Episode Details

Marie Antoinette was shipped to France at fourteen as a political pawn, married to a man who ignored her for seven years, blamed for a nation's financial crisis she did not cause, and executed by a revolution that needed a villain more than it needed the truth. She never said "Let them eat cake" — the phrase was attributed to her decades before she was born — but the myth served the revolution's purposes better than the facts ever could.

This episode traces Marie Antoinette from her sheltered childhood in Vienna through the Versailles years, the Diamond Necklace Affair, the revolution that imprisoned her family, and the trial and execution that made her history's most famous scapegoat.

• The arranged marriage at fourteen and the seven years before the marriage was consummated
• The extravagance at Versailles and how much of it was real versus propaganda
• The Diamond Necklace Affair and the pamphlet campaigns that destroyed her reputation
• The imprisonment, the trial, and the execution that made her a symbol of revolutionary justice