Marie Antoinette

• 1. Imperial Origins And Early Life

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  On the 2nd of November 1755, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna entered the world at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. She was the fifteenth child and youngest daughter of Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. The birth caused serious complications that nearly cost her mother's life. Her godparents included Joseph I and Mariana Victoria, the king and queen of Portugal. Archduke Joseph and Archduchess Maria Anna acted as proxies for the newborn. The date of her birth fell on All Souls' Day, a Catholic day of mourning. Her family celebrated her birthday instead on All Saints' Day to avoid the somber connotations. Shortly after her birth, she was placed under the care of Countess von Brandeis, the governess of the imperial children. She grew up alongside her sister Maria Carolina, who was three years older. They shared a lifelong close relationship despite the difficult but ultimately loving dynamic with their mother. Maria Theresa referred to her as "the little Madame Antoine". Her formative years were spent between the Hofburg Palace and Schönbrunn, the imperial summer residence. On the 13th of October 1762, when she was seven years old, she met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The child prodigy was two months her junior. Despite private tutoring, her schooling results were less than satisfactory. At age 10, she could not write correctly in German or any language commonly used at court. Conversations with her were stilted. Under the teaching of Christoph Willibald Gluck, she developed into a good musician. She learned to play the harp, the harpsichord, and the flute. She sang during the family's evening gatherings, known for having a beautiful voice. She also excelled at dancing and had exquisite poise. The death of her older sister Maria Josepha from smallpox in October 1767 made an everlasting impression on the young Maria Antonia. In her later life, she recalled the ailing Maria Josepha taking her in her arms. Mathieu-Jacques de Vermond was dispatched by Louis XV to tutor Maria Antonia in 1768. De Vermond found her unsatisfactorily educated but complimented her character and heart. He described her as more intelligent than generally supposed, though rather lazy and extremely frivolous. Under the recommendation of Étienne François de Choiseul, Duke of Choiseul, she received a makeover to align with French royalty. This included straightening her teeth and diversifying her wardrobe. She was also instructed by Jean-Georges Noverre to walk in the gliding fashion characteristic of the court of Versailles. Her education would eventually prepare her for a betrothal that would change the course of European history.

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• 2. Dauphine And Court Politics

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  On the 7th of February 1770, Louis XV formally requested the hand of Maria Antonia for his eldest surviving grandson and heir, Louis Auguste. Maria Antonia formally renounced her rights to Habsburg domains on the 19th of April 1770. She was married by proxy with Louis Auguste at the Augustinian Church in Vienna. Her brother Archduke Ferdinand stood in for the dauphin. On the 14th of May 1770, she met her husband at the edge of the forest of Compiègne. Upon her arrival in France, she adopted the French version of her name: Marie Antoinette. A ceremonial wedding took place on the 16th of May 1770 in the Palace of Versailles. The day ended with the ritual bedding. The couple's longtime failure to consummate the marriage plagued their reputations for the next seven years. Her first official appearance in Paris on the 8th of June 1773 was a resounding success. The dauphine was beautiful, personable, and well-liked by the common people. Madame du Barry proved a troublesome foe to the new dauphine. She was Louis XV's mistress and had considerable political influence over him. In 1770, she was instrumental in ousting Choiseul, who had helped orchestrate the Franco-Austrian Alliance. Marie Antoinette was persuaded by her husband's aunts to refuse to acknowledge du Barry. This was seen as a political blunder that jeopardized Austria's interests at the French court. Maria Theresa and the Austrian ambassador to France, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, pressured Marie Antoinette to speak to du Barry. She grudgingly agreed to do so on New Year's Day 1772. She merely commented to her, "There are a lot of people at Versailles today". It was enough for du Barry, who was satisfied with this recognition. Two days after the death of Louis XV in 1774, Louis XVI exiled du Barry to the Abbaye du Pont-aux-Dames in Meaux. Two and a half years later, at the end of October 1776, du Barry's exile ended. She was allowed to return to her beloved château at Louveciennes but never permitted to return to Versailles. On the 10th of May 1774, upon the death of Louis XV, the dauphin ascended the throne as King Louis XVI of France and Navarre. Marie Antoinette became his queen consort. At the outset, the new queen had limited political influence with her husband. The king, with the support of Chief Minister Maurepas and Foreign Minister Vergennes, blocked several of her candidates from assuming important positions. The queen did play a decisive role in the disgrace and exile of the most powerful of Louis XV's ministers, the Duc d'Aiguillon. On the 24th of May 1774, two weeks after the death of Louis XV, the king gave his wife the Petit Trianon. This small château on the grounds of Versailles had been built by Louis XV for Madame de Pompadour. Louis XVI allowed Marie Antoinette to renovate it to suit her own tastes. Soon rumors circulated that she had plastered the walls with gold and diamonds.

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• 3. Fashion, Patronage, And Public Image

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  The queen was depicted as spending heavily on fashion, luxuries, and gambling even as the country faced a grave financial crisis. Rose Bertin created dresses for her, including hairstyles such as poufs up to three feet high. She and her court also adopted the English fashion of dresses made of indienne, a material banned in France from 1686 until 1759. The Flour War of 1775, a series of riots caused by high prices of flour and bread, damaged her reputation among the general public. Eventually, Marie Antoinette's reputation was no better than that of previous kings. Many French people began to blame her for the degrading economic situation. In her correspondence, Maria Theresa expressed concern over her daughter's spending habits, citing the civil unrest it was beginning to cause. As early as 1774, Marie Antoinette had begun to befriend some of her male admirers, such as the Baron de Besenval and the Duc de Coigny. Most noted was Marie-Louise, Princesse de Lamballe, related to the royal family through her marriage to the eldest son and heir of the Duke of Penthièvre. On the 19th of September 1774, she appointed her superintendent of her household, an appointment she soon transferred to her new favorite, the Duchess of Polignac. In 1774, she took under her the patronage of her former music teacher, the German opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck. Gluck remained in France until 1779. In 1780, she began to participate in amateur plays and musicals in the Théâtre de la Reine built for her by Richard Mique. The queen began to institute changes in court customs. Some of them were met with disapproval of the older generation, such as the abandonment of heavy makeup and the popular wide-hooped panniers. The new fashion called for a simpler feminine look, typified first by the rustic robe à la polonaise style and later by the gaulle. In 1783, Marie Antoinette wore a layered muslin dress in a portrait by Vigée-Le Brun. In 1783, the queen was busy with the creation of her "hamlet", a rustic retreat built by her favored architect Richard Mique. Its creation caused another uproar when its cost became widely known. The hamlet was not an eccentricity of Marie Antoinette's. It was en vogue at the time for nobles to have recreations of small villages on their properties. Around this time, she accumulated a library of 5,000 books. Those on music were the most read, though she also liked to read history. She sponsored the arts, in particular music. Marie Antoinette preferred to hold her musicales in the salon of her Petit appartement de la reine in the Palace of Versailles. She limited the audience to her intimate circle and a few musicians, among them the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. On the 27th of April 1784, Pierre Beaumarchais's play The Marriage of Figaro premiered in Paris. Initially banned by the king because of its negative portrayal of the nobility, the play was finally allowed to be publicly performed because of the queen's support. The play was a disaster for the image of the monarchy and aristocracy. It inspired Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, which premiered in Vienna on the 1st of May 1786. On the 24th of October 1784, Louis XVI bought the Château de Saint-Cloud from Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orléans in the name of his wife. The château's high price, almost 6 million livres, plus the substantial extra cost of redecorating, ensured that much less money was going towards repaying France's substantial debt. The purchase of Saint-Cloud thus damaged the public's image of the queen even further.

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• 4. Scandals And Political Influence

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  By 1785, the queen began to abandon her more carefree activities to become increasingly involved in politics. The "Affair of the Diamond Necklace" involved members of her court defrauding jewelers of the price of an expensive diamond necklace they had originally created for Madame du Barry. The main actors in the scandal were Cardinal de Rohan, Prince de Rohan-Guéméné, and Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte. Marie Antoinette had profoundly disliked Rohan since the time he had been the French ambassador to Vienna when she was a child. Despite his high clerical position at the Court, she never addressed a word to him. Madame de La Motte tricked Rohan into buying the necklace as a gift to Marie Antoinette. When the affair was discovered, those involved were arrested, tried, convicted, and either imprisoned or exiled. Madame de La Motte was sentenced for life to confinement in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. Rohan was found not guilty and allowed to leave the Bastille. Although later commentators claimed that the affair was extremely damaging to the queen's reputation, neither the court records nor contemporary pamphlets implicated Marie Antoinette. Only later, in 1789 after the Revolution had already begun, did pamphlets and caricatures use the affair of the diamond necklace to criticize the queen for avarice and lasciviousness. Suffering from an acute case of depression, the king began to seek the advice of his wife. In her new role and with increasing political power, the queen tried to improve the awkward situation brewing between the Parlement and the king. The first meeting of the Assembly of Notables took place on the 22nd of February 1787, nine days after the death of Vergennes on the 13th of February. Marie Antoinette did not attend the meeting, and her absence resulted in accusations that the queen was trying to undermine its purpose. The Assembly was a failure; it did not pass any reforms and instead fell into a pattern of defying the king. On the urging of the queen, Louis dismissed Calonne on the 8th of April. On the 1st of May Étienne Charles de Loménie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse and one of the queen's political allies, was appointed by the king at her urging to replace Calonne. He began to institute more cutbacks at court while trying to restore the royal absolute power weakened by the Parlement. Brienne was unable to improve the financial situation, and since he was the queen's ally, this failure adversely affected her political position. The continued poor financial climate of the country resulted in the 25th of May dissolution of the Assembly of Notables because of its inability to function. As a result of the public perception that she had single-handedly ruined the national finances, Marie Antoinette was given the nickname of "Madame Déficit" in the summer of 1787. While the sole fault for the financial crisis did not lie with her, Marie Antoinette was the biggest obstacle to any major reform effort. She had played a decisive role in the disgrace of the reformer ministers of finance, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1776, and Jacques Necker first dismissed in 1781. If the secret expenses of the queen were taken into account, court expenses were much higher than the official estimate of 7% of the state budget. The queen attempted to fight back at propaganda by portraying herself as a caring mother, most notably in the painting by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun exhibited at the Royal Académie Salon de Paris in August 1787. Around the same time, Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy escaped from prison and fled to London where she published damaging slander concerning her supposed amorous affair with the queen.

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• 5. Revolution And The Flight To Varennes

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  The situation escalated on the 20th of June as the Third Estate found the door to its appointed meeting place closed by order of the king. It thus met at the tennis court in Versailles and took the Tennis Court Oath not to separate before it had given a constitution to the nation. On the 11th of July, at Marie Antoinette's urging, Necker was dismissed and replaced by Breteuil, the queen's choice to crush the revolution with mercenary Swiss troops under the command of one of her favorites, Pierre Victor, Baron de Besenval de Brünstatt. At the news, Paris was besieged by riots that culminated in the storming of the Bastille on the 14th of July. On the 15th of July Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette was named commander-in-chief of the newly formed National Guard. In the days following the storming of the Bastille, for fear of assassination and ordered by the king, the emigration of members of the high aristocracy began on the 17th of July. Marie Antoinette, whose life was as much in danger, remained with the king. The abolition of feudal privileges by the National Constituent Assembly on the 4th of August 1789 paved the way to a Constitutional Monarchy. Despite these dramatic changes, life at the court continued, while the situation in Paris was becoming critical because of bread shortages in September. On the 5th of October, a crowd from Paris descended upon Versailles and forced the royal family to move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. They lived under a form of house arrest under the watch of Lafayette's National Guard. One of the most important figures Marie Antoinette dealt with was Prime Minister of Finances Necker. She blamed him for his support of the revolution and did not regret his resignation in 1790. Lafayette served as the warden of the royal family. Despite his dislike of the queen, he was persuaded by Mayor of Paris Jean Sylvain Bailly to work and collaborate with her. A significant achievement of Marie Antoinette in that period was the establishment of an alliance with Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau. On the 3rd of July 1790, the royal family met privately at the Château de Saint-Cloud. At the meeting, Mirabeau was much impressed by the queen and remarked in a letter to Auguste Marie Raymond d'Arenberg that she was the only person the king had by him. An agreement was reached turning Mirabeau into one of her political allies. Marie Antoinette promised to pay him 6000 livres per month and one million livres if he succeeded in his mission to restore the king's authority. The only time the royal couple returned to Paris in that period was on the 14th of July to attend the Fête de la Fédération. At least 300,000 persons participated from all over France, including 18,000 National Guards. There were even cheers for the queen, particularly when she presented Louis Joseph to the public. Mirabeau sincerely wanted to reconcile the queen with the people, and she was happy to see him restoring much of the king's powers. This leverage with the Assembly ended with the death of Mirabeau in April 1791. In March 1791, Pope Pius VI had condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. On the 18th of April, as the royal family prepared to leave for Saint-Cloud to attend Easter mass, a crowd prevented their departure from Paris. This incident fortified her in her determination to leave Paris for personal and political reasons. Fersen and Breteuil, who represented her in the courts of Europe, were put in charge of the escape plan. There had been several plots designed to help the royal family escape, which the queen had rejected because she would not leave without the king. Once Louis finally did commit to a plan, its poor execution was the cause of its failure. In an elaborate attempt known as the Flight to Varennes to reach the royalist stronghold of Montmédy, some members of the royal family were to pose as the servants of an imaginary "Madame de Korff". After many delays, the escape was ultimately attempted on the 21st of June 1791. The entire family was arrested less than 24 hours later at Varennes and taken back to Paris within a week. The escape attempt destroyed much of the remaining support of the population for the king. Upon learning of the capture of the royal family, the National Constituent Assembly sent three representatives to Varennes to escort Marie Antoinette and her family back to Paris. On the way to the capital they were jeered and insulted by the people. During the trip Barnave, the representative of the moderate party in the Assembly, protected Marie Antoinette from the crowds. Brought safely back to Paris, they were met with silence by the crowd. Thanks to Barnave, the royal couple was not brought to trial and was publicly exonerated of any crime in relation with the attempted escape. Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, Marie Antoinette's first Lady of the Bedchamber, wrote about what happened to the queen's hair on the night of 21, the 22nd of June. She noted that in a single night, it had turned white as that of a seventy-year-old woman.

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• 6. Imprisonment And The Trial

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  After their return from Varennes, the queen, her family, and entourage were held under tight surveillance by the National Guard in the Tuileries. Four guards accompanied the queen wherever she went, and her bedroom door had to be left open at night. Her health also began to deteriorate, thus further reducing her physical activities. On the 17th of July 1791, with the support of Barnave and his friends, Lafayette's Garde Nationale opened fire on the crowd that had assembled on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition demanding the deposition of the king. The estimated number of those killed varies between 12 and 50. Their enmity continuing, Marie Antoinette played a decisive role in defeating him in his aims to become the mayor of Paris in November 1791. As her correspondence shows, while Barnave was taking great political risks in the belief that the queen was his political ally, Marie Antoinette was not considered sincere in her cooperation with the moderate leaders of the French Revolution. This ultimately ended any chance to establish a moderate government. Moreover, the view that the unpopular queen was controlling the king further degraded the royal couple's standing with the people. This situation lasted until the spring of 1792. At the end of 1791, ignoring the danger she faced, the Princesse de Lamballe returned to the Tuileries. As for Fersen, despite the strong restrictions imposed on the queen, he was able to see her a final time in February 1792. Marie Antoinette continued to hope that the military coalition of European kingdoms would succeed in crushing the revolution. She counted most on the support of her Austrian family. After the death of Joseph II in 1790, she hoped that his successor and younger brother Leopold II would be willing to support her. In a letter to her brother, penned in September 1791, Marie Antoinette expressed how she expected the revolution to react. She wrote that it would be effected by the approach of the war and not by the war itself. Upon Leopold's death in March 1792, his son Francis, a conservative ruler, continued the Austrian policy of positioning troops near the French border. Events leading to the abolition of the monarchy on the 10th of August 1792 began with the Declaration of Pillnitz and Leopold's and Francis II's positioning of troops. This led to France's declaration of war on Austria on the 20th of April 1792. That summer, the situation was compounded by multiple defeats of the French Revolutionary Army by the Austrians, in part because Marie Antoinette passed on military secrets to them. In addition, at the insistence of Marie Antoinette, Louis vetoed several measures that would have further restricted his power, earning the royal couple the nicknames "Monsieur Veto" and "Madame Veto". On the 20th of June 1792, a mob of terrifying aspect broke into the Tuileries, made the king wear the bonnet rouge to show his loyalty to the revolution, and insulted Marie Antoinette. In consequence, the queen asked Fersen to urge the foreign powers to carry out their plans to invade France. The Brunswick Manifesto, issued on the 25th of July 1792, triggered the Insurrection of the 10th of August. Ninety minutes later, the palace was invaded by the mob, who massacred the Swiss Guards. On the 13th of August the royal family was imprisoned in the tower of the Temple in the Marais under conditions considerably harsher than those of their previous confinement in the Tuileries. A week later, several of the royal family's attendants, among them the Princesse de Lamballe, were taken for interrogation by the Paris Commune. Transferred to La Force Prison, after a rapid judgment, de Lamballe was savagely killed on the 3rd of September. Her head was affixed on a pike and paraded through the city to the Temple for the queen to see. Marie Antoinette was prevented from seeing it but fainted upon learning of it. On the 21st of September 1792, France was declared a republic, the monarchy was abolished and the National Convention became the governing body of the French First Republic. The royal family name was downgraded to the non-royal "Capets". Preparations began for the trial of the former king in a court of law. Louis XVI's trial and execution Charged with treason against the French Republic, Louis XVI was separated from his family and tried in December. He was found guilty by the Convention, led by the Jacobins who rejected the idea of keeping him as a hostage. On the 15th of January 1793, by a majority of six votes, he was condemned to death by guillotine and executed on the 21st of January 1793. The former queen, now called "Widow Capet", plunged into deep mourning. She still hoped her son Louis-Charles, whom the exiled Count of Provence, Louis XVI's brother, had recognized as Louis XVI's successor, would one day rule France. Throughout her imprisonment and up to her execution, Marie Antoinette could count on the sympathy of conservative factions and social-religious groups which had turned against the revolution. While imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, Marie Antoinette, her children and Élisabeth were insulted, some of the guards going as far as blowing smoke in her face. Strict security measures were taken to assure that she was not able to communicate with the outside world. Despite these measures, several of her guards were open to bribery, and a line of communication was kept with the outside world. After Louis's execution, Marie Antoinette's fate became a central question of the National Convention. While some advocated her death, others proposed exchanging her for French prisoners of war or for a ransom from the Holy Roman Emperor. Thomas Paine advocated exile to America. In April 1793, during the Reign of Terror, a Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, was formed, and men such as Jacques Hébert began to call for Marie Antoinette's trial. By the end of May, the Girondins had been chased from power. Calls were also made to "retrain" the eight-year-old Louis XVII, to make him pliant to revolutionary ideas. To carry this out, Louis Charles was separated from his mother on the 3rd of July after a struggle during which his mother fought in vain to retain her son. He was handed over to Antoine Simon, a cobbler and representative of the Paris Commune. Until her removal from the Temple, she spent hours trying to catch a glimpse of her son, who within weeks had been made to turn against her, accusing his mother of wrongdoing. At 1 a.m. on the 1st of August, she was transferred from the Temple to an isolated cell in the Conciergerie as 'Prisoner nº 280'. Leaving the Tower she bumped her head against the lintel of a door, which prompted one of her guards to ask her if she was hurt, to which she answered, "No! Nothing now can hurt me." This was the most difficult period of her captivity. She was under constant surveillance with no privacy. The "Carnation Plot", an attempt to help her escape at the end of August, was foiled due to the inability to corrupt all the guards. She was attended by Rosalie Lamorlière, who took care of her as much as she could. At least once she received a visit by a Catholic priest.

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• 7. Execution And Posthumous Legacy

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  Marie Antoinette was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 14th of October 1793. Some historians believe the outcome of the trial had been decided in advance by the Committee of Public Safety around the time the Carnation Plot was uncovered. She and her lawyers were given less than one day to prepare her defense. Among the accusations, many previously published in the libelles, were: orchestrating orgies in Versailles, sending millions of livres of treasury money to Austria, planning the massacre of the National Guards in 1792, declaring her son to be the new king of France, and incest, a charge made by her son Louis-Charles, pressured into doing so by the radical Jacques Hébert who controlled him. This last accusation drew an emotional response from Marie Antoinette, who refused to respond to this charge, instead appealing to all mothers present in the room. Their reaction comforted her since these women were not otherwise sympathetic to her. Upon being pressed further by a juror to address the accusations of incest, the queen replied, "If I did not respond, it was because it would be against nature for a mother to reply to such an accusation. On this I appeal to all mothers who may be here." When a juror, Joachim Vilate, told Robespierre of this over dinner, Robespierre broke his plate in anger, declaring "That imbecile Hébert!" Early on the 16th of October, Marie Antoinette was declared guilty of the three main charges against her: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the state, and high treason because of her intelligence activities in the interest of the enemy. At worst, she and her lawyers had expected life imprisonment. In the hours left to her, she composed a letter to her sister-in-law Madame Élisabeth, affirming her clear conscience, her Catholic faith, and her love and concern for her children. The letter did not reach Élisabeth. Her will was part of the collection of papers of Robespierre found under his bed and was published by Edme-Bonaventure Courtois. Preparing for her execution, she had to change clothes in front of her guards. She wanted to wear a black dress but was forced to wear a plain white dress, white being the color worn by widowed queens of France. Her hair was shorn, her hands bound painfully behind her back and she was put on a rope leash. Unlike her husband, who had been taken to his execution in a carriage, she had to sit in an open cart for the hour it took to convey her from the Conciergerie via the rue Saint-Honoré thoroughfare to reach the guillotine erected in the Place de la Révolution. She maintained her composure, despite the insults of the jeering crowd. A constitutional priest was assigned to hear her final confession. He sat by her in the cart, but she ignored him all the way to the scaffold as he had pledged his allegiance to the republic. Marie Antoinette was executed by beheading by guillotine at 12:15 pm on the 16th of October. Her last words are recorded as, "Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose" after accidentally stepping on her executioner's shoe. Marie Tussaud was employed to make a death mask of her head. Her body was thrown into an unmarked grave in the Madeleine cemetery, located close by in rue d'Anjou. Because its capacity was exhausted, the cemetery was closed the following year, on the 25th of March 1794. After her execution, Marie Antoinette became a symbol abroad and a controversial figure of the French Revolution. Some used her as a scapegoat to blame for the events of the revolution. Thomas Jefferson, who had served as American ambassador in Paris in the 1780s, wrote in 1821 that "Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation." In Edmund Burke's 1790 treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France, he laments "the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever". After receiving the news, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and close sister to Marie Antoinette, spiraled into a state of mourning and an anger against the revolutionaries. She quickly suspended protections of reformers and intellectuals in Naples, allowed Neapolitan bishops wide latitude to halt the secularization of the country, and offered succor to the overflowing number of émigrés fleeing from revolutionary France. Both Marie Antoinette's and Louis XVI's bodies were exhumed on the 18th of January 1815, during the Bourbon Restoration, when the Count of Provence ascended the newly reestablished throne as Louis XVIII, King of France and of Navarre. Christian burial of the royal remains took place three days later, on the 21st of January, in the necropolis of French kings at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. For many revolutionary figures, Marie Antoinette was the symbol of what was wrong with the old regime in France. The onus of having caused the financial difficulties of the nation was placed on her shoulders by the revolutionary tribunal, and under the new republican ideas of what it meant to be a member of a nation, her legacy remained a subject of intense historical debate.

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