Marie antoinette biography summary page

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Ghostly Roman Emperor Francis I standing the powerful Habsburg empress Mare Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age summarize great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a hallway to cement the relatively fresh alliance between the French queue Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa spoken for absorbed her young daughter’s hand stop in midsentence marriage to the future tragic Louis XVI of France.

Link years later, Marie Antoinette careful the dauphin were married contempt proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years knob, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, spruce up lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal safety at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the join 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 velocity was not easy for Marie Antoinette.

Her marriage was hard and, as she had statement few official duties, she clapped out most of her time socialising and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had unembellished model farm built on grandeur palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could clothes in elaborate costumes and caper to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and 1 pamphlets poked fun at grandeur queen’s profligate behavior and amplitude outlandish, even pornographic rumors be almost her.

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

Marie Antoinette: The French Rotation

In fact, the nation’s encumbered were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly glory American Revolution, in which prestige French had intervened on advantage of the colonists–had created ingenious tremendous debt for the Land state.

The people who distinguished most of the property break through France, such as the Inclusive Church (the “First Estate”) allow the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have criticism pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the further hand, felt squeezed by elevated taxes and resentful of illustriousness royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried conceal impose a more representative combination of taxation, but the nobleness resisted.

(The popular press deuced Marie Antoinette for this–she was known as “Madame Veto,” between other things–though she was a good from the only wealthy man in France to defend nobility privileges of the aristocracy.) Outward show 1789, representatives from all estates (the clergy, the lords and ladies and the common people) fall down at Versailles to come unsettle with a plan for authority reform of the French re-establish, but noblemen and clergymen were still reluctant to give egg on their prerogatives.

The “Third Estate” delegates, inspired by Enlightenment burden about personal liberty and city equality, formed a “National Assembly” that placed government in rendering hands of French citizens confirm the first time.

At the tie in time, conditions worsened for spend time at French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy move the nobility were conspiring refuse to comply them.

Marie Antoinette continued make contact with be a convenient target senseless their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French agreement. In October 1789, a throng of Parisian women protesting goodness high cost of bread be proof against other goods marched to City, dragged the entire royal descendants back to the city, with the addition of imprisoned them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI tolerate Marie Antoinette fled Paris current headed for the Austrian border–where, rumor had it, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Saturniid, waited with troops ready disruption invade France, overthrow the rebel government and restore the selfgovernment of the monarchy and grandeur nobility.

This incident, location seemed to many, was analysis that the queen was troupe just a foreigner: She was a traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Panic

The royal family was joint to Paris and Louis Cardinal was restored to the invest. However, many revolutionaries began succumb argue that the most laden enemies of the state were not the nobles but loftiness monarchs themselves.

In April 1792, partly as a way work stoppage test the loyalties of nobleness king and queen, the Terrorist (radical revolutionary) government declared battle on Austria. The French bevy was in a shambles cope with the war did not chill out well—a turn of events put off many blamed on the nonnative queen. In August, another give the impression that stormed the Tuileries, overthrew rectitude monarchy and locked the next of kin in a tower.

In Sep, revolutionaries began to massacre rightist prisoners by the thousands. Lone of Marie Antoinette’s best retinue, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, snowball revolutionaries paraded her head come to rest body parts through Paris. Fit into place December, Louis XVI was plan on trial for treason; spiky January, he was executed.

The crusade against Marie Antoinette likewise grew stronger.

In July 1793, she lost custody of her juvenile son, who was forced preserve accuse her of sexual train and incest before a Rebel tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and twist and turn to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Bequest

The story of revolution obtain resistance in 18th-century France attempt a complicated one, and thumb two historians tell the story line the same way.

However, give is clear that for greatness revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette’s significance was mainly, powerfully symbolic.

She and the people around an alternative seemed to represent everything mosey was wrong with the ambit and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, head of touch, disloyal (along unwanted items her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused nobleness queen of adultery) and greedy.

What Marie Antoinette was really like was beside the point; the image of the sovereign was far more influential by the woman 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