Marie Antoinette
On October 16, 1793, Maria Antoinette, the former Queen of France was finally executed for treason. The Queen, who had been separated from her children, was taken to her execution in an ordinary cart. Haggard and prematurely aged by her tribulations, she met her death bravely as the executioner Charles Henri Sanson publicly guillotined her. Her body and severed head were then taken away and buried in an unmarked grave in the Madeleine Cemetery.
In 1835, the famous waxwork artist Madame Marie Tussaud set up her first waxwork museum in London. Amongst the exhibits on show were lifelike wax figures of the decapitated Louis XVI and his queen made from death masks that Madame Tussaud herself made after their executions. Madame Tussaud had known Maria Antoinette from her work in wax in pre-revolutionary times when she and her mentor had created models of the living royal family. In her 1838 biography, Madam Tussaud told the tale of how she came to make Maria Antoinette’s death mask.
Tussaud had watched the former Queen’s procession to the scaffold although she fainted before the execution. However, later, she was forced to take her bag of sculpting tools to the Madeleine Cemetery where, under the watchful eyes of the National Assembly, she made a mask of the dead queen’s face. She had been forced to undertake this procedure before, with other executed aristocrats including the king himself. Madame Tussaud kept the masks and took them with her on her twenty-year-long tour of Britain where they found their final home.
However, it seems strange that the National Assembly would sanction death masks when, as Tussaud also stated, they forbade their public display. This prohibition was to prevent any remnants of the royal family becoming a focus for posthumous adoration. It was for this reason the assembly had ordered the remains of King Louis be quicklimed following his burial. Indeed, for these reasons, it seems odd that they compelled Madame Tussaud to make the masks at all.
It seems that instead, Madame Tussaud and her mentor were making the masks quite willingly- and illicitly. Charles Sanson was notorious for selling off locks of hair, and clothing belonging to the executed. It is therefore plausible that he was renting out the severed heads of royalty to Madame Tussaud for a fee. The mask of Marie Antoinette is genuine. Its features bear an uncanny likeness to her portraits- in all but one regard. For Marie Antoinette shared a facial feature with many of her Hapsburg relatives; a distinctive and less than flattering ‘dropped lip.’ Artists often omitted this feature from official portraits- yet it was present on the mask made after her death.
The masks of other royal ladies, however, are more contentious- especially in cases where there are more than two of them.