I get the joke, and it’s pretty good, but the historian in me can’t take Marie Antoinette slander.
She was only 14 when she became queen. 14. She was widely hated because she, being a child, couldn’t immediately start birthing out heirs to the throne.
This festered into resentment from the noble class, who infamously framed her not only for massive spending of taxes on frivolous things like diamond necklaces (the most famous instance), but also of just general fraud to the country (she was a foreigner and they treated her like one). Like, don’t get me wrong, she definitely spent money. But it’s far less than the public made it out to be, and far less than even her fellow nobles.
On the off-chance she got to hire her own staff, she would hire somebody who was friendly to her (since literally everybody else hated her since day 1). But oh man that just whipped up the nobility even more, with cries of favoritism (as if their entire life wasn’t just that…)
Further, the bankruptcy of France can be far more attributed to her father-in-law, Louis XV. He obliterated France’s economy trying to wage a war with all of Europe. But, women usually get far more blame when things go wrong than men. Women do be spending money, am I right fellas. Hillary’s e-mails.
She was young, female, and a foreigner – who the other nobility hated, and so they largely blamed all of their country’s grievances on her (moreso than even her husband, who was actually in charge of all that stuff). I mean, they killed him, too, but the woman is the one who gets blamed.
Anyway, she watched 2 of her children die (from illness, not from the guillotine, at least), before she got the guillotine a year later.
She accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot, and her last words were, “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t do it on purpose.”
And all of that is no better summarized by the fact that this meme is a play on “Let them eat cake,” which she never said. That too, was wrongly attributed to her. When he wrote that, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing about the person who actually bankrupted France, her predecessor.
Here’s a really great biography of her.
Marie Antoinette was a foreign teenager who got caught in a deadlier version of “Why are millennials killing the napkin industry? It’s probably because of all the avocado toast.”
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