…no. No. That’s not how it works.
Like you’re 100% entitled to your opinion, and it’s true that misogyny was a factor in how she was treated, but here’s the thing. She was very much not a victim.
Unfortunately, royalty tended to marry young back then. Is that a good thing? No. But Marie Antoinette getting married at 14 is not outside of the norm for a political marriage alliance.
Louis the 16th was also not good, and also a very bad ruler, and yeah we should probably blame him more. But like. They were both bad. Both of them were absurdly rich, powerful and influential, ignorant to the needs of the people, and supporters of an absolute monarchy.
Marie Antoinette never went hungry. She never had to do hard labor, never had to go without a roof over her head, and she didn’t give a shit about the fact that most of the country was starving.
Yeah, she occasionally helped singular people she came across, but that’s akin to billionaires donating tiny fractions of their wealth to corporate charities.
She had the power to make systemic change (she was actually very influential in the politics of the court) and she didn’t. She even opposed budget reform ideas that would divert money away from the extravagant lifestyle she and her husband enjoyed.
She didn’t “charm the populace” because the populace was fucking sick of incompetent and ignorant rulers who didn’t give a damn about them and sucked up their money to hold parties and build palaces. If she wanted to charm the fucking populace, she and her husband could’ve, you know, made actual steps towards giving people more representation and reforming the blatantly unfair economic landscape of the time. But they didn’t. Politicians who are shitty to the people usually have many opponents.
Also, her son was not tortured to death. He died of tuberculosis. Yes, he was in prison, yes, conditions in the prison were not good, but keep in mind that those sorts of conditions was how most of fucking France lived before the revolution. Plenty of kids died of tuberculosis, it’s just that they were the poor ones whose names never got famous due to their lineage.
She was 37. An adult. In fact, a quite capable adult who, far from being “not that bright”, had quite an active role in politics before the revolution. If she was smart enough to actively back conservative-aligned political appointments, she was smart enough that, if she was so inclined, she could support the liberal-aligned ones as well. But she didn’t, because supporting those would make her lose some of her insanely high wealth.
They didn’t guillotine little kids. That was not a thing at all. Ever. She was 37. She lived just about her entire life in luxury. People died younger than that all the time, people who never had a full stomach, never had a stable shelter, never had enough money. We just don’t know their names.
And she and her husband were almost certainly not executed just “for funsies”. You have to remember that France was constantly being attacked by people from other countries trying to put them back on the throne. And judging by all that we know of her and her views and actions, it’s likely that she would’ve gone right along with it and gotten back into her powerful, wealthy position.
Like, it wasn’t just “haha we won let’s kill the king!”. Every day the monarchs stayed alive, in prison or not, was another chance for the other European forces to forcibly reinstate them and send France back to square one.
She is not the victim in this story. Her life was much easier and more comfortable than the vast majority of people in that time period. The real victims are the people that suffered under her and her husband, and all the previous monarchs and their extravagant spending.
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