One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body parts through Paris. In September, revolutionaries began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. In August, another mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the monarchy and locked the family in a tower. The French army was in a shambles and the war did not go well-a turn of events that many blamed on the foreign-born queen. In April 1792, partly as a way to test the loyalties of the king and queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war on Austria.
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However, many revolutionaries began to argue that the most insidious enemies of the state were not the nobles but the monarchs themselves. The royal family was returned to Paris and Louis XVI was restored to the throne. This incident, it seemed to many, was proof that the queen was not just a foreigner: She was a traitor. In June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris and headed for the Austrian border–where, rumor had it, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Emperor, waited with troops ready to invade France, overthrow the revolutionary government and restore the power of the monarchy and the nobility. In October 1789, a mob of Parisian women protesting the high cost of bread and other goods marched to Versailles, dragged the entire royal family back to the city, and imprisoned them in the Tuileries. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French nation. Marie Antoinette continued to be a convenient target for their rage. Before long, it had become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.Īt the same time, conditions worsened for ordinary French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy and the nobility were conspiring against them. (For example, she had a model farm built on the palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could dress in elaborate costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and inexpensive pamphlets poked fun at the queen’s profligate behavior and spread outlandish, even pornographic rumors about her. Her marriage was difficult and, as she had very few official duties, she spent most of her time socializing and indulging her extravagant tastes. Life as a public figure was not easy for Marie Antoinette. In fact, the story of a fatuous noblewoman who said “Let them eat cake!” appears in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 years old). It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.ĭid you know? There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that starving peasants should “eat cake” if they had no bread. More than 5,000 guests watched as the two teenagers were married. (They were 15 and 16 years old, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, a lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal chapel at Versailles.
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Four years later, Marie Antoinette and the dauphin were married by proxy in Vienna. In 1766, as a way to cement the relatively new alliance between the French and Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa promised her young daughter’s hand in marriage to the future king Louis XVI of France. Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age of great instability for European monarchies. She was convicted and sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. In 1793, the king was executed then, Marie Antoinette was arrested and tried for trumped-up crimes against the French republic. After the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789, the royal family was forced to live under the supervision of revolutionary authorities. The young couple soon came to symbolize all of the excesses of the reviled French monarchy, and Marie Antoinette herself became the target of a great deal of vicious gossip.
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Marie Antoinette: The French Revolutionīorn in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old.