Quotes by Marie Antoinette:
"If I have not replied, it is because nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother."
— Marie Antoinette’s response to accusations of incest with her son. This won her support and sympathy in her trial. October 14, 1783
Quotes about Marie Antoinette:
Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d'une grande princesse à qui l'on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : « Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. »
Finally I recalled the last resort of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche."
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions — The quote that started the Beam Me Up, Scotty
It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles ; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in, glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! What a revolution! And what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream that, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.
—Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France — Burke's famous Purple Patch
"Antoinette avait résolu [Antoinette had decided]
De nous faire tomber sur le cul; [To drop us on our arses]
Mais le coup a manqué [But the plan was foiled]
Elle a le nez cassé." [And she fell on her face.]
— La Carmagnole, French-Revolutionary song.
"Despite her noble birth, Marie Antoinette was an extremely vulgar woman. The idea of playing the shepherdess at the Trianon, for example, now that's vulgarity! And Marie Antoinette showed her true colors in these kinds of episodes...it seems to me that Marie Antoinette was above all, and quite simply, very stupid, really an idiot. All her adventures were grotesque: her constant compromising, her preromanticism, her unbridled waste, and the story of the necklace and the Trianon and running the silk manufacturers of Lyons out of business, because she wanted her undergarments made only from fine linen and said so, proclaimed it, and waged war on silk."
— Jean Renoir, Renoir on Renoir: Interviews, Essays, and Remarks
