Tom Holland

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53,930 appearances 202 recordings 9 series first heard Sep 2024 last heard yesterday

Tom Holland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Rest Is History · 709. The Terror: The Execution of Marie Antoinette (Part 3) · 27 Sep 2026 podcast

Yeah. matched

The French monarchy was the most splendid, the most magnificent in the whole of Europe. matched

It provided a role model for every other royal family. matched

And it stood at the apogee of an entire society that was founded on kind of loyalty and manners and notions of honor, which ultimately reached back a millennium and more to the very beginnings of the French monarchy. matched

Amid the collapse of Roman Gaul. matched

Its roots are that deep. matched

And now to Burke and to people who read Burke and admired his sentiments, it seemed that everything that was most glorious about that monarchy and about those traditions were being reduced to kind of arid politicking about rights and money, which is essentially the issues that were current in 1789 and 1790. matched

But of course, for the monarchy, matched

And specifically for the king and queen of France, it gets a lot worse after 1790. matched

I think for admirers of everything that royalism could be, the Queen of France, the heroine of that passage, that very florid passage that you read, stood as a much more potent symbol of the French monarchy than the Queen's dull and plodding husband, Louis XVI, because the Queen was. matched

Of course, Marie Antoinette, a figure who was famous across Europe for her glamour. matched

She's a woman who was perpetually setting new trends with her clothes, her hairstyles, her whole way of life. matched

She was, on one hand, bred into the height of luxury. matched

She wasn't just the wife of the King of France, but the sister of the Emperor of Austria. matched

But she was also a woman who. matched

Had found herself stifled by the formalities of court life at Versailles. matched

She had worn the most expensive jewels in Europe, and in fact, diamonds got her into quite a lot of trouble over the course of her time on the throne. matched

But also, famously, in the Petit Trianon, her hideaway in the grounds of Versailles, she played at being a shepherdess. matched

This was a woman who was incredibly mobile. matched

In her tastes, in her sense of fashion. matched

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