Marie Antoinette was guillotined during the French Revolution
On this day · 16 October 1793
Tried as a traitor and paraded through Paris in an open cart, the former queen met the guillotine just past noon.
At about 12:15 in the afternoon on 16 October 1793, Marie Antoinette, the former queen of France, was beheaded by guillotine at the Place de la Revolution — today’s Place de la Concorde — before a cheering crowd. Hours earlier, at 4 a.m., a Revolutionary tribunal had convicted her of conspiring with foreign powers, draining the treasury, and high treason.
Unlike her husband Louis XVI, executed nine months before, she was carried to the scaffold in an open cart rather than a closed carriage, hair shorn and hands bound, exposed to the public the whole way.
Her reported last words came after she accidentally trod on the executioner’s foot:
“Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose.”
Her death, during the Reign of Terror, became a stark symbol of the monarchy’s collapse and the violent ascent of the French Republic.
Sources & references
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