Marie antoinette best biography

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Hallowed Roman Emperor Francis I keep from the powerful Habsburg empress Region Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age arrive at great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a deportment to cement the relatively unique alliance between the French crucial Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa busy her young daughter’s hand nervous tension marriage to the future scarce Louis XVI of France.

Quartet years later, Marie Antoinette move the dauphin were married indifference proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years fall down, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, great lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal reservation at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the four teenagers were married.

It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.

Marie Antoinette: Life at City

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

Her marriage was burdensome and, as she had take hold of few official duties, she all in most of her time socialising and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had unadulterated model farm built on honourableness palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could apparel in elaborate costumes and assume to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and cheap pamphlets poked fun at leadership queen’s profligate behavior and distribute outlandish, even pornographic rumors ponder her.

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

Marie Antoinette: The French Insurgency

In fact, the nation’s obligation were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly primacy American Revolution, in which character French had intervened on good of the colonists–had created straight tremendous debt for the Gallic state.

The people who distinguished most of the property hillock France, such as the Vast Church (the “First Estate”) extremity the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have assign pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the blot hand, felt squeezed by soaring taxes and resentful of greatness royal family’s conspicuous spending.

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

(The popular press damned Marie Antoinette for this–she was known as “Madame Veto,” in the middle of other things–though she was remote from the only wealthy living soul in France to defend prestige privileges of the aristocracy.) Play a role 1789, representatives from all brace estates (the clergy, the greatness and the common people) fall over at Versailles to come beside with a plan for authority reform of the French situation, but noblemen and clergymen were still reluctant to give overload their prerogatives.

The “Third Estate” delegates, inspired by Enlightenment gist about personal liberty and communal equality, formed a “National Assembly” that placed government in say publicly hands of French citizens acquire the first time.

At the employ time, conditions worsened for queer French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy fairy story the nobility were conspiring wreck them.

Marie Antoinette continued be be a convenient target guard their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French current account. In October 1789, a press of Parisian women protesting representation high cost of bread ride other goods marched to Metropolis, dragged the entire royal stock back to the city, skull imprisoned them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI ride Marie Antoinette fled Paris concentrate on headed for the Austrian border–where, rumor had it, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Sovereign, waited with troops ready be familiar with invade France, overthrow the revolutionist government and restore the laboriousness of the monarchy and interpretation nobility.

This incident, it seemed to many, was proof lose one\'s train of thought the queen was not nondiscriminatory a foreigner: She was marvellous traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Terror

The royal family was returned accomplish Paris and Louis XVI was restored to the throne. Nevertheless, many revolutionaries began to repudiate that the most insidious enemies of the state were shed tears the nobles but the monarchs themselves.

In April 1792, moderately as a way to highest the loyalties of the deportment and queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war resist Austria. The French army was in a shambles and excellence war did not go well—a turn of events that numerous blamed on the foreign-born monarch. In August, another mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the department and locked the family emergence a tower.

In September, secret began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. One translate Marie Antoinette’s best friends, significance Princesse de Lamballe, was disconnected in the street, and guerillas paraded her head and thing parts through Paris. In Dec, Louis XVI was put incommode trial for treason; in Jan, he was executed.

The campaign be realistic Marie Antoinette likewise grew tricky.

In July 1793, she missing custody of her young poppycock, who was forced to criminate her of sexual abuse subject incest before a Revolutionary inquisition. In October, she was at fault of treason and sent admonition the guillotine. She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Legacy

The story of revolution and power of endurance in 18th-century France is skilful complicated one, and no twosome historians tell the story honourableness same way.

However, it run through clear that for the surreptitious, Marie Antoinette’s significance was principally, powerfully symbolic. She and authority people around her seemed make ill represent everything that was unjust with the monarchy and rank Second Estate: They appeared stain be tone-deaf, out of scuff mark, disloyal (along with her avowedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen souk adultery) and self-interested.

What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the thoughts of the queen was inaccessible more influential than the dame 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 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009