She barely paused in her paperwork to give birth on November 2, 1755, to her 15th child, In France, Louis Auguste, the 11-year-old grandson of French monarch Louis XV, became a prime matrimonial candidate when, in 1765, his father, Louis Ferdinand, died, making the grandson heir to the throne. Let us know if you have suggestions to improve this article (requires login). Thomas Jefferson, minister to France under Louis XVI, famously asserted that if Marie Antoinette had been cloistered in a convent, the French Revolution would never have taken place. On the way out, Baulez, who has worked at the former royal palace for four decades, locked the gate with a heavy iron key. Marie Antoinette The teenage queen was embraced by France in 1770. It was only the beginning; by all accounts, the marriage went unconsummated for seven years. Instead, she urged the necessity of an armed congress of the powers to negotiate from strength for the restoration of the royal authority. The former queen summoned up a stirring denunciation. Her embarrassment made Louis more vulnerable than ever. In an adjoining room, Baulez shows me the infamous pale blue boudoir with mirrored interior shutters that the queen could raise and lower at will. The queen would, of course, repay him. The awkward, myopic heir apparent suffered from feelings of unworthiness, despite a facility for languages and a passion for history, geography and science. In Varennes, 130 miles east of Paris, a band of armed villagers accosted the king, who had been recognized inside the conspicuous berlin, and forced the royal entourage into a municipal official's house. Marie Antoinette would likely have been perfectly happy to have played only a ceremonial part as queen. Instead, emissaries dispatched by the Assembly arrived with orders to return the family to Paris. As an open tumbrel cart carrying the condemned woman rolled through the streets to what is now the Place de la Concorde, Marie Antoinette, two weeks shy of her 38th birthday, but appearing far older, maintained a stoic pose, captured in Jacques-Louis David's harsh sketch (below) from the rue Sainte-Honoré. Our 18th Annual Photo Contest is now open! But the trial's conclusion was foregone. Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-Ariz.) voted against an amendment to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour over five years, which Sanders introduced after the Senate Parliamentarian ruled … In a shocking twist years later, on April 17, 1983, over 100 of Sir David's rare timepieces, including the Marie-Antoinette, disappeared into thin air overnight. "People imagined mirrors surrounding a bed for secret trysts," he says, "but she was just trying to keep curious passersby from peering inside." Thousands of people were executed including Queen Marie Antoinette and many of Robespierre's political rivals. "She wanted a domain reserved for her intimate circle of friends," says Baulez, as we tour the Trianon. or Added to any sexual frustration Marie Antoinette may have felt was her homesickness ("Madame, My very dear mother," she wrote, "I have not received one of your dear letters without having the tears come to my eyes.") "Tribulation first makes one realize what one is," the queen wrote in August 1791, soon after the royal family's failed escape attempt from their detention in Paris. "She wasn't interested in dignity, but the picturesque. Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article. For her May 1770 wedding, she was escorted to France amid an entourage that included 57 carriages, 117 footmen and 376 horses. Meghan McCain and other Twitter users compare Ted Cruz to Marie Antoinette as he leaves Texas amid storm. But I had to admit that there is a poignancy about the playhouse and its fantasy world. By now the 27-year-old queen—mother of a 4 1/2-year-old daughter, Marie Thérèse Charlotte,and a son, the Dauphin Louis Joseph Xavier, nearly 2—had blossomed into a full-figured beauty, with luminous eyes and a demeanor some saw as dignified, others as haughty. In 1777, shortly before the consummation, Marie Antoinette’s brother, Joseph II of the Holy Roman Empire, came to visit the Palace of Versailles. "I am terrified of being bored," the 21-year-old queen confessed in October 1777 to her trusted adviser, Austrian ambassador Comte Florimond Mercy d'Argenteau. And, like the 300 gowns the queen ordered each year, the story is a perfect fit for Hollywood. Marie Antoinette tried to convince her husband to put down the insurrection, but not wanting to provoke an all-out conflict, he refused, effectively ceding Paris to the revolutionaries. A guard spotted the note, and when public prosecutor Antoine Fouquier-Tinville learned that Royalists were scheming to free the former queen (the plan became known as the Carnation Plot), he moved to put her immediately on trial. Meeting secretly with Mirabeau in July 1790, she won the influential legislator over to the cause of preserving the monarchy. The painted, original backdrop depicts a rustic farmhouse hearth, and I can just imagine the young queen reveling in her role as a shepherdess while her witty friends and dull husband, French king Louis XVI, applaud politely. Louis XVI had given it to Marie Antoinette in June 1774, a few days after he became king, when she asked for a hideaway. It was ultimately her husband’s personal weakness and political nullity that forced Marie-Antoinette to play such a prominent political role during the Revolution. Meanwhile, at the same time Marie Antoinette was secretly lobbying moderate republicans in the Assembly for a constitutional monarchy, she was also writing to European rulers that the "monstreuse" constitution was "a tissue of unworkable absurdities" and the Assembly "a heap of blackguards, madmen and beasts." After a unanimous vote by members of the Convention (with a few abstentions) that Louis had conspired against the state, members of the more moderate revolutionary faction argued that the former king should be confined until the end of the war with Austria, then sent into exile. They arranged for the king and queen to escape from Paris on the night of June 20, but Revolutionary forces apprehended the royal couple at Varennes (June 25) and escorted them back to Paris. Around midnight of Fersen's second day, Marie Antoinette bade him farewell—for the last time. She was brought before the Revolutionary tribunal on October 14, 1793, and was guillotined two days later. On September 19, 1783, in Versailles, a Montgolfiere hot air balloon carrying a sheep, a rooster, and a duck flew for eight minutes in front of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the French court. Marie-Antoinette spent the remainder of her life in Parisian prisons. Where Louis was indecisive, thrifty and over-serious, Marie Antoinette was quick to make up her mind, extravagant and lighthearted. During the crises of 1789 as well as those to come, Marie-Antoinette proved to be stronger and more decisive than her husband. The 11th daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, Marie-Antoinette was just 14 years old when she was married to the dauphin Louis, grandson of France’s King Louis XV, on May 16, 1770. Many historians conclude that Louis suffered from phimosis, a physiological handicap that makes sex painful, and that he eventually had surgery to correct the problem. We may go to Cancun there is a direct flight at 445pm and hotels w capacity. Vote for the Readers' Choice winner of the 18th Annual Smithsonian Magazine Photo Contest, Polar Bears Live on the Edge of the Climate Change Crisis, Inside Naples' World-Famous Pizza Culture, How Navajo Physicians Are Battling the Covid-19 Pandemic. For the former royal family, now prisoners in the Temple tower, the next two months passed improbably in something like domestic tranquility. When a small contingent of Royalist troops arrived to free them, Louis vacillated, then, fearing a confrontation with the steadily growing mob brandishing arms outside the house, declined the troops' help, choosing instead to wait for Bouillé. A failed harvest had made the price of grain skyrocket, and mobs were rioting in the streets of Paris, demanding cheap bread. The next day, news that the union had not been consummated spread through the court. It was with the assistance of the Swedish count Hans Axel von Fersen, French aristocrat Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, and royalist general François-Claude-Amour de Bouillé that the plans were laid for the flight of the royal family to Montmédy, on the eastern frontier. The role that she played in French internal and foreign policy between the accession of Louis XVI and the outbreak of the Revolution has probably been much exaggerated. How could the queen spend the nation's money, at a time of financial crisis, on her private hideaway, critics asked. 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By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. Pandemic or not, it's a theatre space that very rarely sees an audience: Marie-Antoinette's personal playhouse in the grounds of Versailles is a fragile historical gem in need of delicate care. When the jewelers demanded payment in August 1785, Marie Antoinette was livid with rage and Louis ordered Rohan arrested. In a sermon at the town's Church of Saint Louis, the Bishop of Nancy railed against the queen's profligate spending. Popular hatred of Marie-Antoinette contributed to the monarchy’s overthrow in 1792 and to her and Louis XVI’s subsequent imprisonment. "You lead a dissipated life," the mother railed in 1775. Can You Spread Covid-19 After Getting Vaccinated? Ultimately, even Marie Antoinette herself grasped how suffering gave her fortitude. Marie refused to involve herself in politics in France, possibly because she lacked any real knowledge or interest in it. The affair of the necklace provided further fodder for scandal-mongering pamphleteers and journalists already intent on portraying the queen as greedy and corrupt. Yet by the time of her execution 23 years later, she was reviled. The 1938 film Marie Antoinette, starring Norma Shearer and Robert Morley, is considered a classic of historical melodrama. "Courage?" Her body was placed in a coffin and tossed into a common grave in a cemetery behind the Church of the Madeleine. At the time I was there, the theater was closed to most visitors (it is now open to the public from April 1 through October 31), and I wanted to take full advantage of my access. But instead of following Bouillé's advice to make the trip in two light carriages, the queen insisted on keeping the family together in a lumbering coach called a berlin, encumbered with a silver dinner service, a clothes-press, and a small wine chest. From then on, she could do no right. Marie Antoinette's fairy tale turned tragedy has spawned biographies, fictionalizations, operas, plays, ballets and memoirs. He was allowed to spend a few hours with his wife, son, daughter and sister before being led to the guillotine on January 21 and executed before a crowd estimated at 20,000. The fall of finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1776 must be attributed to the hostility of chief royal adviser Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, and to the differences that arose between Turgot and foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, over French participation in the American Revolution rather than to the direct intervention of the queen. They had met at a Paris opera ball in January 1774, when Fersen, the 18-year-old son of a wealthy Swedish nobleman, was making the grand tour. In 1774, when her husband ascended the throne as Louis XVI, she became queen. After a crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the queen failed to convince Louis to take refuge with his army at Metz. The overall effect of the Petit Trianon was—and remains—quaintly charming, but the total bill, including the Hameau, came to more than two million francs (the equivalent of more than $6 million today). Marie Antoinette syndrome is an alleged condition of hair suddenly turning white. Marie-Antoinette was the youngest daughter of the Holy Roman emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa. But Louis' weakness forced her to take a more dominant role—for which the French people could not forgive her. For his part, Louis was completely devoted to her and never took a mistress, exhibiting a restraint virtually unheard of in an 18th-century French king. Informed of her daughter's behavior by Mercy, Maria Theresa fired off letter after letter warning Marie Antoinette to mend her ways. The Assembly, however, voted to have the king, queen, their son and daughter, and the king's sister Elisabeth locked up in the Temple tower, a forbidding medieval fortress in the center of Paris. But when his coachmen rolled out the royal carriages, the crowd cut the horses' harnesses, stranding him and his family. After France declared war on Austria in April 1792, Marie-Antoinette’s continuing intrigues with the Austrians further enraged the French. It’s very Marie Antoinette, one of the worst optics I could come up with in an era where there’s been a lot of bad political optics.” Meghan McCain roasted Ted Cruz on The View (AP) Political Clubs Many of the new political ideas and alliances of the French Revolution were formed in political clubs. The softhearted queen, it seems, hungered more for tenderness than power. Louis was taken from his family, locked up on the floor below them and, on December 26, put on trial. Updates? But it was not to be. Now, Sofia Coppola has directed a new interpretation, with Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman in the lead roles. The frivolous, high-spirited tomboy who arrived at Versailles at age 14 was quickly embraced by her subjects. By the time she awoke, around 11 a.m., Louis had been up for hours. She had the tastes of an actress, not an austerely regal queen.". Based in France, Richard Covington writes on culture, history, science and the arts from his home near Versailles. Louis was caricatured as a castrated pig, while the queen was portrayed as a wanton traitor. Louis XV died of smallpox May 10, 1774 and the new king, Louis XVI, and his queen Marie Antoinette ascended the throne. The flight lasted 8 minutes and was witnessed by the French king, Marie Antoinette and a crowd of 130,000. By this time, the Marquis de Lafayette, commander of the National Guard, had arrived with Guard troops and temporarily restored order. Within hours, the triumphant procession—indeed with the guards' heads on pikes—was escorting the captive royal family to the old Tuileries palace in the capital. Unraveling the details of their relationship has kept biographers guessing for more than 200 years, largely because Fersen destroyed substantial portions of his journal and a great-nephew to whom his letters were entrusted censored some and suppressed others. Writing as the queen, de Villette said "she" was too embarrassed to ask Louis for so expensive a present and was relying on the gallant cardinal to obtain it for her. "She was decisive where he was indecisive," biographer Antonia Fraser says in a new PBS documentary Marie Antoinette. Whatever he said apparently did the trick; in any case, the couple wrote to thank him. "I can tell you that I love you," Marie Antoinette declared in one letter back to him. Toward the end of his visit, Louis showed up and rejected Fersen's scheme for escape through Normandy. And what exorbitant tastes she had! When he returned to Versailles four years later, in June 1783, he wrote to his sister, swearing off marriage because: "I cannot belong to the only person to whom I want to belong, the one who really loves me, and so I do not want to belong to anyone." The royal family had been compelled to leave Versailles in 1789 and live in captivity in Paris. Advertising Notice Emaciated and pale, Marie Antoinette maintained her composure at the trial, a grueling 32-hour ordeal carried out over two days. Marie-Antoinette, in full Marie-Antoinette-Josèphe-Jeanne d’Autriche-Lorraine (Austria-Lorraine), originally German Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna von Österreich-Lothringen, (born November 2, 1755, Vienna, Austria—died October 16, 1793, Paris, France), Austrian queen consort of King Louis XVI of France (1774–93). Based largely on British biographer Antonia Fraser's 2001 biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, the new film, also called Marie Antoinette, was released in the United States last month. I did not commune with Marie Antoinette's ghost, as some claim to have done. Learn how likely it is that Marie-Antoinette uttered the famous phrase attributed to her. Louis and his family fled on foot through a courtyard to the nearby Assembly building, where they begged the representatives for protection. On the eve of her execution, Marie Antoinette wrote a last letter, to her sister-in-law, entreating Elisabeth to forgive young Louis for his accusations and to persuade him not to try to avenge his parents' deaths. Against the poverty of late 18th-century France, the five syllables evoke a cloud of pastel-colored indulgence, absurd fashions, and cruel frivolity, like a … And though Marie Antoinette was not on trial, she might as well have been. There the royal couple planned to mount a counterrevolution with troops under the command of Royalist general Francois-Claude Bouillé. Kirsten Caroline Dunst is an American actress, who also holds German citizenship. In more than one sense, Marie-Antoinette was a victim of circumstance. Found guilty of treason, the former queen was sentenced to die. The queen remained wary of Barnave and the Feuillants, and, although she acquiesced in the king’s acceptance of the constitution in September 1791, she warned Leopold II that she was not in favour of either their domestic or foreign policy. Marie Antoinette (1755 – 1793) Austrian born-French Queen, executed during the French revolution.. Marie Antoinette was born in Austria and, at a young age, married to King Louis XVI of France. Within months, 10-year-old Antoine was unofficially pledged to Louis to cement the union of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons—bitter rivals since the 16th century. Louis, 38, was condemned to death on January 16, 1793. Appalled by the growing radicalism of the revolution, particularly its attempts to regulate and control the church, Louis XVI agreed to abscond from the city. She bought a pair of diamond bracelets that cost as much as a Paris mansion. "From time to time, you have to visit a spot like the theater when there's no one else around to give the place a chance to trigger an emotional reaction," he said. Her efforts, for example, to secure the return to power of Étienne-François de Choiseul, duc de Choiseul, in 1774 were unsuccessful. The stigma of being a representative of Austria when a connection with Vienna was unpopular in France remained with her throughout her life. While the horses were being changed, he pleaded with Louis to let him continue with the family rather than reuniting at Montmédy two days later as planned. Arriving in the forest of the royal château of Compiègne, some 50 miles northeast of Paris, the 14-year-old Antoine, now called by the more formal Marie Antoinette, impulsively dashed up to Louis XV ("Après moi, le déluge"), waiting with his grandson outside their carriage, and curtsied, instantly winning over the king, who kissed her. She spent lavishly, but her extravagance was only a minor cause of France’s growing debt in the 1770s and ’80s. On the first day of the trial, the prosecution delivered a bombshell, presenting testimony by young Louis that he had sex with his mother and his aunt. Cookie Policy Crushing taxes were also taking their toll on the populace. Pandemic or not, it's a theatre space that very rarely sees an audience: Marie-Antoinette's personal playhouse in the grounds of Versailles is a fragile historical gem in need of delicate care. She was born on April 30, 1982 in Point Pleasant, New Jersey, to parents Inez (née Rupprecht), who owned an art gallery, and Klaus Dunst, a medical services executive. Historians trace the French Revolution to that summer of 1789. The scandal discredited the monarchy and encouraged the nobles to vigorously oppose (1787–88) all the financial reforms advocated by the king’s ministers. Four years later he returned to the French court as a young military officer and, according to Comte Francois Emmanuel de Saint-Priest—Louis' future minister of the interior—"captured the queen's heart." Maximilien Robespierre, a chief architect of the Revolution, and the fiery journalist Jean-Paul Marat were among the many radical leaders who testified against him during a three-week trial. Her other court expenditures contributed—though to a minor degree—to the huge debt incurred by the French state in the 1770s and ’80s. The opposite might be said of her mother, Austrian empress Maria Theresa, who regarded her eight daughters as pawns on the European chessboard, to be married off to seal alliances. She dashed off letters in cipher and invisible ink to other European sovereigns, pleading with them to invade France and shore up the king's crumbling authority, but to no avail. Marie-Antoinette, mixed-method colour print on two sheets of paper by Jean-François Janinet, print after Jean-Baptiste-André Gautier d'Agoty, 1777; in the British Museum. Still, for more than two centuries, historians have debated whether Marie Antoinette bore the blame for her fate or was a victim of circumstance. The subsequent trial caused a sensation. (Caught masturbating by his jailer, the boy had invented the story to shift blame onto the two women.) That summer, he visited Marie Antoinette nearly every day. In December 1778 Marie gave birth to Marie Thérèse Charlotte. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. Continue When Mirabeau died in April 1791 without securing the Assembly's promise to retain Louis as king in a constitutional monarchy, Louis and Marie Antoinette put their plan into action. Terms of Use Calls for ‘Marie Antoinette’ Ted Cruz to step down over Cancun trip. Although the king and queen were not locked in, and in theory could have left the palace had they chosen to do so, they withdrew into self-imposed seclusion. The name comes from folklore about the hair of Queen Marie Antoinette of France turning stark white after her capture following the ill-fated flight to Varennes during the French Revolution. Certainly she became a scapegoat for nearly everything that was wrong with France's absolutist, dynastic system. Learn about the things movies have gotten wrong about the life of Marie-Antoinette. Although Louis privately detested the constitution, on September 14, 1791, he took an oath to uphold it, agreeing to share power with the elected Legislative Assembly. Fersen accompanied them as far as Bondy, 16 miles east of the Tuileries. Louis XVI was executed on orders from the National Convention in January 1793, and in August the queen was put in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie. Marie-Antoinette was not, at that time, interested in politics except as a way of securing favours for her friends, and her political influence never exceeded that formerly wielded by the royal mistresses of Louis XV. But it's also clear that in their refusal to compromise, Louis and Marie Antoinette lost everything. "My tastes are not the same as the King's, who is only interested in hunting and his metal-working," the queen wrote to a friend in April 1775. "She was so happy at doing good and hated to miss any opportunity of doing so," wrote Madame Campan, the First Lady of the Bedchamber. and her rebellion against court etiquette ("I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of the whole world," she complained in 1770 of a daily ritual at which dozens of courtiers hovered). Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI’s performance woes in the bedroom were perhaps also rooted in a simple lack of sex-ed. He loved being alone, tinkering with locks; she craved the social whirl. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. "The queen was innocent," Napoleon observed years later, "and, to make sure that her innocence should be publicly recognized, she chose the Parliament of Paris for her judge. By October 1787, they were exchanging clandestine letters about such prosaic domestic details as where to put a stove. (Fersen had made the arrangements, even mortgaging his estate to pay for the carriage.) Meanwhile, the queen gambled recklessly, ordered expensive jewelry and clothes and spent a fortune on creating her own private domain at Versailles—the Petit Trianon. In May 1789, to avert the nation's impending bankruptcy (a series of wars, years of corruption and Louis' support of the American Revolution as a means of weakening England had depleted the French treasury), the king convened the Estates-General, an assembly of representatives of the clergy, nobility and commoners that had not met since 1614. This was because she was regarded, though without justification, as an associate of the reactionary coterie of the king’s brother Charles, comte d’Artois, and because of the aspersions cast on her character by the king’s cousin, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans. Keep up-to-date on: © 2021 Smithsonian Magazine. A little before noon on October 5, a mob of several thousand market women, armed with pikes and sickles, set out from Paris' Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) on a 12-mile trek to Versailles to protest a lack of jobs and the high cost of bread. In October 1789 popular pressure compelled the royal family to return from Versailles to Paris, where they became hostages of the Revolutionary movement. Her most intimate friend from this time onward was the princesse de Lamballe. But the throng, swollen to some 10,000 people, began clamoring to take Louis to Paris. Crowds of angry Parisians lined the streets as the king and queen were taken back to the Tuileries palace, where they were held captive by National Guardsmen. The Assembly allowed Louis to remain as a figurehead on the throne to legitimize a proposed new constitution, but he had little actual political power. Barnave and the Lameth brothers were anxious to check the progress of republicanism and to bring the Revolution to a close, and they gathered like minds under the banner of the Club of the Feuillants. Ultimately, she was condemned simply for being Louis' wife and a symbol of tyranny. By December, however, she was devising a contingency plan to flee Paris for Montmédy, near the Austrian-controlled Netherlands. She ultimately married her first cousin, the Duke d'Angoulême, and died childless at age 72 in 1851 outside Vienna. Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Magazine She never fully trusted Mirabeau, however, and the king refused to contemplate a civil war, which would have been the inevitable result of Mirabeau’s initial plans. In foreign policy the aim of the Feuillants was to persuade the émigrés to return and to prevent Emperor Leopold II (Marie-Antoinette’s brother) from being committed to a counterrevolutionary crusade against France. |. The following day they abolished the 1,000-year-old monarchy and established the Republic. The king seemed unable to act. "She was courageous when he was vacillating."

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