinette of exhausting the national treasury, corresponding with France’s enemies and conspiring against the security of the state. But the proceedings also drew on a much older portrait of the queen. Pamphlets had spent years making her extravagance, sexuality and supposed domination of her husband into explanations for France’s troubles. She had been called “Madame Déficit”, as though the shortfall in the national finances were another of her personal possessions.
Called as a witness, Jacques-René Hébert carried those attacks into her relationship with her son. He alleged that Marie Antoinette and her sister-in-law, Élisabeth, had sexually corrupted the child. The accusation of incest rested on statements obtained from Louis-Charles in captivity. His mother had no access to him. She could not ask him what had been said, or under what pressure. Adults had questioned the boy. Another adult now brought the result before the tribunal as evidence against her. To the Republic he was a royalist threat. To her he was still her child.
She did not answer the allegation.
The proceedings moved on until a juror called attention to her silence. She had not responded, he observed, to what Hébert had said about her son. The court required an answer. “If I have not answered,” she said, “it is because nature refuses to answer such a charge made against a mother. I appeal to every mother who may be here.”
Her appeal did not save her. The lawyers still had to defend her against the political charges, without the preparation time they had requested and never received. The hearings continued through 15 October and into the following morning. Early on 16 October, the jury found her guilty and she was sentenced to death.
She was guillotined later that day in the Place de la Révolution.
Louis-Charles remained a prisoner in the Temple. The mother who had been required to answer an accusation extracted from him had not seen him since July, and would never see him again.
