Marie Thérèse de Choiseul


Marie Thérèse Françoise de Choiseul was a French noblewoman and a Monegasque princess, married to Prince Joseph of Monaco in 1782.

Life

She was the daughter of Jacques Philippe de Choiseul, Duke of Stainville, and Thérèse de Clermont, and the niece of Étienne François, duc de Choiseul, the chief minister of Louis XV. On 6 April 1782, she married Prince Joseph of Monaco. The marriage was described as a happy one.
In March 1793, Monaco was annexed to Revolutionary France, and the members of the former ruling dynasty became French citizens. In parallel, her spouse spend most of his time abroad to negotiate foreign loans, which made him a suspect of contra-revolutionary activities and thus made whole family suspected of being traitors. He became, in fact, involved in the royalist uprising in Vendée. Marie Thérèse de Choiseul was arrested in the absence of her spouse, as was his father, his brother and his sister-in-law. Arrested in Paris for the charge of conspiracy, Marie Thérèse was imprisoned with her family in the Sainte-Pélagie Prison. Her small daughters were left in the care of their governess.
She was condemned to death, pretended to be pregnant to delay the execution, but was discovered not to be with child. She admitted having lied about her pregnancy, but explained that she had done so to delay the execution only for a day, so that she may have time to cut of her own hair and give it to her daughters as a memory, rather to have it cut by the executioner. She applied for a meeting with Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, and spent her last day in his waiting room, but was forced to leave without having had time to meet him.
Her execution, on July 27th, would be one of the last during the Reign of Terror; the following day, the Thermidorian Reaction saw the violent fall of the Jacobin government, which saw the executions of Maximilien Robespierre as well as René-François Dumas, the prosecutor in the princess's trial.

Issue