Marie Antoinette (1755-1793)

Marie Antoinette

Maria Antonia of Austria was born on November 2nd 1755 at Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Austria. She was baptised Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna the next day. Her father was Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor (1708-1765) and her mother was Empress Maria Theresa also Queen of Hungary and Croatia and archduchess of Austria (1717-1780). Maria was the youngest daughter and the 15th (out of 16) child of the Emperor and Empress.

Maria Antonia had a simple and carefree childhood, especially in comparison to that of Louis XVI. She was never lonely, since she never had the chance to be alone. The Imperial family was one that thoroughly enjoyed music. She herself learned to play the harpsichord, spinet and clavichord, as well as the harp, taught by Gluck. During the family's musical evenings, she would sing French songs and Italian arias. She also excelled at dancing – an accomplishment often remarked by those who saw her, whether friendly or hostile, having been carefully trained in it since her early youth. Her education was poor, or at least it lacked the rigorous training of Louis XVI's; her handwriting, for was sprawling and careless in form. She learned Italian, from Metastasio, on top of the necessary French and German, as well as Austrian history and French history, though from an Austrian perspective. But while she flourished in her learning of Italian, her other languages proved to be a weak point. Conversations with her were stilted, and her ability to read and write German and French (the 'universal' language of Europe at this point in time) was poor

With the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the preservation of a fragile alliance between Austria and France became a priority for Empress Maria Theresa; cementing alliances through matrimonial connections was a common practice among European royal families at the time. In 1765, the son of French Emperor Louis XV, Louis Ferdinand, died, leaving his 11-year-old grandson Louis Auguste heir to the French throne. Within months, Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste were pledged to marry each other. 

A dowry was set at 200,000 crowns; as was the custom, portraits and rings were exchanged.Finally, Antonia was married by proxy on May 16 1770 at Versailles. Her brother Ferdinand stood in as the bridegroom. She was also officially restyled as Marie Antoinette, Dauphine of France. Through her father, Marie Antoinette became the second (after Margaret of Valois, the renowned Queen Margot) French Queen ever to descend from Henry II of France and Catherine de' Medici.

Marie Antoinette in her wedding dress

Louis XV passed away on May 10th 1774, and Louis Auguste succeeded him to the French throne as Louis XVI, making Marie Antoinette, at 19 years old, Queen of France. However, as personalities went Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette could not have been more different. He was introverted, shy and indecisive, a lover of solitary pleasures such as reading and metalwork. She was vivacious, outgoing and bold, and very social. She enjoyed to party, as a result she would awake before noon while her husband had been at work for hours.

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette

In 1777, word reached Empress Maria Theresa that her daughter and her husband had not yet consummated their marriage, and she immediately dispatched Joseph II, Marie Antoinette's older brother, to France to act as a sort of marriage counselor. Whatever his counsels, they apparently worked; a year later, Marie Antoinette gave birth to a daughter, Marie Therese Charlotte. She would go on to give birth to Louis-Joseph in 1781, Louis-Charles in 1785,and Sophie-Béatrix in 1786.

The Royal Family

Beginning in 1780, Marie Antoinette began spending more and more time at Petit Trianon, her private castle on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, almost always without the king. Around this time the first rumors surfaced about her relationship with Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen. During the 1780s, with the French government sliding into financial turmoil and poor harvests driving up grain prices across the country, Marie Antoinette's fabulously extravagant lifestyle increasingly became the subject of popular ire. Countless pamphlets accused the queen of ignorance, extravagance and adultery, some featuring salacious cartoons and others dubbing her "Madame Deficit." In 1785, the infamous diamond necklace scandal permanently tarnished the queen's reputation. A thief posing as Marie Antoinette obtained a 647-diamond necklace and smuggled it to London to be sold off in pieces. Although Marie Antoinette was innocent of any involvement, she was nevertheless guilty in the eyes of the people. Refusing to let public criticism alter her behavior, in 1786 she began building the Hameau de la Reine, an extravagant retreat near the Petit Trianon in Versailles.

On July 14, 1789, 900 French workers and peasants stormed the Bastille Prison to take arms and ammunition, marking the beginning of the French Revolution. On October 6, a crowd of 10,000 gathered outside the Palace at Versailles and demanded that the King and Queen be brought to Paris. At the Tuileries Palace in Paris, the always indecisive Louis XVI acted almost paralyzed, and Marie Antoinette immediately stepped into his place, meeting with advisors and ambassadors and dispatching urgent letters to other European rulers begging them to help save France's monarchy. In a plot hatched primarily by Marie Antoinette and her lover Count Axel von Fersen, the royal family attempted to escape France in June 1791, but they were captured and returned to Paris; in September, King Louis XVI agreed to uphold a new constitution drafted by the Constituent National Assembly in return for keeping at least his symbolic power. However, in the summer of 1792, with France at war with Austria and Prussia, the increasingly powerful radical Jacobin leader Maximilien de Robespierre called for the removal of the king. In September, after a month of terrible massacres in Paris, the National Convention abolished the monarchy, declared the establishment of a French Republic, and arrested the King and Queen.

In January of 1793, the radical new republic placed King Louis XVI on trial, convicted him of treason and condemned him to death. On January 21, 1793, he was dragged to the guillotine and executed. In October, a month into the infamous and bloody Reign of Terror that claimed tens of thousands of French lives, Marie Antoinette was put on trial for treason, theft, and a false and disturbing charge of sexually abusing her son. After the two-day trial, an all-male jury found her guilty on all charges. Like her husband several months before, Marie Antoinette was beheaded at the guillotine on October 16, 1793. The night previous, she had written her last letter to her sister-in-law Elisabeth. "I am calm," the Queen wrote, "as people are whose conscience is clear." Then in the moments before her execution, when the priest present told her to have courage, Marie Antoinette responded, "Courage? The moment when my ills are going to end is not the moment when courage is going to fail me."

The last Queen of France, Marie Antoinette has been both vilified as the personification of all the evils of monarchy and exalted as pinnacle of fashion and beauty. Marie Antoinette the villain is perhaps best captured by the famous, although almost certainly apocryphal, story that upon hearing that the people had no bread to eat she remarked, "Let them eat cake." Marie Antoinette the heroine is reflected in the obsessive scholarship on her choices in wardrobe and jewelry and the endless speculation about her extramarital love life. Both of these takes on the character of Marie Antoinette demonstrate the tendency, as prevalent today as it was in her own time, to see her life and death as symbolic of the downfall of European monarchies in face of global revolution. As Thomas Jefferson said, predicting the way Marie Antoinette would be viewed by posterity, "I have ever believed that if there had been no Queen there would have been no Revolution."

Her execution

Her grave