Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette stepped down from an open cart in the Place de la Revolution on the 16th of October 1793. She trod on her executioner's shoe and apologized: "Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose." Minutes later she was beheaded by guillotine. It was the final public act of a woman the Revolution had spent years turning into a symbol of everything wrong with the old regime.
She had been born in Vienna in November 1755, the fifteenth child of Empress Maria Theresa. She arrived in France at fourteen to marry a boy she had never met. Eighteen years later she was queen of a nation that called her Madame Deficit and blamed her for its empty treasury.
How did an Austrian archduchess become the face of a bankruptcy she did not cause. What was true in the flood of pamphlets that accused her of orgies, theft, and treason, and what was simply invented. And why, more than two centuries later, would scientists still be trying to read words she had scratched out in her own letters.
At the Hofburg Palace, Maria Antonia was born on All Souls' Day, a Catholic day of mourning. Her family found this unsettling enough that they celebrated her birthday a day early throughout her childhood, on All Saints' Day instead. She was placed in the care of Countess von Brandeis and grew close to her sister Maria Carolina, three years older. Their bond lasted her whole life, and her mother called her "the little Madame Antoine."
At Schonbrunn Palace on the 13th of October 1762, seven-year-old Maria Antonia met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a child prodigy only two months her junior. At ten she still could not write correctly in German, French, or Italian. She sang beautifully though, played the harp and harpsichord, and excelled at dancing under her music teacher, Christoph Willibald Gluck.
In October 1767 her older sister Maria Josepha died of smallpox in Vienna. The loss stayed with Maria Antonia for the rest of her life. Dying, Maria Josepha told her she would not be traveling to Naples to marry King Ferdinand IV, but to the family vault instead.
In 1768 her new tutor, Mathieu-Jacques de Vermond, found her poorly educated and unable to write properly. Still, he judged that "her character, her heart, are excellent," and that she was "more intelligent than has been generally supposed." He added, though, that she was "rather lazy and extremely frivolous." A political makeover followed: French dentists straightened her teeth, and the choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre taught her the gliding walk of the Versailles court. All of it prepared her for a marriage arranged to seal the alliance between France and Austria.
The wedding took place at Versailles on the 16th of May 1770, but the marriage went unconsummated for seven years, damaging both their reputations. Her brother Joseph II visited in 1777 and bluntly described the couple, in a letter to their brother Leopold, as "a couple of complete blunderers." The marriage was finally consummated that August. Her first official appearance in Paris, on the 8th of June 1773, had already won the public over completely.
In 1774 Louis XVI gave his wife the Petit Trianon, a small chateau at Versailles. Rumors soon spread that she had plastered its walls with gold and diamonds. In fact she could be strikingly frugal. One year she refused to buy her children expensive New Year presents, because so many people in France were poor.
Her dressmaker, Rose Bertin, built her towering poufs, hairstyles up to three feet high, and a feathered ornament called the panache. Her court also took up English fashions made from indienne, a fabric banned in France for over seventy years to protect local textile makers. The Flour War of 1775, a wave of riots over the price of bread and flour, further damaged her standing with ordinary French people. Pamphlets called libelles accused her of being profligate, promiscuous, disloyal, and secretly loyal to Austria.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in 1785, did lasting harm even though Marie Antoinette had nothing to do with it. Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Remy, Comtesse de la Motte, tricked Cardinal de Rohan into buying an expensive necklace as a gift for the queen. Marie Antoinette had detested Rohan for years, though, and had never spoken a word to him.
When the fraud came to light, most of those involved were arrested, tried, and either imprisoned or exiled. La Motte was sentenced to life at the Pitie-Salpetriere, while Rohan himself was acquitted by the Parlement of Paris. Contemporary court records did not implicate the queen at all. Only after the Revolution began, in 1789, did pamphleteers dig the scandal back up to paint her as greedy and immoral.
Madame du Barry, Louis XV's mistress, helped force the exile of Choiseul, the minister who had arranged Marie Antoinette's marriage. It happened within months of her arrival at court in 1770. Marie Antoinette refused to acknowledge du Barry for over a year. She relented only on New Year's Day 1772, with a single icy remark: "There are a lot of people at Versailles today."
In 1782 the previous royal governess went bankrupt and resigned. Marie Antoinette replaced her with the Duchess of Polignac and gave the duchess a 13-room apartment at Versailles. The sudden wealth of the whole Polignac family outraged the rest of the aristocracy. Ambassador Mercy-Argenteau wrote that it was "almost unexampled" for royal favor to bring a family such overwhelming advantages so quickly.
The Princesse de Lamballe returned to Paris from London at the end of 1791, despite the danger, to stay close to the queen. Revolutionaries seized her in 1792 and took her to La Force Prison, where she was killed on the 3rd of September. Her head was carried on a pike past the Temple tower so the queen could see it. Guards kept Marie Antoinette from the window, but she fainted upon learning of it.
The Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen returned to Versailles in 1783 and was drawn into the queen's private circle. That closeness fueled rumors of a love affair that stayed unproven for centuries, since most of their letters were lost, destroyed, or blacked out. Only in 2016 did scientists at the Centre for Research and Restoration of Museums of France begin recovering the redacted passages. What they found revealed an intense emotional bond between the two, with no evidence of a physical relationship. That closeness with a foreign nobleman would look far more dangerous once France itself went to war.
In 1779 Marie Antoinette pushed for French mediation in a brief war between Austria and Prussia. The resulting Peace of Teschen handed her homeland a territory of more than 100,000 people. Many in France saw the deal as a betrayal of their own interests.
She also helped secure Austrian and Russian backing that blocked a British attack on French shipping. In 1780 she pressed for the Marquis de Segur and Charles Eugene Gabriel de La Croix to be appointed ministers of war and the navy. Both men went on to help George Washington defeat the British in America.
Her influence peaked in 1783, when she helped install Charles Alexandre de Calonne as Controller-General of Finances. That same year she installed the Baron de Breteuil as Minister of the Royal Household. In 1788 she pushed for Jacques Necker's return as finance minister. In 1790 she opened a secret alliance with the revolutionary lawmaker Mirabeau. She agreed to pay him 6,000 livres a month, plus a bonus of one million livres, if he restored the king's authority.
That arrangement ended with Mirabeau's death in April 1791, after which the lawmaker Antoine Barnave became her chief ally in the Assembly. Yet by 1792, with France at war against Austria, Marie Antoinette was passing French military secrets to the enemy. That betrayal helped turn a string of early battlefield defeats into a case for treason.
During the failed Flight to Varennes, on the night of the 21st to the 22nd of June 1791, something remarkable happened to Marie Antoinette's hair. Her lady of the bedchamber recorded that it "had turned white as that of a seventy-year-old woman" in a single night. Brought back under guard, she and Louis XVI were mocked as "Madame Veto" and "Monsieur Veto," after he vetoed a string of revolutionary laws.
The family was imprisoned in the Temple tower after the storming of the Tuileries on the 10th of August 1792. In July 1793 her eight-year-old son, Louis-Charles, was forcibly taken from her. He was handed to a Paris Commune official and raised to turn against her. Moved alone to the Conciergerie in August, she was logged simply as "Prisoner number 280." After striking her head on a low doorway there, she told a guard, "No! Nothing now can hurt me."
At her trial in October 1793, prosecutors accused her of incest with her own son, a charge her accusers had pressured the boy into making. She refused to answer, appealing instead to every mother in the room. When a juror later described the scene to Robespierre, he reportedly smashed his plate and shouted, "That imbecile Hebert!"
Found guilty of treason, she wanted to wear black for her execution. Guards instead forced her into a plain white dress and cut her hair short. She was driven to the guillotine in an open cart, not the closed carriage that had carried her husband. Her body went into an unmarked grave at the Madeleine cemetery, a burial site so crowded it closed for good the following March.
Thomas Jefferson, who had served in Paris in the 1780s, later wrote that "had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution." Her sister, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, reacted to the news by turning against reformers across her own kingdom. Not until 1815, during the Bourbon Restoration, were her remains exhumed and given burial among the kings of France at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
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Common questions
When was Marie Antoinette born and where did she enter the world?
Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna entered the world on the 2nd of November 1755 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. She was the fifteenth child and youngest daughter of Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa.
When did Marie Antoinette become Queen of France and who was her husband?
Marie Antoinette became Queen of France on the 10th of May 1774 upon the death of Louis XV. Her husband was King Louis XVI, who ascended the throne as King Louis XVI of France and Navarre.
What happened to Marie Antoinette during the Flight to Varennes on the 21st of June 1791?
The entire royal family was arrested less than 24 hours after the escape attempt began on the 21st of June 1791 at Varennes. They were taken back to Paris within a week, which destroyed much of the remaining support of the population for the king.
When was Marie Antoinette executed and what were her last words?
Marie Antoinette was executed by beheading by guillotine at 12:15 pm on the 16th of October 1793. Her last words are recorded as, Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose after accidentally stepping on her executioner's shoe.
Where were Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI buried after their executions?
Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave in the Madeleine cemetery, located close by in rue d'Anjou. Both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI's bodies were exhumed on the 18th of January 1815 and given Christian burial three days later in the necropolis of French kings at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.
Who was the first Lady of the Bedchamber to Marie Antoinette and what did she record?
Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan served as Marie Antoinette's first Lady of the Bedchamber. She wrote about what happened to the queen's hair on the night of the 21st of June, noting that it had turned white in a single night.
All sources
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