Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), Queen Consort (1774-1792) of Louis XVI of France. Marie Antoinette’s unpopularity helped discredit the monarchy in the period before the French Revolution.

Born in Vienna on November 2, 1755, Marie Antoinette was one of the daughters of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. Her marriage in 1770 to Louis, the heir to the French throne, was intended to cement an alliance between France and her parents’ dynasty, the Habsburgs of Austria. After her husband succeeded to the throne in 1774, the couple had two daughters and two sons: Marie-Thérèse (1778), Louis-Joseph Xavier François (1781, who died in 1789), Louis-Charles (1785), and Marie Sophie Hélène Beatrice (1786, who died a year later).

Disliked by the French as a foreigner, Marie made herself more unpopular by her devotion to the interests of Austria, the bad reputations of some of her friends, and her extravagance, which was mistakenly blamed for the financial problems of the French government. In 1776 she spent 150,000 livres on a garden, built a theatre, and gave expensive banquets. Although Marie was apparently more conscious of avoiding conspicuous spending in the 1780s, especially damaging was her supposed connection in 1785 with the so-called Diamond Necklace Affair, a scandal involving the fraudulent purchase of some jewels. In 1787 it was revealed that the royal family had spent nearly 1,250 million livres, when France’s total income was only 560 million livres. People in France made a connection between Marie’s friends, royal favourites, and corruption in government. There is no evidence that on being told that the poor had no bread she said, “Let them eat cake” to the women of Paris, but this apocryphal story stands as a mark of her reputation before and after the French Revolution.

After the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, Marie Antoinette sided with the intransigents at court who opposed compromise with the moderate revolutionaries, and began appealing for help to her brother, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II. Marie and Louis tried to escape from Paris with their surviving son Louis-Charles in 1791— the flight to Varennes, but they were captured and brought back as prisoners. In 1792 the monarchy was overthrown, and, after the execution of the king and separation from her son, she was sent before the revolutionary tribunal the following year. She was charged with a number of conspiracies. The revolutionaries maintained that she had forced her husband to veto legislation against the French clergy; they also emphasized her greed, and accused her of sending money to her brother Leopold for use against France. Sentenced to death for treason, she was guillotined in Paris on October 16, 1793.