It was a claggy, cloudy morning in Paris on 16 October 1793, yet the crowds made their way toward the Place de la Révolution undeterred, eager to see their queen, Marie Antoinette, meet the guillotine. That morning, she had been forced to undress before her guards and change into a plain cotton dress; her hands were bound, and her long hair, said to have turned grey overnight with stress, was shorn to ensure a clean strike of the blade. Loaded into an open cart, she was paraded through the city to a cacophony of jeers. As she climbed the steps to the scaffold, she accidentally trod on the executioner’s foot. ‘Pardonnez-moi, monsieur’, she said quietly. ‘Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès.’

At exactly 12:15 pm, the blade fell, and the executioner lifted her head up and showed it to the crowd, prompting an eruption of cheers and cries of ‘Vive la République!’ Spectators rushed to soak their handkerchiefs in the dead queen’s blood for a macabre memento before her decapitated body was tossed into an unmarked grave in Cimetière de la Madeleine.

More than two centuries later, the V&A’s Marie Antoinette Style exhibition – the UK’s first ever show dedicated to the controversial queen – revisits that epochal spectacle, with an aquatint print showing the executioner brandishing her head as Perseus brandished Medusa’s. While the exhibit focuses on the gilded aspects of her life, from court dresses, silk slippers and blinding jewels, it also interrogates how her expensive tastes became emblems of royal excess and moral decay through a small selection of prints, etchings, and drawings.

Widespread calls for Marie Antoinette’s death accelerated sharply after 1785, following the ‘Affair of the Diamond Necklace’, a scandal in which she was falsely accused of complicity. Though innocent, the episode cemented her public image as a corrupt spendthrift – often nicknamed ‘l’Autrichienne’, the Austrian she-wolf or ‘Madame Déficit’. Accusations of wasteful spending circulated in the pages of libelles: scandalous pamphlets that featured pornographic cartoons accusing her of promiscuity, treason and financial recklessness.

These libels irreparably damaged Marie Antoinette’s reputation, turning her into a scapegoat for France’s mounting crises and helping to erode faith in the monarchy itself. She became a lightning rod for public anger toward Louis XVI and the failing ancien régime. The word libelle, from the Latin liber meaning ‘book’, initially referred to any small volume, but by the mid-18th century it had come to mean an écrit injurieux, an offensive or defamatory work. As historian Robert Darnton notes, these pamphlets were ‘slanderous attacks on public figures collectively known as les grandes’.

Such literature was not an entirely new phenomenon. During the French Wars of Religion in the 1580s, libels were published by both Catholics and Protestants, accusing opposing sides of treason and immorality, and targeting the king for weak or impious leadership. Likewise, the civil wars of the Fronde between 1648 and 1653 saw a considerable increase in libels, known as ‘Mazarinades’, attacking Cardinal Mazarin, then chief minister, ridiculing his birth, luxurious proclivities and notorious private life. Alarmed by the sedition of these pamphlets, the government tried to suppress them by threat of hanging, forcing much of the printing underground and abroad, with many libellers relocating to Holland.

However, in the 18th century, these libels intensified in both volume and venom. What began as a weapon wielded by rival factions against certain individuals evolved into an underground press that targeted institutions – most notably the Catholic Church, the aristocracy, and the monarchy. France’s increasingly literate public became fertile ground for sedition. In the late 17th century, literacy hovered around 29 per cent for men and 14 per cent for women; by the 1780s, it had nearly doubled. Printing technology had improved, and coffee-houses were full of people exchanging new political and philosophical ideas. As the works of philosophes such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau spread, a new generation of Frenchmen was born into a world brimming with novel ideas about the state and their place within it.

One of the earliest libels published was in 1781: it was a book titled Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie Antoinette. Suppressed by royal censors, it was republished secretly and widely circulated. The book portrayed Antoinette in a highly defamatory manner, comparing her behaviour to that of the infamous Countess du Barry (the official mistress of King Louis XV). In the book, she engaged in debauched orgies, spread moral corruption at Versailles, and even poisoned her young son, the Dauphin.

During this period, Marie Antoinette’s body became public property, and in the libels, she was sexualised, mythologised and mutilated. A hand-coloured etching on show at the V&A exhibition, titled Bravo, bravo, the Queen penetrates herself with the Nation (1791), shows Antoinette embracing a soldier of the royal guard, genitalia exposed, as three of his companions look on.

Other cartoons of the era show her beside a phallic ostrich, exploiting the pun between autrichienne (Austrian woman) and autruche (ostrich) to mock her foreign birth. In one version, the Marquis de Lafayette rides the erect bird while the queen looks on, implying both a political and sexual collusion. She was also frequently portrayed in lesbian encounters, particularly with the Princesse de Lamballe and the Duchesse de Polignac, an ‘unnatural’ act at the time that suggests a corruption of the body politic. Beyond these sexualised forms, she appeared as a harpy, a mythological creature with a woman’s head and a bird’s body that symbolised greed, cruelty and abnormality, while other caricatures rendered her as a leopard, a nod to the proverb that a leopard cannot change its spots.

Another notorious print on show at the exhibition shows Louis XVI with the horns of a cuckold, igniting rumours of Antoinette’s infidelity. The pair are joined as a double-headed beast, the king’s horns offering a concise metaphor for his impotence, both maritally and politically. Also on show is the etching, The Last Pleasures of Marie Antoinette (1792), which casts her as an immoral queen asserting dominance over a powerless king, with exposed breasts, pleasuring her husband while making a cuckold gesture. It is through these images that she lived up to Maximillien Robespierre’s description in the Journal des hommes libres, that she was indeed ‘more bloodthirsty than Jezebel’ and ‘more conniving than Agrippina’.

Marie Antoinette’s appearance did her no favours and only deepened the mockery. Her Habsburg jaw, high forehead and slightly protruding lip were unfashionable to French eyes, and all served as visual shorthand for portraying her as a foreigner who was not to be trusted. Antoinette did everything to make the shoe fit – she rouged her cheeks, powdered her hair and even perfected the ‘Versailles glide’, the courtly shuffle that made noblewomen seem like pebbles skimming across the floor. Yet it didn’t matter what she did, wore, or said; to many, she was the embodiment of everything rotten in the ancien régime, and for that, she was fair game. By 1789, Paris was flooded with posters, caricatures, broadsides and canards, all peddling accusations of royal degeneracy – and with Antoinette as the poster girl.

Beneath these attacks on her appearance were anxieties about power and morality. The libellous caricature of Marie Antoinette that was presented in the scandalous press was too loud, too sexual, too foreign, and too political. Louis, meanwhile, appeared soft, indecisive and emasculated. The queen was too masculine, the king too effeminate. This inverted dynamic, an irresistible theme for satirists, was seen across the pamphlets, plays and cartoons of Paris.

Still, as Darnton notes, ‘the French Revolution was not la faute à Rousseau, and probably not la faute à Voltaire’ – nor was it la faute of the libels that attacked Antoinette. The pamphlets were not enough to cause a revolution, but they did fan its flames. Their graphic imagery and gleeful slander turned royal gossip into political dynamite, desacralising the king and queen, and by extension, the regime as a whole.

The Marie Antoinette Style exhibition invites visitors to reconsider the ill-fated queen’s legacy not just as a patron of the arts and French luxury, but as a woman who was systematically sexualised and dismantled by the 18th-century’s mass ‘gutter press’. Public fascination with powerful women still teeters between desire and destruction. Then as now, the crowd gathers to watch, to judge, to jeer. The stage has changed, but the appetite remains as insatiable as ever.

Marie Antoinette Style at the V&A Museum, London, until March 22, 2026.