Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. It was a time of rampant, crushing inequality; the über-wealthy upper class of a powerful nation-state sat upon gilded thrones, while the lower classes scraped out a miserable existence. Aristocrats depleted the nation’s treasury in pursuit of pleasure while the serrated class divides between the haves and have-nots grew sharper, and eventually fanned the flames of a full-scale rebellion. In 2019, this state of affairs sounds familiar — but this was 18th-century France, not the modern-day U.S. When the people rose up and stormed the Bastille in 1789, the revolution began in earnest, and the ancien régime was toppled. The ensuing years of radical fervor saw the streets of Paris run red with the blood of elites and those suspected of hostility to the revolution, and the difficult birth of a new, more democratic republic. The French Revolution — as complex and brutal as it was — remains a symbol of working-class resistance centuries later, and its iconography continues to inspire a new (and very online) generation of the oppressed.

Though many — but certainly not all — of the uprising’s chief architects were men, women played a crucial, militant role in the French Revolution, and two totems of dread femininity became distinct icons of the time: Madame Deficit and Madame Guillotine, nicknames for the doomed Queen Marie Antoinette and the ruthlessly efficient device that killed her. Their influence has carried on through the centuries, and remain touchstones for today’s crop of working-class dissidents.

Marie Antoinette was a child of privilege. Born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna in Austria in 1755, at 14 she was married off to Louis-Auguste, the future King Louis XVI. At 19, following the death of Louis XV, she became the Queen of France. She had a tumultuous relationship with her husband, and drowned her sorrows in extravagant fashion and other indulgences, frittering away eye-popping amounts of the public’s money as the population suffered. For this, she was dubbed “Madame Deficit,” and reviled by the populace, who got their revenge in 1793 when they introduced her to Madame Guillotine.

Versions of the guillotine itself date back to the Middle Ages, known as a planke in Germany, the Halifax Gibbet in England, and the Maiden in Scotland. It was formally introduced to France in 1791 after physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin helped pass a law in 1789 stating the device be used as a means to enact all capital punishment quickly and efficiently via decapitation. This privilege had previously only been afforded to the nobility due to its relative painlessness (in comparison, before the Revolution, peasants found guilty of crimes were hanged). The device was originally called a louisette or louison after its inventor, Antoine Louis, but it soon became known as la guillotine — or, later, la veuve (the widow) and le rasoir national (the National Razor). During the French Revolution, the guillotine was used to behead thousands of people, especially during the violent period known as the Reign of Terror.

Marie Antoinette was executed by the instrument on October 16, two days after the disgraced royal was convicted of treason and condemned to lose her head. Her death came several months after her husband met the same fate, and not long after, Marie Antoinette allegedly uttered her famously callous bon mot in response to reports of French peasants starving for bread — “Let them eat cake” (which probably never actually happened, but why let facts get in the way of a good story?).