Even before losing their heads, the French Revolution was a big pain in the royal family’s collective necks. For one, as the country shifted toward a constitutional monarchy, Louis XVI was suddenly expected to govern in cooperation with a parliamentary body. But on top of that, the royals were also forced to move from the glittering Palace at Versailles to one that nobody liked — Tuileries Palace — in the center of Paris.
“Marie Antoinette hated all of this,” says Rebecca L. Spang, a professor of history at Indiana University Bloomington and author of Stuff and Money in the Time of the French Revolution. For those who believed kings to be anointed by God, Spang adds, it was considered outrageous that a crowd of people could force the king to do anything. Marie Antoinette "sensed that their world was collapsing around them and that people who should be taking a strong position, like Louis XVI, were not.”
