'Let them eat cake!' The villainization of women in history:

Serenity Corbett-Richardso

An infamously audacious exclamation, erroneously attributed to Marie-Antoinette amidst the suffering of the French subjects. In fact, Jean Jacques-Rousseau first authored this phrase, ascribing it to “a great princess” three years before Marie-Antoinette even married the dauphin, who would later become King Louis XVI.

“Marie-Antoinette has certainly been vilified, which is not to say that she wasn’t a very flawed human being,” said Christine Adams, PhD, a professor of history at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

As an Austrian Habsburg, Marie-Antoinette was born to play the role of a political pawn. At the age of 14, Her marriage to the future king of France thrust her into French affairs of which she, euphemistically, had no clue.

“She was not a particularly adept political player—she had pretty bad instincts for politics, especially as they were evolving by the 1780s and especially the 1790s. But she was shaped by her own upbringing and a worldview shaped by royal prerogative. She was placed in a difficult situation at a young age,” Adams said.

Marie-Antoinette, a staunch anti-revolutionary royal, has long been held accountable for the suffering that characterized the 18th-century French Revolution.

“Something that should be taken into account for Marie Antoinette—as well as everyone else in history—is their personalities and opinions on a subject, rather than just timeline facts. I think that understanding historical figures as people gives us a stronger understanding of historical actions and events as a whole,” said Emily Muscolina, a junior at Carlmont.

While she certainly had a good deal of influence on politics—fulfilling the roles of both the queen and the royal mistress, a somewhat salacious yet traditionally influential advisor to the king, (of which King Louis XVI had none)—Marie-Antoinette wielded less obvious power than, say, her husband.

“She worked with counterrevolutionaries to undermine the proposed constitutional changes, but it would be hard to claim that she was personally responsible for much suffering or violence,” Adams said. “She did not have an official role. But she did exercise ‘soft power.’”

Despite some very rightful grievances held against the queen of France, much of her reputation has been embellished. In addition to the cold “Let them eat cake!” remark, MarieAntoinette was also targeted by her contemporaries in the scandalous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which she was accused of stealing an extravagant piece of jewelry previously belonging to Madame DuBarry. While now understood to have been the victim of a vengeful plot by a disgraced cardinal, this event has contributed to Marie-Antoinette’s frequent casting as the villain.

“I think she is taught with a negative connotation, but it could be worse than it is,” Muscolina said. “It seems that history is going in the right direction to portray her more accurately, but the media's influence and ideas of the past sway public opinion. Marie Antoinette was a queen who neglected her duty, which should be recognized, but it should also be understood that this came from a place of being sheltered from the true state of France.”

An untraditional and somewhat unfit queen, she found herself at the center of anti-monarchy sentiment, which did no favors for her reputation. The official Château de Versailles website cites her “blunders, [committed] often unwittingly, which gradually alienated public opinion, helping to tarnish her image in a most disastrous way.”

A trend noted by Adams in her op-ed “America hates older women,” published in the Baltimore Sun in 2016, is the villainization of women in their time.

“There is certainly a long tradition in history of directing hatred and loathing at women perceived as the power behind the throne,” Adams said. “Including, in the French context, royal mistresses such as Madame de Pompadour and Madame DuBarry.”

The crucifixion of Marie-Antoinette in the 18th century can be chalked up to the fact that she was a foreigner and a female one at that. But more importantly, she was an easy target for the revolutionaries, as they were able to use her faults to the advantage of attacking the monarchy.

“Some of her best-known roles were those invented for her: the dissolute queen, the licentious tigress, ‘the Austrian woman’ with its implication of ‘the Austrian b****’ (‘l’Autrichienne’), emerged in the vicious pamphlet literature of the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary years,” said Adams and her sister Tracy Adams in their book “The Creation of the French Royal Mistress.”

Additionally, Marie-Antoinette was emblematic of the lavish lifestyle led by the upper class. Her signature rococo fashion and Versailles getaways were nothing short of enraging to the struggling lower classes.

“She was very symbolic of many of the things people saw wrong with the monarchy in France at the time,” said Corey Alger, a junior. “But she’s not really different from any of the other kings or queens who preceded her. She was just there when it happened and the last domino to fall.”

Though she was loathed in the tense era of revolution, Marie-Antoinette’s name has been cleared of some of the many misconceptions once had about her. Public opinion on her has certainly evolved in the nearly 300 years since her death, though her faults remain acknowledged, and rightly so.

“I think popular culture portrays her in a relatively sympathetic fashion; it seemed so gratuitous to execute a woman who, in the end, lacked any real authority,” Adams said.