Marie Antoinette (1755–1793)

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MARIE ANTOINETTE (1755–1793)

MARIE ANTOINETTE (1755–1793), queen of France. Josèphe-Jeanne-Marie Antoinette (Maria Antonia, archduchess of Austria) married Louis-Auguste, dauphin of France, on 16 May 1770. Louis XVI (ruled 1774–1792) and Marie Antoinette ascended the throne in 1774. The youngest daughter of the sixteen children of Maria Theresa (1717–1780), archduchess of Austria and queen of Bohemia and Hungary, and Francis I (ruled 1745–1765), Holy Roman emperor, Marie Antoinette wed at age fifteen to secure a tenuous Franco-Austrian alliance. A French tutor educated the archduchess in religion, history, the classics, and the arts. Not an adept learner, though enthusiastic, Marie Antoinette excelled in artistic pursuits. Her parents married for love, shared the same bed, and took joy in parenthood, unusual for the eighteenth century. Marie Antoinette's days were divided between courtly etiquette and the unceremonious family quarters. Maria Theresa's moral code permeated the court and influenced her children. Marie Antoinette venerated her loving, albeit highly principled mother, but she was especially attached to her father. His death at the age of fifty-six devastated the ten-year-old Marie Antoinette, and sorrow attended her throughout her life. This burden typified her complex personality, which was often eclipsed by her public image as a pitiless and spendthrift queen.

The duc de Choiseul, foreign minister to Louis XV, and Maria Theresa orchestrated the political match between Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, an excruciatingly shy adolescent of sixteen years whose chief delights were hunting and puttering in his locksmith shop. The marriage was politically disastrous and personally fragile for Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI. The enmity France bore for this Austrian queen was almost pathological. The hostility toward Marie Antoinette from both the educated elite and the populace forever impugned her character. She suffered rumors of infidelity and infertility in the seven years before she gave birth to a daughter and finally the dauphin, born in 1781. Marie Antoinette was comforted by Louis XVI, who ultimately came to love his charismatic bride and to whom he paid unfettered affection in public.

By 1774 the queen endured unspeakable venom at court and in Paris from those outraged at the monarchy for an unjust social order. Scandals proliferated, assuming a life of their own; "Madame Déficit" became the favorite political scapegoat. Marie Antoinette incensed her enemies with her disdain for etiquette and her expenditures, and she was condemned for trafficking with unsavory friends. Her untamed and extravagant conduct incited the authors of a libelous underground street discourse, already active by the time she came to France, and these authors exposed the decline of the monarchy. By the 1780s clandestine pamphlets targeting Marie Antoinette circulated widely, most notably in Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie Antoinette d'Autriche (c. 1789). Scurrilous works of this nature circulated in places like the Palais-Royal in Paris, a forum for public discontent, as well as at Versailles. The writers actively fed into public perceptions of Marie Antoinette as immoral and dissolute. Their fantastic charges of lesbian affairs, incestuous debauchery, and a demasculinization of men undermined the legitimacy of the monarchy.

The public refused to see Marie Antoinette as a loving and dutiful mother. This contemptuous response to the queen continued in the Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785–1786. Marie Antoinette was proclaimed guilty in the court of public opinion for this infamous case of stolen goods devised by the adventuress Jeanne de La Motte and a gullible dupe, Cardinal de Rohan, both jockeying for position at Versailles. Events spun out of control in 1789. Hungry market women from Paris stormed Versailles, forcing the king and queen's exile and house arrest in the Tuileries palace in Paris, followed by the monarchs' failed escape to Saint-Cloud on Easter in 1791. The escalating political turmoil of 1792 led to their trials and incarceration in the Conciergerie, the jail on the Seine in Paris.

While Marie Antoinette's critics have denigrated her, modern scholarship dispels distortions that blur her import. From her early days at court, Marie Antoinette was high-spirited, mischievous, and witty; she once masqueraded as a Sister of Charity before Louis XVI, and they howled together over his naïveté. She supported the arts and sought to relax the stiff decorum of the court while cultivating her keen need for privacy. Her loyal friendships defined her, none more so than that of the king, who sustained her in the anguish of relentless character defamation. Following the king's execution on 21 January 1793, Marie Antoinette on 16 October 1793 rode bravely erect in the tumbrel to her execution at the Place de la Révolution, a proud queen, devoted mother, and faithful wife.

See also Diamond Necklace, Affair of ; France ; Louis XVI (France) ; Maria Theresa (Holy Roman Empire) ; Revolutions, Age of .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Maria Theresa. Marie Antoinette. Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau, avec les lettres de Marie-Thérese et de Marie Antoinette. Paris, 1874–1875.