Marie Antoinette

Ever since her grisly demise at the end of an executioner’s blade in 1793, her name has become synonymous with ostentatious luxury by the super rich and indifference to the hardships of the poor. Whether such criticism was deserved remains a source of some debate even to this day. Certainly, she was a byproduct of her environment: born into nobility and opulence, she was no different than thousands of other women of the era born into such a high station in life. That she would lose her head on the guillotine for it, however, seems not only a bit excessive but most likely undeserved. Obviously her and her husband, King Louis XVI, had simply become a target for all the inequities and injustices the royal system was known for, making them forever symbols of the people’s rejection of the old monarchial form of government that had been in place since antiquity. In essence, she was a victim of incredibly bad timing; had she been born a half century earlier probably no one would have heard of her. Born when and where she was and considering the political climate of her era, she becomes famous not only as a symbol of affluent indifference and the consequences thereof, but for being the first female monarch ever to be executed—a probably undeserved and certainly unsought fate if ever there was one.