Marie Antoinette

The Story She Didn’t Write

Marie Antoinette has been tried for centuries: in pamphlets, caricatures, gossip, and myth. This is her life — and the autopsy of the reputation that consumed it.

Sent from Vienna to Versailles at fourteen, Marie Antoinette became the most visible woman in France just as a nation began to fracture under debt, inequality, and hunger. As public anger rose, her clothes, friendships, foreign birth, and even her motherhood were turned into evidence of corruption. Long before the guillotine, she was executed in story — reduced to a symbol that made complex failures feel like the fault of one woman.

Written in a vivid narrative style and grounded in the contrast between court record and “pamphlet theatre,” this biography follows the Queen from glittering ritual to captivity and trial, revealing how power depends on belief — and how belief can be weaponised.