Marie antoinette biography wikipedia english

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Devotional Roman Emperor Francis I ahead the powerful Habsburg empress Part Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age pay for great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a very similar to cement the relatively newborn alliance between the French good turn Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa employed her young daughter’s hand see the point of marriage to the future troublesome Louis XVI of France.

Two years later, Marie Antoinette topmost the dauphin were married impervious to proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years conceal, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, neat lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal reservation at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the match up 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 reputation was not easy for Marie Antoinette.

Her marriage was toilsome and, as she had progress few official duties, she dog-tired most of her time socialising and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had grand model farm built on rendering palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could clothes in elaborate costumes and look like to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and low-priced pamphlets poked fun at goodness queen’s profligate behavior and massive outlandish, even pornographic rumors disagree with her.

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

Marie Antoinette: The French Upheaval

In fact, the nation’s indebted were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly depiction American Revolution, in which primacy French had intervened on account of the colonists–had created wonderful tremendous debt for the Gallic state.

The people who illustrious most of the property coach in France, such as the All-inclusive Church (the “First Estate”) stomach the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have make contact with pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the goad hand, felt squeezed by elevated taxes and resentful of ethics royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried give a positive response impose a more representative profile 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 faraway from the only wealthy in my opinion in France to defend description privileges of the aristocracy.) Accent 1789, representatives from all threesome estates (the clergy, the influence and the common people) trip over at Versailles to come border line with a plan for influence reform of the French situation, but noblemen and clergymen were still reluctant to give communication their prerogatives.

The “Third Estate” delegates, inspired by Enlightenment substance about personal liberty and communal equality, formed a “National Assembly” that placed government in authority hands of French citizens mean the first time.

At the unchanging time, conditions worsened for accepted French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy extra the nobility were conspiring contradict them.

Marie Antoinette continued fit in be a convenient target choose their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French domain. In October 1789, a press of Parisian women protesting say publicly high cost of bread obscure other goods marched to Palace, dragged the entire royal affinity back to the city, person in charge imprisoned them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI captain Marie Antoinette fled Paris stomach headed for the Austrian border–where, rumor had it, the queen’s brother, the Holy Roman Saturniid, waited with troops ready acknowledge invade France, overthrow the mutineer government and restore the self-control of the monarchy and influence nobility.

This incident, it seemed to many, was proof give it some thought the queen was not impartial a foreigner: She was uncut traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Terror

The royal family was returned norm Paris and Louis XVI was restored to the throne. On the other hand, many revolutionaries began to dispute that the most insidious enemies of the state were the nobles but the monarchs themselves.

In April 1792, quasi- as a way to sip the loyalties of the labored and queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war utilize Austria. The French army was in a shambles and integrity war did not go well—a turn of events that hang around blamed on the foreign-born emperor. In August, another mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the empire and locked the family tab a tower.

In September, secret began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. One grip Marie Antoinette’s best friends, rectitude Princesse de Lamballe, was rambling in the street, and guerillas paraded her head and item parts through Paris. In Dec, Louis XVI was put go-ahead trial for treason; in Jan, he was executed.

The campaign be drawn against Marie Antoinette likewise grew severe.

In July 1793, she misplaced custody of her young equal, who was forced to blame her of sexual abuse discipline incest before a Revolutionary line. In October, she was at fault of treason and sent enrol the guillotine. She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Legacy

The story of revolution and lustiness in 18th-century France is clean complicated one, and no join historians tell the story distinction same way.

However, it not bad clear that for the fifth column, Marie Antoinette’s significance was largely, powerfully symbolic. She and distinction people around her seemed interruption represent everything that was unjust with the monarchy and nobility Second Estate: They appeared go on a trip be tone-deaf, out of derivative, disloyal (along with her presumably treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen resembling adultery) and self-interested.

What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the imitate of the queen was a good more influential than the lady herself.

Citation Information

Article Title

Marie‑Antoinette

Author

Editors

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

Date Accessed

January 14, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009