The Tragic Dress Marie Antoinette Wore to Her Execution

Marie Antoinette got dressed for the last time on the 16th of October 1793, in a prison cell. A servant, an eyewitness and a newspaper all described what she put on, and they don't agree. For almost 20 years, the queen's clothes were counted, billed and argued over. Every morning at Versailles she chose her gowns by putting pins in a book of fabric samples, and a book like it still survives in the Archives nationales in Paris. This documentary follows her wardrobe from that swatch book to the scaffold: Rose Bertin, the milliner from Abbeville who wasn't allowed into the queen's bedchamber; the towering headdress her mother complained about in 1775; the white muslin portrait taken down from the 1783 Salon; the 1785 wardrobe bill that her own lady of the robes called truly excessive; the pamphlets of 1789; and the clothes she had left in the Temple and the Conciergerie. Chapters 0:00 Her last morning 0:32 The pin book 4:01 The milliner from Abbeville 6:42 36 inches of hair, and a letter from her mother 10:16 Too plain: the chemise and the 1783 Salon 14:32 The bill 18:27 The pamphlets 21:13 The Tuileries and the Temple 25:35 The Conciergerie 27:41 The last morning Main sources Henriette Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette (1823) Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau, ed. Arneth and Geffroy (1874) Pierre de Nouvion and Émile Liez, Un ministre des modes sous Louis XVI: Mademoiselle Bertin (1911) Émile Langlade, La marchande de modes de Marie-Antoinette: Rose Bertin (1911) Mémoires secrets (1774-1784) and Correspondance secrète, politique et littéraire (1787) Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette d'Autriche (1789 and 1790) Lafont d'Aussonne, Mémoires secrets et universels des malheurs et de la mort de la Reine de France (1824) G. Lenotre, La captivité et la mort de Marie-Antoinette (1907) Le Moniteur, 27 October 1793 Archives nationales, Gazette des atours de Marie-Antoinette (AE/I/6 n°2), and Sylvie Dallet's review of the facsimile, Annales historiques de la Révolution française (2007) Musée Carnavalet (OM1700), Royal Ontario Museum (925.18.3.A-B), Musée du Louvre (3599 DR/1), Victoria and Albert Museum, Marie Antoinette Style (2025)