(This is part two of a double episode – listen to part one here. We also just released our Guillotine Special bonus episode at patreon.com/reelhistorypodcast Join for as little as 2.5 EUR and get access to dozens of bonus eps!)
The powdered parties are over, the pastry crumbs swept aside, and the gates of Versailles are about to be kicked in. Join us for the explosive second half of our Marie Antoinette double bill as we leave the perfumed salons of the palace and step into the hungry, furious, rapidly radicalising France that Sofia Coppola’s film mostly keeps beyond the frame. If episode one was all silk slippers and scandal sheets, episode two is bread riots and bayonets!
Having charted Marie Antoinette’s rise from teenage archduchess to the most notorious woman in France, we now turn to the crisis consuming the kingdom itself. Why did one of Europe’s richest and most powerful states collapse into bankruptcy, paralysis and revolt? How did the ancien régime of privilege and feudal dues stagger into the constitutional age? We’ll trace the great turning points of the Revolution, including the famous Women’s March on Versailles that dragged the royal family from their gilded isolation and into the uneasy captivity of Paris. From there, we follow two years of humiliation, suspicion and dwindling authority before the fateful attempted escape to Varennes — a bungled flight that shattered what little trust remained between crown and country.
As Europe’s monarchies close ranks and revolutionary France lurches into war, the stakes grow bloodier still. In the middle of it all stands Marie Antoinette: widowed, demonised and facing the same merciless machinery that consumed so many others. Was she a vain symbol of a rotten system, a stubborn political actor who helped doom the monarchy, or a tragic scapegoat caught in forces far beyond her control? Join us as we sort fact from legend one last time and follow Marie Antoinette from the Hall of Mirrors to the guillotine.
Sources
‘Marie Antoinette -The Journey” – Antonia Fraser
‘The Ancien Régime and the Revolution’ – Alexis De Tocqueville
‘Citizens – A chronicle of the French Revolution’ – Simon Schama
‘The History of Modern France’ – Jonathan Fenby
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