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Sophie of France (1786–1787) was nominated for deletion. The discussion was closed on 19 September 2022 with a consensus to merge. Its contents were merged into Marie Antoinette. The original page is now a redirect to this page. For the contribution history and old versions of the redirected article, please see its history; for its talk page, see here.
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Last Words
The source for Marie Antoinette's last words on this article is a clickbait listicle which gives no source. I have tracked this quote down to Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001), by Antonia Frasier (ISBN-13: 9780385489492), p. 580. No source is given in the book itself for this quote, which I find distressing considering how pervasive these supposed last words have become. In the Memoirs of the Sansons, Vol. II (1876), by Henri Sanson (ISBN-13: 978-1172710188), p. 56, Henri Sanson records the last words of Marie Antoinette as "Farewell, my children; I am going to join your father."
I see no reason why an unsourced quote in a random online article should be allowed as a valid source. And even beyond that, I see no reason why an unsourced quote written in a book over 200 years after the death of Marie Antoinette occurred is allowed to persist at all on Misplaced Pages as the purported last words of such a significant historical figure. Fraser's book is a tertiary source (and that is a generous evaluation on my part) which contains no reference whatsoever to any contemporary recordings of this quote. Henri Sanson's records are a secondary source that draw from the diary and notes of Charles-Henri Sanson, the man who put Antoinette to death himself, and his own experiences on the scaffold during the First French Republic. The conclusion I have come to many months after first discovering this discrepancy is that the last words of Antoinette currently on this article are a balatant fabrication by Fraser. Past that, Fraser's book is not even cited on this article. From where does "thoughtcatalogue.com" get any credence? The article on that site does not reference any sources at all. Anyone with a lick of experience on the internet can see that this "Famous Last Words" article was designed from the ground up to only draw in ad revenue.
The currently listed last words of Antoinette do garner a lot of sympathy, but it is unjustifiably gained. As Sanson relates in the memoirs, any real sympathy should come from the fact that this woman was forced into her position as queen and lost her husband and all of her children within such a short period of time. But that is enough for me, and I see no reason why clearly fabricated last words should be used to bring her any more sympathy than the awful circumstances of her life should evoke in any human. Ct00 (talk) 07:37, 19 August 2023 (UTC)
Family tree instead of ahnentafel
While everyone, including me, is in agreement that genealogy is relevant, I question the choice of information presented here. Biographies of Marie Antoinette abound, and a survey of those cited in the article shows that they do not present genealogy in the form of an ahnentafel. Instead they use charts that include siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins, and illustrate Marie Antoinette's relationship to Louis XVI and the French royal family. Therefore I propose replacing the ahnentafel with a chart modelled after those found in the biographies of Marie Antoinette. Surtsicna (talk) 02:15, 20 August 2023 (UTC)
Here is an example modelled after the family tree from Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette:
Family tree after Fraser, illustrating the Bourbon-Habsburg-Lorraine connections
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Rename the article from 'Marie Antoinette' to Marie Antoinette of Austria. She was royal and just baptismal names isn't how royalty is represented. 'Of Austria' is included in many other pages, such as in the French and Spanish articles. ImperialFabrics (talk) 01:50, 18 January 2024 (UTC)