When Marie-Antoinette was summoned to stand trial at the Revolutionary Tribunal from October 14 to 16, 1793, the judgment was predictable and led inexorably to the guillotine. The special prosecutor, Antoine Quentin Fouquier-Tinville (1746–1795), seized her gardens as a tangible materialization of her corruption. The Petit Trianon gardens were no longer considered signs of the queen's exquisite taste, inspiring fashionable emulation; Fouquier-Tinville purported that the gardens were a dangerous place that served as a backdrop for the queen's clandestine encounters and impersonations. For Fouquier-Tinville, the garden personified the queen's ability to dissimulate, an accusation that was tantamount to conspiring against the Republic.

Before 1789, picturesque garden theory championed “tricking” the visitor into the belief that the artfully arranged trees and plants grew spontaneously together, a contrived naturalism that stimulated the imagination and encouraged immersion in the sensorium. At the Petit Trianon, the once-acclaimed beautiful disorder now connoted that the queen mastered the aesthetic merits of fakery. By 1793, the condemnation of the queen's gardens discredited the aesthetic appeal of the picturesque itself, including the novel forms of sociability that the gardens engendered.

In the past thirty years, historians have primarily focused on how pornographic imagery defamed the queen, focusing on her body as a site of corruption.