Madame Tussaud’s Dark Life Before The Wax Museum

Long before she became “Madame Tussaud,” she was first known as Marie Grosholtz, born on December 1, 1761, in Strasbourg, France. Her father had already died shortly before she was born, and her mother then moved them to Bern, Switzerland, when Marie was just six years old.

According to some sources, Marie’s family had ties to the profession of public executioners — her paternal grandfather worked as a town executioner.

Her mother, Anne-Marie Walder, was a widow who worked as a housekeeper for Philippe Curtius, a physician and wax modeler. And yes, this meant young Marie grew up surrounded by wax figures of the human body.

Philippe didn’t just treat Marie as a mere helper’s daughter, though. He taught her the entire art of wax sculpture, including every skill that would later make her famous.

Marie turned out to be quite gifted at the art of wax modeling, quickly mastering techniques that let her capture people with lifelike accuracy. Her talent stood out rather quickly.

By 1777, when Marie was only about 16, she sculpted the famous author and philosopher Voltaire. Yes, she was already trusted with major public figures at that age!

Marie also modeled the American founding father Benjamin Franklin. In fact, Madame Tussauds Berlin even displays a figure of Marie herself in the act of sculpting Franklin’s head!

Naturally, Marie’s talent opened royal doors. According to her memoirs, around 1780, she was invited to the Royal Court at Versailles to serve as an art tutor to Madame Élisabeth, the sister of King Louis XVI.

Marie claimed in her memoirs that from about 1780 until the Revolution erupted in 1789, she lived and worked at Versailles, embedded for nearly a decade in the glittering world of French royalty.

On the eve of the French Revolution in 1789, Marie left Versailles and returned to Paris. The cozy royal world she’d known was about to be violently torn apart. Her life was about to pivot from sculpting living aristocrats to casting dead ones.

Marie’s ties to the royal family became dangerous fast. According to Marie’s memoirs, in 1793, she and her mother were imprisoned in the notorious La Force Prison, suspected of royalist sympathies. The imprisonment was brief and Marie was released and put to work by the revolutionary government.

During the Reign of Terror, Marie created death masks of executed nobles, including former members of the royal family she had known at court, such as the King and Queen, for public display and news exhibitions in Paris.

According to accounts, freshly severed heads were often brought to Marie directly from the guillotine for her to cast.

Some of the beheaded people Marie cast may not have been strangers at all, since she claimed personal ties to figures from the court and society circles she once knew.

Among the death masks she created were those of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and Maximilien Robespierre, one of the Revolution’s key leaders. She captured the most famous heads to fall, on all sides of the conflict. In a disturbing way, she became the Revolution’s grim official portraitist.

In her own memoirs, Marie left a description that’s impossible to forget. She wrote of sitting on the steps of the exhibition with bloody severed heads resting on her knees, taking impressions of their features.

Amid the chaos, Marie’s fortunes shifted again. When her mentor Curtius died in 1794, she inherited his famous wax exhibition and museums, and became the owner of an entire collection.

In 1795, Marie married François Tussaud, an engineer, which is finally where the famous surname comes from. The marriage, by all accounts, was not a happy one. He’s described in the sources as an unreliable husband, and the union simply didn’t work out. So the name on the world-famous museum comes from a man she couldn’t wait to leave behind.

By 1802, Marie made a bold, life-changing decision. She packed up her eldest son, Joseph, and her collection of wax figures and left for the British Isles, pointedly leaving her husband and younger son in France.

Marie didn’t open her famous London home right away, though. She spent an astonishing 33 years touring England, Scotland, and Ireland, showing her wax figures to crowds. In a world before photographs, her waxworks let ordinary people finally “see” the famous figures they’d only read about!

This content was created with the help of AI.