Which queen of France was executed in 1793?

Marie Antoinette, guillotined nine months after her husband, having been tried by a revolutionary tribunal on charges including treason and, in a final piece of gratuitous cruelty, an accusation of incest with her eight-year-old son extracted from the child himself. She was 37.

She never said let them eat cake. The line appears in Rousseau's Confessions, written when she was a child in Austria, attributed to an unnamed great princess - and versions of the story predate her by decades. It was attached to her afterwards, along with an enormous volume of pornographic pamphlets, because she was foreign, female and a useful focus for hatred of the monarchy.

That is not the same as saying she was blameless. She spent extravagantly during a fiscal crisis, resisted reform, and lobbied for Austrian intervention against the revolution, which is the charge on which a treason case actually rested. But the caricature that made her killing feel just was built out of invented quotations and fabricated sex scandals, which is a pattern with a long life beyond the eighteenth century.