Marie Antoinette as a Casualty of Post-National Sovereignty How the French Revolution Deleted an Operating System of European Order

This paper reinterprets the execution of Marie Antoinette not as the tragic fate of an individual queen, but as the symbolic deletion of a pre-modern, transnational sovereignty regime. It argues that the French Revolution functioned as a system-level replacement of Europe’s political operating system: dismantling a universalist order rooted in Habsburg dynastic networks and Catholic legitimacy, and installing national self-authorization as the sole source of political legitimacy. Rather than denying the Revolution’s social and economic causes, the paper reframes revolutionary violence as structurally necessary in the transition between incompatible regimes of sovereignty. Marie Antoinette is analyzed as a “living protocol” of supranational legitimacy whose continued existence rendered revolutionary unification of sovereignty impossible. By conceptualizing sovereignty as an operating system, this paper offers a structural account of why execution functioned as irreversible protocol deletion, why Napoleon emerged as a workaround rather than a restoration, and why unresolved tensions between national sovereignty and universalist legitimacy persist into the present.