The traveling circus of the Summer Olympics offers the host country a chance to tell its national story, and the eyes of the world are on France this summer. The usual culture war talking points have erupted over the avant-garde performance art at the opening ceremony, but the headless Marie Antoinette is widely accepted as an icon of France. Her decapitated corpse appeared during the “Liberty” portion of the show, looking down on the athletes from the concierge (her former prison). The general disinterest in Marie as a historical woman executed under dubious circumstances is palpable. Salon declared that France was experiencing a “hot guillotine summer,” and artistic director Thomas Jolly called the entire segment a “homage … to the guillotine.” Jake Tapper tweeted that the headless Marie Antoinette was a “brat,” somehow inserting the dead queen into the summer zeitgeist of American pop culture.
The use of the dead Marie Antoinette as a republican icon should be carefully considered. It is a deliberate simplification of the past to tell a gentler and more entertaining story to a modern nation. French antipathy towards Marie Antoinette in the late 18th century is well documented and well deserved. Her lavish lifestyle and indifference to the poverty of the French people made her an enemy of the state when the Revolutionary Committee came to power. Her husband Louis XVI was guillotined for treason, christening the Revolution with the thrill of public bloodshed. Marie and her children were initially imprisoned together in the Conciergerie and then forcibly separated. The Revolutionary Tribunal blamed her for the royal court’s lavish spending and for her ongoing ties with rival Austria. However, she was also accused and tried on a number of trumped-up charges, including incest with her seven-year-old son (a false explanation for the injuries the boy had sustained in prison). The child signed an affidavit of this abuse by his mother after being visited in prison by radical members of the Tribunal, certainly under pressure and possibly coercion. For this reason, Marie was publicly executed by guillotine. Her son spent three more years in prison, where he was tortured by his guards and died of tuberculosis at the age of ten. He was not executed outright like his parents, but his death by abuse was of great benefit to the new Republic, which feared that his royal blood might arouse sympathy among his powerful relatives across Europe.
The execution of Marie Antoinette and the treatment of her family are nothing to be proud of. Her punishment is the first evidence of a revolution gone out of control. The spirit of her trial was public revenge and it can hardly be considered a court case. Her seven-year-old child was coerced and forced in prison to testify to the incestuous rape committed by his mother. The effort to bring this particular charge against Marie shows that the trial was not just about her conduct of state affairs, but rather about publicly humiliating her. Marie refused to answer the charges in the courtroom, claiming she was not up to her dignity as a mother. Killing Marie was not an act of justice. It was extrajudicial public revenge and an act that should, if not condemned outright, then at least be very carefully considered. The imprisonment and death of her son is a clear example of cruelty and abuse of an innocent child for convenience and as an act of familial retribution.
The Olympic torch passed the headless Marie and through a staging of Les Miserables‘ famous barricades. The French opening ceremonies thematically linked all these events for the viewer. In their preferred story, Marie was justly killed by a just revolution, now remembered in heroic songs and hailed as a time of liberation for the people. No one should begrudge a nation its desire to show the world the best of its heritage and culture. But the conscious rewriting of an event and the glorification of a national evil is troubling. A similar reworking of national memory played out in the decades following the collapse of the Vichy government, France’s Nazi-collaborator regime during the war.
The United States has been grappling with the nuances of its own past for decades. Statues, the names of public institutions, and school curricula are all battlegrounds over whether the light and shadow of our national past are properly balanced. The story of the French Revolution is far less familiar to an American audience than in broad strokes. The elevation of Marie Antoinette to a fashionable doll of republican victory (accompanied by blood-red banners and a blaring heavy metal band) is the end result of a nation rushing to untangle its past. The world would no doubt be appalled and horrified if the Russian Olympic Committee paraded as a national symbol the body of Alexandra Romanov, a queen who was also murdered with her children by a revolutionary government. Her death in 1918 was widely viewed as a cruel and unnecessary act by the Soviets. Russia has since taken steps to repair this national stain, including an elaborate state reburial of the entire family in 1998. France clearly sees things differently.
The French Revolution is an example of the good and evil that a revolution can produce. France and the world should do everything in their power not to confuse the two. The vindictive abuse of Marie and her children must not be forgotten. It was an evil not worthy of the Olympic splendor.
Image via Flickr
