Roland and Antoinette’s letters and lives treated politics as a personal issue, and not from a detached, historical, or an analytic approach. Essentially, in their writings, they allow their readers to know how they engaged in the French Revolution and how it caused both of them to be agents of change and victims. Furthermore, one parallel between both of these women is that they saw their own suffering as part of a larger system of injustice that is perpetuated in the society. Marie Antoinette was in many ways a victim of circumstance; while she did have quite a number of flaws, she by no means was guilty of all she was nearly accused of, let alone did she bear responsibility for the fall of the Monarchy . If one follows history and timeline …show more content…
The charges against her were “squandering public money on personal pleasures and secret contributions to the Austrian emperor, which was her brother, before the Revolution, and after the Revolution creating counterrevolutionary conspiracies at court through the agency of men she influenced using sex”. Finally, the most heinous charge against her was with incest with her six-year-old son. A bill of indictment was later rendered on her stating “forgetting her quality of mother and the demarcation prescribed by the laws of nature, she has not stopped short of indulging herself in incestuous relations with her young son”. In analyzing this indictment against her, the language particularly references to motherhood and law of nature, which is parallel to viewpoints circulated in pre-revolutionary France and I should say Jean Rousseau, where a woman solely belonged in the household. In addition, I believe this incest charge serves as the ultimate antithesis to the ideal of what a woman should be and how she should behave especially towards her children. In all, the revolutionary men’s agenda were actualized in portraying this political and active woman into a monstrous, sexualized creature and of course, a threat to gender roles in