Marie-Antoinette

Queen of France (r. 1774-1793)

• Born: November 2, 1755
• Birthplace: Vienna, Austria
• Died: October 16, 1793
• Place of death: Paris, France

Marie-Antoinette, through her exaggerated public image as a frivolous and extravagant woman, did much to undermine popular respect for the French monarchy. As queen of France, she opposed the revolutionary movement at every turn.

Early Life

Marie-Antoinette (mah-ree ahn-twah-neht) was born in Vienna to Empress Maria Theresa and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She was the eleventh child in a family of three boys and eight girls; the last child in the family, Maximilian, would be born a year later. Her mother, the intelligent, strong ruler of the widespread Habsburg possessions since 1740, combined statecraft and childbearing with great efficiency. Her father, Emperor Francis of the House of Lorraine, was a pleasant, easygoing man, successful in business ventures. He was an adored though profligate husband and a kind father to his numerous children. His imperial title conferred no power.

Like her siblings, Marie-Antoinette enjoyed a lively musical environment. She played the harp and formed small musical groups with her brothers and sisters to entertain the family. Her education, entrusted to tutors, was mediocre. She learned fluent French but, to the end of her life, spoke it with a German accent. A dainty, pretty child, with blond hair and blue eyes, she was spontaneous and charming. Her mother sheltered her from corrupting influences and schooled her in good manners and morals.

From her tenth year, Marie-Antoinette intended to marry the heir apparent to the French throne in order to seal the Habsburg monarchy’s alliance with France. At thirteen, she was grooming for her future role, adding graciousness and polish to her charm. On May 16, 1770, at Versailles, she married the dauphin Louis, a clumsy, shy young man of sixteen. It was assumed that Marie-Antoinette would control her soon-to-be-king husband, so, unwittingly, she became part of a world of intrigue, a threat to the old king’s mistress, Madame du Barry, and the other enemies of Étienne François de Choiseul, the chief architect of the French alliance with Austria.

The duc de Choiseul was dismissed a few months after Marie-Antoinette’s arrival in Paris, placing her in a somewhat precarious situation. She found a mentor in Graf Florimund Mercy d’Argenteau, Austria’s ambassador to the French court, who maintained a constant line of communication between her and her mother. Marie-Antoinette’s position also improved as she won the affection of her husband.

Life’s Work

On the death of Louis XV, on May 10, 1774, Marie-Antoinette’s husband became King Louis XVI, and she became his queen. Initially popular, she soon attracted the enmity of the anti-Austrian faction at court, angered by her failed attempt to gain the recall of the duc de Choiseul. Her most serious problem was her husband, the king, who failed to consummate their marriage. By 1774, she had become the target of scurrilous pamphlets. She reacted to her predicament by throwing herself into a life of expensive diversion and pleasure. Her closest friends, the princesse de Lamballe and the comtesse Jules de Polignac, sought and received extravagant gifts and offices. She also frequented salons devoted to high-stakes gambling, horse races, and masked balls without the king. Her enemies professed to be scandalized.

In 1777, her eldest brother, Emperor Joseph II, paid her a visit in Paris. He warned her of the dangers of her conduct, then told her husband how to consummate the marriage. Louis accepted the emperor’s advice. A few months later, Marie-Antoinette became pregnant, and in December, 1778, she gave birth to a daughter. In October, 1781, a son was born; in March, 1785, another son; and in July, 1786, another daughter. For a time, she reduced her social engagements and proved to be a wise and caring mother.

Although Louis succeeded in performing his marital duties, he failed to satisfy Marie-Antoinette’s need for affection and intimacy. After a brief period of self-restraint, she once again threw herself into a hectic social life with the Polignac family and other favorites, heedless of her brother’s advice.

In 1785-1786, she became embroiled in the affair of the diamond necklace. Consisting of some five hundred large, perfect diamonds, the necklace was commissioned by the jeweler Boehmer and offered to Louis XV as a present for Madame du Barry. The king had declined the purchase. In 1785, Louis-René-Édouard, prince de Rohan, a worldly cardinal, was persuaded by his mistress, Jeanne, comtesse de la Motte, to contract for the necklace on behalf of Queen Marie-Antoinette. His mistress was to arrange for delivery of the necklace, but she passed it to her husband, who fled to England and sold it stone by stone. When the fraud was discovered, Cardinal Rohan was arrested and tried. Because of her reputation for extravagance and scandal, the queen was widely assumed to be involved in the affair, and many believed that the cardinal may have intended to buy sexual favors from her. Rohan’s conviction on a reduced charge failed to clear the queen’s name in the public eye.

In the following years, as the monarchy reeled in debt and edged ever closer to bankruptcy, the queen, who symbolized frivolous, decadent luxury to the common people, drew much of the blame upon herself. Addicted to pleasure, she was heedless of the calumnies swirling about her, incapable of grasping the point of serious political discussion, and inclined to intrude into affairs of state for personal reasons, such as to advance the cause of her favorites.

In 1789, the monarchy was shaken to its foundations, and the queen’s position undermined. On May 4, the Estates-General met at Versailles. A month later, her eldest son died. On July 14, the Bastille fell. In October, the royal family was forcibly removed from Versailles to the Palace of the Tuileries in Paris. As her husband sank in apathy and indecision, Marie-Antoinette grasped at straws. In vain, she negotiated with the moderate, pragmatic Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, a plan to flee Paris and rally the provinces to the king’s cause.

After the death of Mirabeau in April, 1791, Marie relied chiefly on the Swedish count Hans Axel von Fersen, who had entered French military service as a young man. She had known the tall, handsome, unmarried aristocrat since 1774. Their relationship had grown intimate over the years, attracting scurrilous comment. How physical their love became is a matter of conjecture; however, certainly, they loved each other deeply. Fersen organized the flight of the royal family from Paris on June 21, 1791, in an attempt to prepare a base in Lorraine from which the king could lead loyal forces to the recovery of his authority. Revolutionaries stopped the royal coach in Varennes and forced it to return to Paris.

The plan’s failure, for which Marie-Antoinette shares the blame with her husband, profoundly compromised the royal cause. In September, 1791, Louis was forced to accept a new constitution, leaving him a weak executive under the control of a legislative assembly that distrusted him. Guided by Fersen, the queen came to believe that the monarchy could be saved only by the intervention of Austria and other major powers. This conviction was strengthened in April, 1792, when France declared war on Austria. Marie-Antoinette relayed to Fersen and the Austrians the plans of the French generals and welcomed the advance of the enemy into her country. She endorsed the July manifesto of the duke of Brunswick, commander of the Austro-Prussian army, that threatened dire reprisals on Paris if the royal family were harmed. That declaration was counterproductive. On August 10, a mob stormed the Tuileries. The royal family was imprisoned in the Temple Tower and France was declared a republic.

Initially, the royal family’s situation remained comfortable; they were subjected to merely minor indignities. The queen mended the king’s clothes while he instructed his surviving son and heir in the Latin classics and the new geography of France. In December, the king was taken from the family and put on trial before the national convention, a revolutionary body lacking legal authority. Accused of conspiring against the safety of the state, Louis defended himself well. It was a political trial, however, and ended in his condemnation. On January 21, 1793, he was guillotined before an immense crowd.

Marie-Antoinette faced a similar fate. She continued to live in the Temple Tower, growing thinner, dressed in the black of mourning. Her only hope of staying alive was that the revolutionary forces might find her useful as a hostage. The allied armies might reach Paris and liberate her and her children before the national convention decided they must all die. Meanwhile, her son, whom she regarded as Louis XVII, took ill. He was taken from her and entrusted to an elderly cobbler who neglected him.

Marie-Antoinette’s hope for rescue was dashed. Under pressure from advancing allied armies and growing counterrevolution among peasants in the western region and in several cities in the provinces, the revolutionary government instituted a Reign of Terror, the systematic liquidation of internal dissent. On August 2, 1793, the police arrested Marie-Antoinette, separated her from the rest of her family, and imprisoned her in the Conciergerie to await trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal.

Under close, harsh confinement, her health deteriorated rapidly. Nonetheless, she was alert and cogent when brought before the judges in October. Accused of an absurd variety of crimes, including incest and counterfeiting, she maintained a regal bearing and dismissed the charges with contempt. On October 16, 1793, she was carried in a cart for common criminals to the place of execution, hair white and lank, hands bound behind her back, a scene immortalized in a sketch by the revolutionary artist Jacques-Louis David. She died to the loud applause of the mob.

Significance

Marie-Antoinette was by nature and training a decent, modest woman, attractive and charming. However, she showed poor judgment in the company she kept, in her choice of favorites, and in the favors she gave them, faults that were exaggerated by her enemies to the detriment of the failing French monarchy. If she had had her mother’s political sense as well as her courage, French history might have taken a different course during the reign of Louis XVI. The king needed someone at his side who could compensate for his inability to make decisions or forcefully express himself. Marie-Antoinette could show him affection, but unfortunately, she was poorly equipped to help him rule.

Bibliography

Barton, H. Arnold. Count Hans Axel von Fersen: Aristocrat in an Age of Revolution. Boston: Twayne, 1975. The author presents a detailed, judicious interpretation of the queen’s relationship with the Swedish aristocrat, concluding that they loved one another deeply, sincerely, and honestly. Whether they were physically intimate is a secondary issue and, in any case, cannot be resolved for lack of evidence.

Beales, Derek E. D. Joseph II: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1741-1780. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. The marital difficulty between Marie-Antoinette and her husband has been the subject of scholarly as well as scurrilous discussion. Beales relates Emperor Joseph’s frank advice to his brother-in-law in 1777 that led to the successful consummation of the royal marriage.

Crankshaw, Edward. Maria Theresa. London: Longmans, 1969. Offers useful insight into Maria Theresa’s continuing influence upon her daughter Marie-Antoinette.

Doyle, William.The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1989. The author gives a standard account of the political and social background of the most significant period of Marie-Antoinette’s life.

Erickson, Carolly. To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie-Antoinette. New York: William Morrow, 1991. The queen’s humanity emerges in this well-balanced narrative. According to the author, the intimacy between the queen and Fersen almost certainly became physical in the 1780’s.

Fraser, Antonia. Marie Antoinette: The Journey. New York: N. A. Talese/Doubleday, 2001. Fraser portrays Marie-Antoinette as good-hearted, badly educated, and totally unprepared to confront the political turmoil of late eighteenth century France.

Hardman, John. Louis XVI. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. The author describes at length how the queen swayed her husband’s judgment in political matters on many occasions.

Howarth, T. E. B. Citizen-King: The Life of Louis-Philippe, King of the French. London: Eyre and Spottiswoods, 1761. Marie-Antoinette figures prominently in the first nine chapters of this biography of the son of the prince, who was one of the queen’s most dangerous enemies.

Mossiker, Frances. The Queen’s Necklace. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961. The author reconstructs the affair that proved so damaging to the queen’s reputation, quoting extensively from memoirs, letters, and legal documents.

Price, Munro. The Fall of the French Monarchy: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Baron de Breteuil. London: Macmillan, 2002. Recounts the clandestine campaign to restore the French monarchy to power between 1789 and 1793. Focuses on Breteuil’s efforts to win financial and military support from other European monarchs. The book was subsequently published in the United States and retitled The Road from Versailles: Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the Fall of the French Monarchy.