12/03/2026
Marie Antoinette's teeth
Marie Antoinette is forever tied to the phrase “Let them eat cake.” Whether she ever said it is doubtful.
The line probably referred to brioche, a richer bread, and it circulated widely as propaganda against her long before the Revolution.
She certainly had plenty of enemies ready to put words in her mouth. But words were not the only thing people were interested in when it came to the young Austrian princess.
Marie Antoinette was born an Archduchess of Austria, the daughter of Maria Theresa of the Holy Roman Empire. Her marriage to the future Louis XVI was arranged to strengthen the alliance between Austria and France. Politically it was ideal. Personally, the girl sent to France did not impress the French court at first.
When the envoy Duc de Choiseul came to inspect the young bride-to-be, he found her rather untidy by court standards.
Her clothes were creased, her hair messy, and her teeth distinctly crooked. Unfortunately for Marie, the Habsburg family was known for strong jawlines and uneven teeth.
At the French court, where appearance mattered enormously, this would not do for a future queen.
Before she could marry the Dauphin, her smile had to be fixed.
The task fell to a fashionable dentist named Pierre Laveran, who used an invention developed by the dentist Pierre Fauchard, often called the father of modern dentistry.
The device was known as Fauchard’s Bandeau.
It was not pretty.
A metal arch shaped like a horseshoe was fitted inside the mouth. Tiny holes ran along the metal frame.
Gold wires were threaded through them and tightened around the teeth to pull them gradually into position. Over several months the wires were adjusted again and again until the teeth straightened.
The process was slow, uncomfortable, and painful. But it worked. By the time Marie Antoinette was fourteen and met her future husband, her teeth had been corrected and she could smile with confidence.
Pierre Fauchard himself had become interested in dentistry while serving as a naval surgeon. At sea he saw the devastating effects of scurvy.
Without vitamin C, collagen breaks down, gums rot and teeth fall out. Determined to understand dental disease better, he studied the tools and techniques used by barbers, jewellers and watchmakers and applied their skills to dentistry.
In his writings he described more than a hundred oral diseases and proposed treatments for them, including methods for straightening teeth.
By the time revolution broke out in France in 1793, Marie Antoinette’s smile had long since been perfected. When she was led to the guillotine, the blade that ended her life was said to be as sharp as the straight teeth she had spent months enduring wires to obtain.
While the queen of France was losing her head, another famous figure across the Atlantic had his own dental misery.
George Washington suffered from severe tooth problems for most of his life. Pain began when he was young and gradually worsened until he could eat little more than soft food like corn bread and soup.
Despite careful cleaning, his teeth deteriorated quickly. By his early twenties his first adult tooth had already been pulled. By the time he became president at fifty-seven, he had only one natural tooth left.
Many believe Washington wore wooden dentures. He did not.
His dentures were made from ivory carved from elephant and rhinoceros tusks, reinforced with lead, and fitted with teeth taken from animals and occasionally from humans.
Enslaved people at Mount Vernon were sometimes paid for teeth, though it is unclear whether any of theirs ended up in the dentures now preserved.
The dentures were badly fitting and painful. They forced Washington’s lips forward and altered the shape of his face, something clearly visible in portraits such as Gilbert Stuart’s famous image later used on the one-dollar bill.
Washington often kept his mouth tightly closed in public, speaking briefly because the dentures were uncomfortable.
Demand for replacement teeth was so high in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that teeth were sometimes taken from executed criminals, dug up from graves by body-snatchers, or removed from soldiers killed on battlefields.
After the Napoleonic Wars, such harvested teeth even acquired a grim name: “Waterloo teeth.”
When the dentist John Greenwood removed Washington’s final natural tooth, he kept it and mounted it in a locket attached to his watch.
The tooth survives today, along with several sets of Washington’s dentures, preserved in museums.
Source:
Suzie Edge, Vital Organs (chapter “Marie Antoinette’s Teeth”)
