Fourteen year old Austrian Archduchess Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna married the future King Louis XVI of France by proxy on 19 April 1770, and the bride’s name was officially changed to the Francophone pronunciation of Marie Antoinette … a name still associated with extravagance, foolishness, and tragedy.
Marie Antoinette became the Queen of France and of Navarre on 10 May 10 1774, and being queen would eventually kill her, but not before her reputation was falsely dragged through the muck.
Marie Antoinette was the lightning rod for French dissatisfaction, because she was seen as an Austrian interloper and femme fatale. As happens to all women who are seen as “bad”, she was accused of promiscuity and lavishly slut shamed; another victim of The Jezebel Effect. Among other things, she “was falsely accused in the libelles of conducting an affair with [Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette who had a major role in the American victory over the English in the Revolutionary War], whom she loathed, and, as was published in “Le Godmiché Royal” (translated, “The Royal Dildo“), on having a sexual relationship with the English Baroness ‘Lady Sophie Farrell’ of Bournemouth, a well-known lesbian of the time.” At her “trial” by the Revolutionary Tribunal on October 14, 1793, Marie Antoinette was furthermore accused of staging orgies at Versailles and sexually assaulting her own son. None of these things were true.
However, the young girl getting married on a lovely spring day at the Augustinian Church in Vienna wouldn’t have foreseen anything other than the privilege and pleasure of becoming Queen of France.
She said her vows without ever having seen her fifteen year old groom; her brother served as the royal stand-in for Louis. A few weeks later the teen bride set off for France, escorted by 57 carriages, 117 footmen and 376 horses. She met her spouse and his grandfather, Louis XV, in the Picardy region of France on 14 May, where she knelt before the king and was briefly embraced by her shy husband. She was brought to the Palace of Versailles where another formal marriage ceremony took place two days later. Marie Antoinette did not make her first official appearance in Paris until 8 June 1773.
From the first, Marie Antoinette was over her head at the new court. She was a talented musician and could dance like a dream, but she wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box and she was utterly lacking in statecraft or political acumen. Homesick, she turned to her new husband’s aunts to be mothered and comforted, and they gave her appallingly bad advice and used her to socially punish the king’s mistress Madame du Barry, which caused her all sorts of problems at court.
As a young girl (and indeed, for a good decade into her reign as queen), Marie Antoinette seldom interfered in government, except to plead for policies on behalf of her siblings. Instead, she spent her time gambling, playing, and pushing fashion away from clumsy dresses and heavy makeup in favor of a “more simple feminine look, typified first by the rustic robe à la polonaise and later by the gaulle, a simple muslin dress Marie Antoinette wore in a 1783 Vigée-Le Brun portrait”.
Maria Antoinette would eventually excel at motherhood as much as she did in style. She had four children — Marie Thérèse,Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, Louis-Charles ( future King Louis XVII of France), and Princess Sophie. The greatest tragedies of the queen’s life before the Revolution were the deaths of her eldest son at age 7 from tuberculosis and the loss of her infant daughter at only 11 months old from the same illness. Her children were her beloved focus, even as the erroneous reports of her supposed evils spread throughout the country and the the first rumbles of the French Revolution shook Versailles.
The queen even “adopted a number of children during her reign. When one of her maids died, Marie adopted the woman’s orphaned daughter, who became a companion to Marie’s own first daughter. Similarly, when an usher and his wife died suddenly, Marie adopted the three children, paying for two girls to enter a convent while the third became a companion for her son Louis-Charles. Most strikingly, she baptised and took into her care a Senegalese boy presented to her as a gift, who normally would have been pressed into service.”
Alas for Marie Antoinette, she would see her world crumble, her husband murdered, and her children imprisoned. In the summer of 1792, she and her two surviving children, Marie-Therese and Louis-Charles, would be captured by an armed mob (which slaughtered the Swiss Guards attempting to protect the royal family) and carried off to the Temple fortress in Paris.
Louis XVI would be guillotined in January of 1793, making Marie Antoinette a widow and their seven-year-old son King Louis VXII of France.
In July, the deposed queen had to endure her son being taken away from her — physically ripped from her arms by guards — while both he and his mother wept and pleaded. She spent the final months of her imprisonment standing for hours at the barred windows of her prison, “trying to catch a glimpse of her son.”
Marie Antoinette herself was put on trial as the Widow Capet by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 14 October 1793, and the guilty verdict for her crimes was almost certainly a forgone conclusion. Among the things she was accused of were: “orchestrating orgies in Versailles, sending millions of livres of treasury money to Austria, planning the massacre of the gardes françaises (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 elements who controlled him.”
Of all the calumnies made against her, this one was the worst. The queen refused to respond to this charge. Rather than answer the prosecution, Maria Antoinette turned to ask all the mothers present at her trial if they thought such a thing possible. The women, as anti-monarchy as they were, agreed with her, much to the queen relief and satisfaction. They might kill her, but they couldn’t say she committed such atrocities against her own son.
Although the queen would be executed in when both her remaining children were alive, her son would be brutalized in prison and die of tuberculosis at age ten. Upon examining the small king’s body, a doctor was horrified to find a multitude of “scars from abuses of the poor boy, such as whippings, all over the front and back of his torso as well as on his arms, legs, and feet”.
The queen’s eldest daughter was the only one of her family to survive. The poor teenager didn’t find out what had happened to her mother, aunt, and brother until 2 August 1795, and during the time of her imprisonment she was left with only her grief to dwell on, denied even the distraction of books to read. Marie-Therese was finally released on 18 December 1795, the day before her 17th birthday.
She was reunited with her father’s younger brothers, Louis Stanislas Xavier and Charles Philippe. At the urging of her uncle Louis, she married her uncle Charles’s son, Louis-Antoine, duc d’Angoulême on 10 June 1799. Her marriage would be a reasonably happy one, but childless.
Marie-Therese would live to see the Bourbon Restoration in 1814, and her uncle became King Louis XVIII. She would also see her uncle King Charles X botch it up, and the final revolution of 1848 that made France a firm Republic.
Marie Antoinette’s final living child died on 19 October 1851, close to the anniversary of her mother’s beheading. Her gravestone is inscribed with the title Queen Dowager of France, because of her husband’s extremely brief reign as Louis XIX of France. At least one of Marie Antoinette’s royal offspring was monarch of France, albeit for only 20 minutes. I think she would rather have had her parents and brothers and aunts alive than to have reigned 20 years.
Revolution and death had brought a terrible end for the hopeful and happy marriage made between Austria and France on a fine spring day.