… ow herself on the balcony. Bravely she stepped out and faced them alone. As voices shouted, ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ the queen bowed her head and curtsied.
Then Lafayette joined her, bowed to her, and kissed her hand. He was considered a great hero, and his action impressed the crowd. ‘Vive la rein e,’ they shouted (‘Long live the queen!’ ). Since that day the royal family became prisoners of France The Escape The royal family remained imprisoned for years.
In 1791 Axel Fersen, ‘s rumored lover, arranged their escape. His initial plan called for Louis and Marie Antoinette to leave Paris in a small, fast coach; their children would travel separately to avoid suspicion. But Marie Antoinette refused to leave her children, insisting that the entire family travel together in a large, slow coach. It was a decision that sealed their fate, for the royal family was recognized in the village of Varennes and arrested. (Fersen, who had driven the escape coach, survived the French Revolution only to be murdered in 1809 by a revolutionary mob in Sweden.
) Lafayette was still trying to moderate between the royals and the revolutionaries, which won him few friends on either side. Marie Antoinette said sarcastically, ‘I can see that M. de Lafayette wishes to save us, but who will save us from M. de Lafayette?’ Lafayette lost public support when he ordered soldiers to fire on a crowd that had gathered to petition for the dethronement of the king.
Eventually he fled France and was imprisoned for five years in Austria for leading French troops into battle against the Austrians. He was liberated by Napoleon and lived to see Louis XVI’s brother brought to the throne as Louis XVIII. He participated in the July Revolution (1830) against a third brother. Charles X.
Lafayette died in 1834. King Louis was apathetic, so it fell to Marie Antoinette to negotiate with revolutionaries on the royal family’s behalf. She also secretly urged Austria to intercede in France. When France went to war with Austria, Louis and Marie Antoinette were charged with treason. In 1792, the year the institution of royalty was officially abolished in France, the royal family was moved to the Temple Prison. They were treated fairly well and were permitted to live together.
In December of that year Louis’s trial began. He was found guilty and on January 21, 1793 sent to the guillotine where he was killed. For several months after their father’s death Louis Charles and his sister, Marie Therese Charlotte, remained in prison with Marie Antoinette. The children were often sick, and the queen cared for them as best she could.
Spitefully their jail ors decided to separate young Charles Louis from his mother. He was put in the cell beneath hers, where she could hear him crying. A few weeks later Marie Antoinette was also separated from her daughter. The former queen was awakened in the middle of the night and taken to the squalid Concierge rie prison.
Louis Charles and Marie Therese Charlotte remained in the cell. They never saw their mother again. Her best friend, the Princess de Labelle, was executed and her chopped head was put on a pole and paraded in front of the Queen. Antoinette was treated really cruel on her last days of captivity, she was also sent to the revolutionary tribunal the same year. In October, Marie Antoinette, nicknamed ‘the Widow Capet,’ was tried and, like the king, convicted of treason and sent to be guillotined. On October 16, 1793 she was taken through the streets of Paris in an open cart, where she was executed for Treason without proof of the crimes that people accused her for…
She maintained her dignity to the end. On the scaffold she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot, and her last words were, ‘Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.’ An speech From Edward Burke 1793… It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphine ss, 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 had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0 h, 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; 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 honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.
But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. Edmund Burke -1793 Marie Therese and Louis Charles; The Aftermath Her son, Louis Charles (now King Louis XVII) was kept in a dark, dirty cell until he died of tuberculosis in 1795. In future years many men came forward claiming to be the long-lost prince. The most believable was Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, who died in Holland in 1845, but DNA tests later established that Naundorff was not related to Marie Antoinette.
Marie Antoinette’s daughter, Madame Royale (Marie Therese), survived the revolution. She became the duchess e d’Angouleme and had great influence during the reigns of her uncles Louis XVIII and Charles X.