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Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French 
Femininity

by Olivia Fuson

Introduction
From beautiful Austrian princess to tragic heroine 

to depraved whore, depictions of Marie Antoinette 
are almost as varied as depictions of the French 
Revolution itself. Historians have written at length 
about the persona(s) of this great royal but have yet 
to come to a consensus. Who was Marie Antoinette? 
What was her role in the Revolution? And did she 
deserve her sentence? Our perspective from within 
an equality-driven society makes it all too tempting 
to cheer along as the guillotine falls on a monarch; we 
want the Revolution to succeed because the values 
which it espouses so closely resemble those of our 
culture today. This bias in favor of the ideals of the 
early Revolution has led many historians to justify its 
later events in light of the Enlightened motivations 
behind them and, in doing so, to condone the death 
of Marie Antoinette as a necessary casualty on the 
road towards Enlightenment. However, due to the 
rapid reorganization of French society after the 
collapse of the monarchy, persistent food shortages, 
riots, violent political polarization, and frequent 
redistributions of power, the Republic of 1793 more 
closely resembled a civilization in crisis than a 
democratic society.  Consequently, in order to fully 
appreciate the significance of the execution of Marie 
Antoinette and its impact on French national identity, 
we must take into account the violent elements which 
plagued the society that condemned her instead of 
simply writing her death off as collateral damage on 
the road to the modern Republic. Through the work 
of prominent philosopher René Girard, who has 
written extensively on the phenomenon of violence in 
societies in crisis as well as on the trial and execution 
of Marie Antoinette, we gain particularly valid insight 
into the execution of the queen. While Girard’s work 
focused on the effects of the societal phenomenon 
of violence rather than individual sacrifice, his line 
of reasoning can help us create a valuable, nuanced 
understanding of Marie Antoinette when coupled 
with a feminist perspective—an understanding 
which clarifies both the fragmented nature of her 

modern identity as well as the evolution of French 
feminism and womanhood.

Girardian Mimetic Relations in Revolutionary 
France

To fully appreciate the complexities of Marie 
Antoinette’s trial, we must first consider the tensions 
within France that later culminated in her sentencing 
and execution. Mimetic tensions had been building 
in France since the beginning of the Revolution, 
contributing to the violent atmosphere surrounding 
Antoinette in 1793. As Girard notes in his book, 
Violence and the Sacred, man’s tendency to imitate 
the desires of his fellow man frequently leads to 
competition and conflict. Girard explains how these 
tensions multiply within the population, writing, 
“Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous 
convergence of two desires on a single object; rather, 
the subject desires the object because the rival desires 
it…The reason is that he desires being, something he 
himself lacks and which some other person seems to 
possess. The subject thus looks to that other person 
to inform him of what he should desire in order to 
acquire that being.”1 Girard argues that, due to man’s 
insecurity over the validity of his own existence, 
he takes others’ desires as more valid than his own 
and proceeds to mimic these desires in hopes of 
attaining the supposedly superior reality of his rival. 
In France, various factions (men with property, men 
without property, women, etc.) had all begun to 
mimic each other’s desires and were each clamoring 
over the object of natural rights by the dawn of 
the Revolution. While there were certainly various 
factions involved in this competition, this paper 
will focus on the relationship between men and 
women, which had become particularly mimetic and 
contentious by 1791, as we can infer from the parallel 
writings of the National Assembly and Olympe de 
Gouges. Responding to women’s exclusion from the 
supposed equality of the Revolution despite their 

1 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1977). 



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201813

equal participation in it, De Gouges penned her 
“Declaration of the Rights of Women” in hopes of 
attaining for women those rights which men had 
already seized for themselves. Commandeering 
the structure as well as the content of the original 
“Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen,” de 
Gouges writes:

Mothers, daughters, sisters, female representatives 
of the nation ask to be constituted as a national 
assembly. Considering that ignorance, neglect, 
or contempt for the rights of woman are the sole 
causes of public misfortunes and governmental 
corruption, they have resolved to set forth in a 
solemn declaration the natural, inalienable, and 
sacred rights of woman.2

De Gouges’s imitation of the male, Revolutionary 
“Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” is 
a noteworthy example of the mimetic nature of 
political desire early in the Revolution. Although 
both desirous of the same object, men and women 
constituted two distinct factions that pursued their 
desires independently of one another, as the very 
existence of this document indicates. Due to the 
apt characterization of men and women as distinct 
entities that both desired the same object, Girard’s 
idea of mimetic rivalry accurately depicts the 
relationship between the men and women of France 
at the time when De Gouges penned her “Declaration 
of the Rights of Women.” 

As Girard notes, however, a mimetic relationship 
such as that between the men and women of the early 
Revolution, can never be peaceful. He elaborates 
on the nature of the mimetic relationship, writing, 
“The model, even when he has openly encouraged 
imitation, is surprised to find himself engaged 
in competition. He concludes that the disciple 
has betrayed his confidence by following in his 
footsteps. As for the disciple, he feels both rejected 
and humiliated, judged unworthy by his model of 
participating in the superior existence the model 

2 Olympe de Gouges, “The Declaration of the Rights of 
Woman, September 1791,” in The French Revolution and 
Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, trans. and 
ed. Lynn Hunt (Boston/New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 
1966), 124-129.

himself enjoys.”3 Taking men to be the model in this 
scenario (simply because they expanded their rights 
earlier than women) and women to be the disciples, 
we begin to understand, firstly, why tensions existed 
between these two factions that supposedly desired 
the same ends and, secondly, why the first faction 
blocked the second from attaining its object. Initially, 
the debate over women’s rights seemed to be making 
headway and even gained purchase on the floor of the 
National Assembly.4 Scarcely a year later, however, the 
tide had turned against women’s rights, prompting 
Olympe De Gouges to write her “Declaration of the 
Rights of Women” and English author and observer 
of the Revolution Edmund Burke to conclude, “On 
this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen 
is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an 
animal not of the highest order.”5 Girard’s idea of the 
model’s resentment of their rival(s) accounts for the 
tentative consideration and then violent rejection of 
women’s rights. Due to the threat the male faction 
perceived in women’s desire of the coveted object of 
rights, they could not allow women to achieve those 
same rights because any other faction’s achievement 
would diminish the value of their own. As a result, 
the relationship between women and men was 
fraught with resentment which, as the Revolution 
progressed, moved closer and closer to violence. 
      
Sacrificing Marie Antoinette

While in developed societies today, Girard 
explains, venerable judicial systems serve as 
bulwarks against mimetic violence, the judicial 
system of France in 1793 was not yet so established 
as to be able to fulfill this role and, as a result, had to 
employ a more primitive method to restore harmony 

3 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1977). 
4 Marquise de Condorcet, “On Giving Women the Right 
of Citizenship,” in Condorcet, Foundations of Social Choice 
and Political Theory, trans. and eds. Iain McLean and Fio-
na Hewitt (Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Lim-
ited, 1994), http://www.historywiz.com/primarysources/
condorcet.html  
5 Edmund Burke, Reflections On the Revolution In France, 
And On the Proceedings In Certain Societies In London 
Relative to That Event: In a Letter Intended to Have 
Been Sent to a Gentleman In Paris, Second ed. (London: 
J. Dodsley, 1790), PDF, https://archive.org/details/
reflectionsonre04burkgoog 



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201814

within the population: sacrifice.  According to 
Girard, when tensions within a society threaten to 
erupt into violence, that violence cannot be denied. 
It can either be redirected through the state’s judicial 
system—provided that the judicial system possesses 
enough recognition to command this authority—
or redirected towards a surrogate victim. In 1793, 
violence was redirected through the latter course.6 
As one Revolutionary author noted in her work 
“Defense of the Queen by a Woman,” Louis XVI 
was the first surrogate victim to fall to the internal 
dissentions within France. Germaine Necker (née de 
Stael), the most famous woman of her day, writes of 
Louis’ execution:

The principal men of a popular party seek 
to bind the people indissolubly to their own 
cause; they know that in all revolutions glory or 
failure belongs only to the leaders; and, fearing 
that the people do not trust them, these leaders 
want to identify the people in all manners 
[with the Revolution]; they try to persuade the 
people that they are the true authors of these 
irreversible acts. Initially, the execution of the 
king joins together these cruel advantages. The 
Convention, in multiplying the judges of Louis 
XVI, was applauded by many spectators; it made 
several addresses from various departments to 
the kingdom; it ordered that a hundred thousand 
men-at-arms, the day of the death of the king, 
agreed, by their silence, with this terrible 
catastrophe.7

Necker, a contemporary of Louis XVI, reveals exactly 
what his death was: a ploy by the state to bind the 
conflicted French people to the Revolution. In other 
words, if the people were convinced that Louis XVI’s 
death was the embodiment of their will, not only 
would their violence fix upon an object and cease 
to threaten the society as a whole, but they would 
pledge allegiance to the government that satiated 
their appetite through the controversial execution of 
a king. 

Although she is writing almost two hundred 
years before the birth of Girard, Necker’s insights in 

6 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1977). 
7 Germaine Necker, Réflexions Sur Le Procés De La Reine, 
trans. Eithne Leahy (Paris: Édicions du Boucher, 2002), 
PDF, http://www.leboucher.com/pdf/stael/b_nec_rp.pdf

this passage closely resemble Girard’s explanation of 
the scapegoat effect. Specifically, Necker’s analysis 
of the execution of the king touches upon Girard’s 
claim that “A single victim can be substituted for 
all the potential victims… All the rancors scattered 
at random among the divergent individuals, all 
the differing antagonisms, now converge on an 
isolated and unique figure, the surrogate victim.”8 
However, as Necker also notes, the sacrifice of 
this particular surrogate victim was insufficient to 
quell the disparate antagonisms within the French 
populace. Necker argued that the failure of Louis 
XVI’s sacrifice should have marked the end of the 
scapegoating cycle, writing, “nothing could equal 
the terrible show of the execution of the king. The 
judgement of the queen would be thus a useless 
crime, and by that even more degrading…Would 
one imagine to redouble the courage of the people by 
making them drunk on the blood of a new victim?”9 
Despite Necker’s incredulity, this is exactly what the 
Convention imagined, and her entreaty fell on deaf 
ears. Since the execution of the king was not odious 
enough to quench the people’s thirst for vengeance, 
the Convention was forced to cast about for another, 
even more dramatic victim during the tense months 
that separated these trials. They found one in the 
queen. 
      
The Trial, Distortion, and Legacy of Marie 
Antoinette
      Examining Marie Antoinette through her role as 
a sacrificial victim—instead of simply an unpopular 
monarch or a symbol of the bourgeoisie—we 
can finally begin to grasp the logic of the grossly 
unjust and, oftentimes, ridiculously heinous trial 
which sentenced her to death. Girard notes that 
as a sacrificial victim, one must both represent the 
tensions which one’s sacrifice is to resolve as well as 
remain distant enough from these tensions and from 
the society in general so as not to inspire vengeance. 
Marie Antoinette was distant from this society as a 
foreigner, as an essentially classless “monarch,” and, 
as the Convention would argue during her trial, as 
the antithesis to the ideal Revolutionary woman. The 

8 René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore: Johns 
Hopkins University Press, 1977). 
9 Germaine Necker, Réflexions Sur Le Procés De La 
Reine, trans. Eithne Leahy (Paris: Édicions du Boucher, 
2002), PDF, http://www.leboucher.com/pdf/stael/b_nec_
rp.pdf 



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201815

only tension she herself embodied was that between 
the Ancien Régime and the Revolutionaries; 
however, due to the long history of pornography 
and slander which surrounded her reign,10 she was 
already a symbolic figure of any and all crimes (real 
or imaginary) that the people perceived against 
themselves. Therefore, as a politically malleable 
public figure, she was the perfect candidate to 
assume and suffer for all public antagonisms. Indeed, 
her trial opens with the broadest of accusations that 
“Marie Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet, has, since 
her abode in France, been the scourge and blood-
sucker of the French people.”11 While Louis XVI’s 
indictment limited itself to his political crimes 
against the Revolution, Marie Antoinette stood 
trial for a laundry list of grievances, including but 
not limited to intentionally distributing her own 
pornography in order to “make it be believed by 
foreign powers that she was extremely ill-treated 
by Frenchmen, to instigate them to go to war with 
France;” intentionally causing a famine to stop the 
Revolution; brainwashing and feminizing the king 
and controlling matters of state; and even raping her 
own son. It does not matter that these accusations 
were ridiculous fabrications as often as they were 
legitimate grievances because her trail was not a 
judicial determination of guilt or innocence but, 
rather, a ritualistic airing of grievances before 
sacrifice. If Marie Antoinette assumed blame for the 
War with Austria, continued food shortages, and the 
“base” character of women, then her death appealed 
to every tension within the French population, and 
she became the ideal victim to quench the vengeful 
spirit of each faction within the new Republic. 
Consequently, the true identity of Marie Antoinette 
ceased to matter during her trial as Marie Antoinette 
the woman slowly gave way to the symbol whose 
extinguishment was to restore internal harmony to a 
restlessly divided nation. 

10 Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: 
Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in 
the French Revolution,” in The French Revolution: Recent 
Debates and New Controversies, Second ed., ed. Gary Kates 
(New York: Routledge, 1998). 
11 Marie Antoinette,  Authentic Trial at Large of Marie 
Antoinette, Late Queen of France, before the Revolutionary 
Tribunal at Paris, on Tuesday, October 15, 1793 ... To 
Which Are Prefixed, Her Life, and a Verbal Copy of Her 
Private Examination ...,  Third ed. (London: Printed for 
Chapman and Co., 1793).

Additionally, the idea of Marie Antoinette 
as a sacrifice accounts for the dichotomy of her 
memory both in Revolutionary as well as current 
thought. As mentioned above, Marie Antoinette’s 
purpose as a surrogate victim overshadowed her 
personal identity leading up to and during her trial. 
The heinous accusations that dominated her trial 
amplified unsubstantiated charges (e.g., the queen’s 
dissemination of pornography) and cemented 
two distinct images of Marie Antoinette into the 
annals of history. Binhammer recognizes these two 
distinct images, writing, “While Mary Robinson 
reveres Marie Antoinette as a symbol of victimized 
womanhood, Mary Wollstonecraft, even as late 
as 1794, was decrying the queen as a sexual and 
political abomination who was the corrupt head of an 
oppressive political state.”12 Even within the context 
of French Revolutionary feminism, there existed two 
caricatures of Marie Antoinette, one the dignified 
martyr and one the recalcitrant whore. Marie 
Antoinette lives on as both Beauty and the Beast; the 
cruel truth, however, is that neither of these images 
does justice to the individual. If, like Edmund Burke, 
one chooses to paint Marie Antoinette as a beautiful 
victim, she loses all depth of character and sense of 
agency. Burke described the early misfortunes which 
befell the queen in his Reflections on the Revolution 
in France:

surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly 
seemed to touch, a more delightful vision…
she just began to move in, glittering like the 
morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and 
joy…little did I dream that I should have lived 
to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation 
of gallant men…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.13

12 Katherine Binhammer, “Marie Antoinette Was ‘One of 
Us’: British Accounts of the Martyred Wicked Queen,” The 
Eighteenth Century 44, no. 2/3 (2003): 233-55, PDF, http://
www.jstor.org.cuhsl.creighton.edu/stable/41467927. 
13 Edmund Burke, Reflections On the Revolution In France, 
And On the Proceedings In Certain Societies In London 
Relative to That Event: In a Letter Intended to Have 
Been Sent to a Gentleman In Paris, Second ed. (London: 
J. Dodsley, 1790), PDF, https://archive.org/details/
reflectionsonre04burkgoog



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201816

While he does sympathize with the queen, Burke’s 
treatment of her is that of a precious yet defenseless 
object. Characterizing her as a divinely surreal vision, 
Burke supplants the real Marie Antoinette with his 
stylized illustration of womanly purity, destroying 
her identity as well as her existence as a flesh and 
blood woman. Therefore, those who sympathize with 
Marie Antoinette as a fallen, defenseless object of 
beauty, as Burke does, actually further the oppression 
of women through their glorification of unrealistic 
feminine delicacy and innocence, which provides an 
impractical, powerless mold for women to attempt to 
fit themselves into. Similarly, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 
venomous critique of the queen produces another 
type of misogyny. By identifying the queen as the 
embodiment of femininity and then railing against 
her vulgar existence, Wollstonecraft first harangues 
traditional womanhood by suggesting that women 
should aspire to be male and then demands that all 
women fashion themselves as the antithesis of Marie 
Antoinette.14 Just like Burke, Wollstonecraft attempts 
to fit women into an ideal mold; the only exception 
is that her mold is the exact opposite of Marie 
Antoinette, while Burke holds the queen up as his 
model. Thus, whichever characterization of Marie 
Antoinette we choose, we are still embracing one 
version of the “ideal woman.” With this perspective, 
we are no closer to delving beneath the stereotypes or 
discovering the individual behind the caricature. The 
scapegoating of Marie Antoinette has robbed her, like 
so many women, not only of her life, but her identity 
as well. For now, instead of remembering the brave 
woman, mother, and daughter who ruled France and 
eventually ascended the scaffold, we must choose 
between one of two reductionist, androcentric 
narratives: the sacrificial virgin or the dangerous 
whore. Indeed, the sacrifice of Marie Antoinette did 
not conclude with her death. We are still feeling the 
effects of it today through our limited, simplistic 
narratives of a complex and very real woman.

Finally, the sacrifice of Marie Antoinette 
constituted not only the death of the ideal of “class” 
in the French Republic, but the death of positive 
14 Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of 
the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution and the 
Effict it Has Produced in Europe (London: J. Johnson, 
1795), PDF, http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/wollstone-
craft-an-historical-and-moral-view-of-the-origin-and-
progress-of-the-french-revolution 

femininity throughout Europe as well, which 
tragically shaped French feminism and female 
identity for years to come. While the sacrifice of 
Marie Antoinette did succeed in fending off internal 
violence in France for a time (many more sacrifices 
were to come in the months of the Terror), hers was 
not the only casualty which resulted from her death. 
Elizabeth Colwill explains the dual nature of her 
execution, writing, “On the one hand, it undermined 
the legitimacy of the monarchy and provided a 
rallying cry for the new republic; on the other it 
provided a negative model against which non-elite 
women were to define their own identity. Marie-
Antoinette’s trial and execution thus represent events 
of real political significance in French political 
history, as well as a watershed in the ideology of 
womanhood.”15 As Colwill indicates, the sacrifices 
of Marie Antoinette signified the death of both the 
Ancien Régime and of Revolutionary feminism. Her 
re-branding as the anti-woman at the hands of the 
National Convention as well as English feminists 
such as Mary Wollstonecraft paved the way for a new 
era of misogyny which began the very weeks after her 
trial. Two weeks after Marie Antoinette’s execution, 
the Convention banned women’s political clubs. 
Soon after, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined, as 
was the Girondin Revolutionary leader Madame de 
Roland. The Convention solidified their victory over 
their rivals with an epitaph in Le Moniteur. Colwill 
quotes the epitaph as follows:

The revolutionary tribunal has given women a 
great example which must not, no doubt, have 
been lost upon them . . . Marie-Antoinette, raised 
in a perfidious and ambitious court, brought 
the vices of her family to France. She sacrificed 
her spouse, her children, and the country that 
adopted her to the ambitions of the house in 
Austria . . . She was a bad mother, a debauched 
spouse . . . and her name will be forever abhorred 
by posterity.16

15 Elizabeth Colwill, “Just Another ‘Citoyenne?’ Marie-
Antoinette on Trial, 1790-1793.”  History Workshop 28 
(1989): 63-87, PDF, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288925.
16 Excerpt from Le Moniteur, as cited in Paule-Marie 
Duhet, Les Femmes et la Révolution française (Paris, 
1971), pp. 205-206, quoted in Elizabeth Colwill, “Just 
Another ‘Citoyenne?’ Marie-Antoinette on Trial, 1790-
1793.”  History Workshop 28 (1989): 63-87, PDF, http://
www.jstor.org/stable/4288925.



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  201817

With the sacrifice of Marie Antoinette, the 
Convention gained both a scapegoat for public 
tensions as well as a distinct victory over their rival 
faction. The message in this excerpt is clear: French 
womanhood is the opposite of Marie Antoinette in 
every way. Women are to be loyal to their spouse and 
children and forego their own ambition. Certainly, 
they are not to desire the same objects as men or 
to enter into competition with them. These ideals 
of French womanhood would persist for years and 
severely crippled the French feminist movement. 
Indeed, this rigid perspective of French womanhood 
endured well into the twentieth century. France 
was one of the last Westernized countries to grant 
women the vote (they did in 1944), and feminists 
such as Simone de Beauvoir have continued to 
critique women’s secondary status. Even today, 
historians cannot make up their minds about Marie 
Antoinette. Was she a neutral, passive victim, a tragic 
heroine, or a frivolous symbol of excess? While the 
real Marie Antoinette may be lost to us forever, the 
ramifications of her sacrifice live on, for women are 
still caught in the same dichotomy between innocent 
motherhood or dangerous seductress which shaped 
her trial. However, understanding how Marie 
Antoinette’s role as a sacrifice shaped this dichotomy 
leads us one step closer to deconstructing and, ideally, 
reversing it. For once we divorce the caricatures of 
Antoinette which persist in our memory from the 
woman herself, we can begin the historical task of 
resurrecting Marie Antoinette the individual and, 
hopefully, dismantling the misogynistic paradigms 
which her sacrifice perpetuated. 

Conclusions
Applying Girard’s theories of mimetic violence 

and ritual sacrifice to the trial and execution of 
Marie Antoinette elucidates both the contradictory 
versions of Antoinette that have muddled her 
character for the past two centuries as well as the 
drastic impact her death had on French female 
identity. Firstly, Girard’s theory of mimetic violence 
aptly describes the tensions between men and 
women over the object of natural rights, which 
created a contentious backdrop to the queen’s trial 
and contributed heavily to the degradation of French 
womanhood. Secondly, understanding the nature of 
sacrifice as an abject symbol of all public grievance 

explains how Marie Antoinette’s identity ceased to 
reflect her character and instead became a catch-
all of vice and antagonism during the Revolution, a 
disassociation which gave rise to the many disparate 
versions of Antoinette which exist today. Finally, as 
the culmination of the brief struggle for women’s 
rights during the Revolution, the queen’s execution 
and the Convention’s swift removal of women from 
the political sphere sounded the death knell of the 
French Revolutionary feminist movement, a setback 
which crippled the ideal of French womanhood for 
centuries to come. 

While the litany of rumors and accusations 
which trailed Marie Antoinette during her life 
and ingratiated itself into her trial has persisted 
for so long as to become de facto truth, it is our 
duty as historians to delve into this body of myth, 
separate the true from the false, and analyze the 
factors which contributed to her defilement in the 
first place. The task of any historian is to recover 
pieces of the past and incorporate them into a 
meaningful, rounded history that comments on 
modern society. Subsequently, if we succumb to the 
false perspectives of Marie Antoinette that solidified 
during her trial and have persisted in some form or 
other ever since, we are presenting only one version 
of history—a version which, as Madame Necker 
indicates, the general populace recognized as false 
even as it was created. If we perpetuate the debate of 
Burke and Wollstonecraft over the Beauty or Beast 
nature of Antoinette, we fail to provide any sort of 
well-rounded or even accurate history. Thus, it is 
imperative that we at least attempt, as much as we 
are able, to separate the woman from the sacrifice. 
Once we achieve this task, only then can we begin 
to recover the true identity of Marie Antoinette and 
finally reclaim the notions of French femininity 
which perished with the scapegoated queen. 



Marie Antoinette’s Sacrifice and the Fragmentation of French Femininity

Aisthesis      Volume 9,  2018

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