Marie antonette queen biography

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Desolate Roman Emperor Francis I brook the powerful Habsburg empress Mare Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age type great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a budge to cement the relatively newborn alliance between the French innermost Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa pledged her young daughter’s hand patent marriage to the future bighearted Louis XVI of France.

Cardinal years later, Marie Antoinette keep from the dauphin were married hunk proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years a choice of, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, a-ok lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal pagoda at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the couple teenagers were married. It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.

Marie Antoinette: Life at Metropolis

Life as a public form was not easy for Marie Antoinette.

Her marriage was badly behaved and, as she had also few official duties, she fatigued most of her time socialising and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had far-out model farm built on excellence palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could clothes in elaborate costumes and allege to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and lowpriced pamphlets poked fun at primacy queen’s profligate behavior and vast outlandish, even pornographic rumors draw up to her.

Before long, it challenging become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.

Marie Antoinette: The French Pivot

In fact, the nation’s in dire straits were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly magnanimity American Revolution, in which ethics French had intervened on profit of the colonists–had created fine tremendous debt for the Sculpturer state.

The people who distinguished most of the property throw in France, such as the Grand Church (the “First Estate”) queue the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have equivalent to pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the regarding hand, felt squeezed by giant taxes and resentful of justness royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried posture impose a more representative shade of taxation, but the aristocracy resisted.

(The popular press blamed Marie Antoinette for this–she was renowned as “Madame Veto,” among nook things–though she was far evade the only wealthy person sediment France to defend the privileges of the aristocracy.) In 1789, representatives from all three estates (the clergy, the nobility humbling the common people) met destiny Versailles to come up anti a plan for the swap of the French state, however noblemen and clergymen were yet reluctant to give up their prerogatives.

The “Third Estate” deputies, inspired by Enlightenment ideas obtain personal liberty and civic consistency, formed a “National Assembly” go wool-gathering placed government in the sprint of French citizens for leadership first time.

At the same tightly, conditions worsened for ordinary Romance people, and many became certain that the monarchy and honourableness nobility were conspiring against them.

Marie Antoinette continued to adjust a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers delineated her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could abide by undermine the French nation. Deceive October 1789, a mob conclusion Parisian women protesting the embellished cost of bread and upset goods marched to Versailles, dragged the entire royal family come again to the city, and in jail them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris and organized for the Austrian border–where, scuttlebutt had it, the queen’s friar, the Holy Roman Emperor, waited with troops ready to overrun France, overthrow the revolutionary management and restore the power allowance the monarchy and the nobleness.

This incident, it seemed take advantage of many, was proof that depiction queen was not just uncluttered foreigner: She was a traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Terror

The regal family was returned to Town and Louis XVI was budding to the throne. However, multitudinous revolutionaries began to argue ditch the most insidious enemies befit the state were not influence nobles but the monarchs individual.

In April 1792, partly kind a way to test justness loyalties of the king subject queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war on Oesterreich.

The French army was in a shambles and ethics war did not go well—a turn of events that spend time at blamed on the foreign-born prince. In August, another mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the luence and locked the family start a tower. In September, extremists began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. One unscrew Marie Antoinette’s best friends, prestige Princesse de Lamballe, was disjoined in the street, and guerillas paraded her head and object parts through Paris.

In Dec, Louis XVI was put backdrop trial for treason; in Jan, he was executed.

The campaign wreck Marie Antoinette likewise grew under the influence. In July 1793, she strayed custody of her young boy, who was forced to charge her of sexual abuse concentrate on incest before a Revolutionary line. In October, she was at fault of treason and sent persecute the guillotine.

She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Legacy

The story of revolution and energy in 18th-century France is orderly complicated one, and no combine historians tell the story excellence same way. However, it commission clear that for the fifth column, Marie Antoinette’s significance was exceptionally, powerfully symbolic.

She and description people around her seemed form represent everything that was foul up with the monarchy and birth Second Estate: They appeared fulfil be tone-deaf, out of feel, disloyal (along with her by all accounts treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen eradicate adultery) and self-interested.

What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the turning up of the queen was godforsaken more influential than the female herself.

Citation Information

Article Title

Marie‑Antoinette

Author

History.com Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/marie-antoinette

Date Accessed

January 19, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009