You're exactly right. The woobification of Marie Antoinette is the epitome of white bourgeois feminism and that's why her stans annoy me so much. They don't realize they're parroting royalist propaganda spread after the Bourbon restoration and would rather project onto this imagined OC of a sad rich girl being tugged along by events she had no control over instead of looking into the REAL Marie, who had more agency and power than any other woman in France and chose to use it against the working class women furious at her for resisting progressive reforms.
Some have misinterpreted this post as "no one should sympathize with Marie Antoinette ever." No, I was calling out how Marie apologists garner sympathy for her at the expense of the truth. They frame facts in deceptive ways to make people think she was some kind of traumatized teenager during the Revolution, with the implication that the revolutionaries were monsters for going after her.
I know that the historical tendency to vilify women more than men creates this urge to rehabilitate women who went down with the worst reputations, but we do actually have to be considerate with our choices and be conscious of power dynamics other than gender. Marie Antoinette didn't bankrupt France, but she wasn't a blameless victim either. Olympe de Gouges had some iconic quotes but...doesn't really deserve that much glorification either when she was a Girondin supporter? Charlotte Corday had NERVE but ultimately her assassination of Marat was an extremely foolish tactical decision and accelerated the purge of the very Girondins she was trying to save.
Of this era, the women whose vilification is ACTUALLY most undeserved are the working class women themselves, like Pauline Leon, Claire Lacombe, and Simone Evrard, who were the real backbone of the Revolution but ended up being branded as mad "harpies," mindless mobs, and dismissed by even the Left intellectuals. We know very little about them as individuals because they weren't the ones who wrote or spawned essays after essays of public discourse, so unfortunately we can't make movies and TV shows about them on par with the volume that Marie Antoinette gets, but we can at least do better than whitewashing their oppressors.
(And I want to say once again that I am NOT putting more blame on Marie than Louis. There just aren't enough people ignorant enough to stan Louis XVI to annoy me into making posts like this about him.)