MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE VICTIM OF GOSSIPS AND PROPAGANDA

By Natalia Klimczak

Envy can be dangerous, sometimes it is a killer. In the most horrible cases, it pushes people to the cruelest acts. One of the victims of envy was famous French queen Marie Antoinette. Did you know that she didn’t say the famous phrase „let them eat cake”?

In 1815 this day in a cold soil near the cathedral Saint-Denis in France, a group of people exhumed the body of a woman. Her remains were preserved good enough to recognize her identity. Her delicate silhouette, light hair and still visible royal face expression allowed to conclude that the corpse and severed head belong to queen Marie Antoinette.

The story of Marie Antoinette is one of the most tragical examples of what envy can do. She grew up on the Austrian court, where she learned how to work, how to respect people and how to be generous. Marie loved to work in a garden, that’s why King Louis gave her a small”cottage house” near the Versailles palace.

However, Marie Antoinette was a queen. She wore expensive clothes, beautiful jewelry and spent time like many other royal women. Those times she had no opportunity to share the depth of her personality. There was no well-developed media, no possibility to share thoughts and opinions. Therefore, when the French Revolution started, she was a natural enemy of the people. Propaganda created by the leaders of revolutionists was so strong, that negative and untrue opinions about her stay alive until now.

Marie Antoinette was killed because she was born in the royal family, because she wore expensive clothes and because she was misunderstood by her people. She arrived in Paris as a teenager,  and according to her biographers, if she could choose a different life for herself, she wouldn’t choose to be a queen. During the French Revolution, nobody knew that in her letters home the teardrops are still visible. Queen had to pay with life for her position, for being the wife of the king and for a bunch of nonsense arguments created by propaganda. As mentioned before, Marie Antoinette wasn’t an author of famous phrase about eating the cakes. It was a Spanish infant a few decades before.

People often judge hard people they don’t know. When someone seems to be more successful, the horde of barking dogs attacks and tries to bark. During the execution, Marie Antoinette was terminally ill. She would die a few months later, but the hunger for revenge brought her cruel death during the public execution. Her body was buried in a mass grave. However, two decades later French decided to recover her remains and make a funeral she deserved. Although her body was recovered and reburied, the bad fame of the queen stays alive. And most of the people don’t care about the truth.