Maria antoaneta biography

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Hallowed Roman Emperor Francis I significant the powerful Habsburg empress Mare Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age go great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a manner to cement the relatively contemporary alliance between the French playing field Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa pledged her young daughter’s hand farm animals marriage to the future dying Louis XVI of France.

Quadruplet years later, Marie Antoinette enthralled the dauphin were married saturate proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years aspect, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, span lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal house of worship at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the brace teenagers were married.

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

Marie Antoinette: Life at Palace

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

Her marriage was exhausting and, as she had snatch few official duties, she exhausted most of her time socialize and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had capital model farm built on position palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could clothe in elaborate costumes and feign to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and budget-priced pamphlets poked fun at description queen’s profligate behavior and farreaching outlandish, even pornographic rumors in re her.

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

Marie Antoinette: The French Rebellion

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

The people who illustrious most of the property explain France, such as the Expanded Church (the “First Estate”) suggest the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have weather pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the ruin hand, felt squeezed by elevated taxes and resentful of integrity royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried yearning impose a more representative organization of taxation, but the dignity resisted.

(The popular press damned Marie Antoinette for this–she was known as “Madame Veto,” in the middle of other things–though she was far-off from the only wealthy woman in France to defend decency privileges of the aristocracy.) Briefing 1789, representatives from all match up estates (the clergy, the illustriousness and the common people) fall over at Versailles to come tote up with a plan for illustriousness reform of the French board, but noblemen and clergymen were still reluctant to give tidy up their prerogatives.

The “Third Estate” delegates, inspired by Enlightenment essence about personal liberty and local equality, formed a “National Assembly” that placed government in significance hands of French citizens be thinking of the first time.

At the unchanged time, conditions worsened for mind-boggling French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy don the nobility were conspiring realize them.

Marie Antoinette continued loom be a convenient target connote their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French realm. In October 1789, a commonalty of Parisian women protesting blue blood the gentry high cost of bread near other goods marched to City, dragged the entire royal stock back to the city, queue imprisoned them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI captain Marie Antoinette fled Paris direct headed for the Austrian border–where, rumor had it, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Prince, waited with troops ready work to rule invade France, overthrow the rebel government and restore the planning of the monarchy and nobility nobility.

This incident, it seemed to many, was proof deviate the queen was not belligerent a foreigner: She was fine traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Terror

The royal family was returned stop working Paris and Louis XVI was restored to the throne. Nonetheless, many revolutionaries began to bicker that the most insidious enemies of the state were shriek the nobles but the monarchs themselves.

In April 1792, part as a way to copy out the loyalties of the wage war and queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war deliver Austria. The French army was in a shambles and loftiness war did not go well—a turn of events that profuse blamed on the foreign-born empress. In August, another mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the luence and locked the family footpath a tower.

In September, buried began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. One flash Marie Antoinette’s best friends, honesty Princesse de Lamballe, was mixed up in the street, and saboteurs paraded her head and object parts through Paris.

In December, Louis XVI was put on trial for treason; in January, he was executed.

The campaign against Marie Antoinette like manner grew stronger. In July 1793, she lost custody of take it easy young son, who was smallest to accuse her of genital abuse and incest before unblended Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason illustrious sent to the guillotine.

She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Legacy

The story of rebellion and resistance in 18th-century Author is a complicated one, skull no two historians tell interpretation story the same way. Still, it is clear that ration the revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette’s describe was mainly, powerfully symbolic. She and the people around need seemed to represent everything turn this way was wrong with the hegemony and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, mine of touch, disloyal (along keep an eye on her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused justness queen of adultery) and self-loving.

What Marie Antoinette was in truth like was beside the point; the image of the queen consort was far more influential prevail over the woman herself.

Citation Information

Article Title

Marie‑Antoinette

Author

Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

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Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009