Awesome / The Rose of Versailles

• The manga is one for Riyoko Ikeda. Why? Her research on the historical facts is so good that fans regularly ace in history tests about the lead-up to the French Revolution. In fact she did such a good job that she got the friggin' Légion d'honneur for it.
• When Madame Du Barry decided to punish Oscar for taking Marie Antoinette's side in their feud by framing her mother for poisoning, Oscar barged in her apartment, held Louis XV's Royal Favorite at swordpoint, and delivered a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech that left Du Barry too shaken to try and take revenge through the sheer horror of antagonizing the future Queen of France while her position and prestige depended entirely on the favor of a 64-years-old man that could become ill and die at any moment.
  • Even the lead-up to the situation is awesome for Oscar thanks to her intelligence. When Du Barry and Marie Antoinette started their feud Oscar, knowing she had little political clout but a huge popularity among the court's ladies thanks to her looks, decided to stay out of it and enjoying the show... Up until Du Barry demanded her mother to become her lady-in-waiting to take advantage of her popularity and Marie Antoinette did the same to counter, at which point Louis XV, who knew this was actually about Oscar didn't want to get caught between his granddaughter in law and his favorite, ordered Oscar to decide. Thus we see Oscar analyzing the situation, admitting Du Barry at that point held more power than Marie Antoinette but not only she was bound to lose it the moment Louis XV died and Marie Antoinette became the Queen but the countess was clearly ruthless and uncaring while Marie Antoinette had shown her good morals the entire time, and sent her mother in Marie Antoinette's service. And it was explaining this reasoning in detail that shattered Du Barry's pride and made her realize her power was on borrowed time right after her influence on Louis XV and the danger of causing a war had forced Marie Antoinette to take the loss and aknowledge her presence at Versailles.
  • One on Marie Antoinette: a proud if naive woman, the moment it was pointed out to her that ignoring Du Barry was offending Louis XV and risked causing a war she immediately had the Count de Mercy set up an occasion where she would talk to her in public, and when Louis XV's daughters sabotaged it just to spite Du Barry she set up another in a way the spiteful women couldn't sabotage. It was this willingness to swallow her pride for the good of the nation that gained her Oscar's actual loyalty rather than one of simple convenience.
• Shortly after the incident with Oscar's mother and Du Barry, Louis XV and family go on a hunting trip with various nobles including Oscar plus their servants, and Andrè accidentally scares Marie Antoinette's horse and makes her fall. The furious King declares that harming a member of the royal family is unforgivable and orders to bring him a death warrant to sign... Then Oscar declares that since Andrè is her servant anything he does is her responsability and thus it should be her to be executed. This is the exact moment Andrè falls for Oscar.
  • While Louis is surprised at Oscar's intervention and wondering what to do, Marie Antoinette intervenes and calms down the King by pointing out it was an accident, she wasn't injured, and that she is responsible because she should have been able to handle the horse. Faced with such a proclamation, the King immediately backtracks and declares nobody's getting executed.
• Early on, with Louis XV on his deathbed but still alive, the king's confessor got one by kicking Madame Du Barry out of Versailles. This is the same Madame Du Barry who, thanks to her influence over Louis XV, succeeded in forcing Marie Antoniette (the Dauphine of France, and thus both the future queen and the most powerful woman of France) to surrender and aknowledge her right to stay at court, and the king's confessor (a minor son of a noble line) not only got her exiled from Versailles and the court but got the king to give the order himself.
• In the anime, Rosalie was this close to killing Polignac, the one who murdered her mother. If memory serves, Rosalie steals some guns from Oscar's house at night, then, at gun point, threatens the men who were in charge of the carriage that Polignac and Charlotte were in. Once they're in a secluded forest, Polignac realizes that it's Rosalie, who quickly tells her to shut up and not talk to her, a pistol ready and aimed to shoot Polignac. Polignac runs away, screaming that she doesn't want to die, although it was Rosalie's personality that saved her.
  • Another one from both the anime and manga: Rosalie attends a ball with Oscar, and is quickly surrounded by women who wanted to know more about Oscar. Charlotte interrupts them and warns Rosalie not to be easily led. A minuet comes up and asks Rosalie if she knows it. Rosalie says that she doesn't, then proceeds to bully Rosalie about it. One of the ladies asks Rosalie about her mother, however Rosalie responds with "Maman". Charlotte hears this and notes that only poor people call their mothers "Maman". The young girl quickly deduces that Rosalie is a country bumpkin, then threatens to tell her mother (Polignac) that Oscar brought a poor girl to a ball. Enraged and insulted, what does Rosalie do? She throws her fan against Charlotte's face, of course. Rosalie then proclaims that she really is a noble's daughter, then proceeds to run away in tears.
  • When Polignac and Rosalie meet at court, the first thing that Rosalie does is take out a dagger from the folds of her dress to kill Polignac. Luckily, Oscar stops Rosalie from doing the deed because of the large number of witnesses, as well as killing a nobleman would result in the death penalty.
• In the lead-up to the Revolution, Oscar's mutinous French Guards gets two in the same day. First, without officers (who, apart Oscar, stayed loyal to the Crown), they saves the rebelling Parisians from two royalist regiments (including the elite Royal-Allémand dragoons) in a Curb-Stomp Battle, finally proving that at least one of the oversized Household Regiments is the Badass Army it's supposed to be. Then the massed Oh, Crap! at court when they find out of the mutiny (even before they find out Oscar led them), because they knew that, with the premier regiment of the kingdom on the rebellion's side, suppressing the revolt of Paris was next to impossible.
  • The following day, July 14, the French Guards had another. The Parisians were on the losing side of a Curb-Stomp Battle in the storming of the Bastille due the Bastille defenders having cannons and knowing how to use them while the Parisians had no idea how to use theirs, when the French Guard pulls another Big Damn Heroes by showing up and applying their military training to man the cannons (similar enough to their muskets they could figure it out), forcing the Bastille into surrender. And this time it's not just Oscar's grenadiers to help the rebellion, but the entire rank and file of the regiment, the ones who had stayed loyal having deserted that very morning when ordered to suppress the rebellion of Paris.
    • Becomes even more awesome when the defenders of the Bastille, applying regular military logic and seeing there's just one officer, shoot Oscar. Normally a military unit of the time would have dissolved without their officers. Here, Pierre Hulin, the historical leader of the mutiny, calmly took over from Oscar as her designated second in command. The Bastille surrendered soon after.
    • The scene is a CMOA for some of the defenders too: when the cannons started firing most of the garrison went to the commander and begged him to surrender, but the soldiers detached from the Swiss regiment Salis-Samade calmly coordinated together, aimed at Oscar, shot a salvo, reloaded and salvoed again for good measure, keeping their cool in spite of knowing that their medieval fortress would soon shatter under the artillery fire.
• A One-Scene Wonder gets one. Why? It's Napoléon Bonaparte showing up to provide a Sequel Hook, and scares the hell out of Oscar by just passing by.
  • With the sequel Eroica retroactively becomes one for Oscar too. Why? Because, before he became famous for repeatedly mopping the floor with Austrian troops in his first Campaign of Italy, most people in the series failed to see past his insignificant looks until they saw him in action or he whipped out a terrifying Death Glare, but Oscar realized right away what Napoleon was capable of doing, something that only Joseph Fouché (the Information Broker of the regime and in cahoots with Barras, who had already seen Napoleon in action at the siege of Toulon) and Desiree Clary (Napoleon's fiancee at the time) could do. Not even Alain (someone of undeniable smarts and experience in people more dangerous than they look) or Bernard (The Smart Guy and Intrepid Reporter of Rose Of Versailles).
• Marie Antoinette gets one at her supposed trial, when she had been accused of incest with her son. She first didn't reply to the charge, but when the court demanded an answer she refuted the charge with the words "If I have not replied, it is because Nature itself refuses to respond to such a charge laid against a mother," getting the support of the watching women (many of which had previously tried to lynch her) and Robespierre and Saint-Just themselves. Note that Saint-Just was the one who wanted her and Louis XVI dead the most, and was personally responsible for both swaying the courts into sentencing the deposed king to death and organizing her own sham trial. The best part? It's Truth in Television.
• Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette facing their executions with absolute calm and dignity, with Louis taking care of forgiving everyone involved in his execution and even helping the executioner and Marie Antoinette walking to the guillotine with an expression that said "Let's get over with this indignity" and thinking about showing how the Queen of France dies. And once again, this is actually how things went.

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