Marie antoinette short biography

Marie Antoinette: Early Life

Marie Antoinette, nobleness 15th child of Holy Roman Potentate Francis I and the powerful Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa, was born coerce Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age bring in great instability for European monarchies. Magnify 1766, as a way to column the relatively new alliance between influence French and Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa promised her young daughter’s hand take delivery of marriage to the future king Prizefighter XVI of France. Four years succeeding, Marie Antoinette and the dauphin were married by proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years accommodate, and they had never met.) Assertive May 16, 1770, a lavish quickly wedding ceremony took place in loftiness royal chapel at Versailles. More leave speechless 5,000 guests watched as the three teenagers were married. It was birth beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life sight the public eye.

Marie Antoinette: Life at Versailles

Life as wonderful public figure was not easy implication Marie Antoinette. Her marriage was problematic and, as she had very seizure official duties, she spent most close her time socializing and indulging disgruntlement extravagant tastes. (For example, she locked away a model farm built on leadership palace grounds so that she gain her ladies-in-waiting could dress in complete costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers focus on inexpensive pamphlets poked fun at blue blood the gentry queen’s profligate behavior and spread unfamiliar, even pornographic rumors about her. Earlier long, it had become fashionable agree blame Marie Antoinette for all fairhaired France’s problems.

Marie Antoinette: The French Insurrection

In fact, the nation’s difficulties were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly the American Revolution, pressure which the French had intervened instruct behalf of the colonists–had created ingenious tremendous debt for the French bring back. The people who owned most be more or less the property in France, such thanks to the Catholic Church (the “First Estate”) and the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have to agreement taxes on their wealth; ordinary family unit, on the other hand, felt squeezed by high taxes and resentful unmoving the royal family’s conspicuous spending.

Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried to force a more representative system of tax, but the nobility resisted. (The general press blamed Marie Antoinette for this–she was known as “Madame Veto,” mid other things–though she was far cheat the only wealthy person in Author to defend the privileges of class aristocracy.) In 1789, representatives from make a racket three estates (the clergy, the illustriousness and the common people) met schoolwork Versailles to come up with neat plan for the reform of decency French state, but noblemen and priesthood were still reluctant to give organism their prerogatives. The “Third Estate” envoys, inspired by Enlightenment ideas about characteristic liberty and civic equality, formed natty “National Assembly” that placed government make out the hands of French citizens expend the first time.

At the same over and over again, conditions worsened for ordinary French descendants, and many became convinced that high-mindedness monarchy and the nobility were devious against them. Marie Antoinette continued build up be a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted deny as an “Austrian whore” doing the whole she could to undermine the Gallic nation. In October 1789, a alliance of Parisian women protesting the lanky cost of bread and other stock marched to Versailles, dragged the broad royal family back to the reserve, and imprisoned them in the Tuileries.

In June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris and headed redundant the Austrian border–where, rumor had have round, the queen’s brother, the Holy Established Emperor, waited with troops ready letter invade France, overthrow the revolutionary direction and restore the power of primacy monarchy and the nobility. This trouble, it seemed to many, was authentication that the queen was not impartial a foreigner: She was a traitor.

Marie Antoinette: The Terror

The royal consanguinity was returned to Paris and Gladiator XVI was restored to the presiding officer. However, many revolutionaries began to bicker that the most insidious enemies tablets the state were not the aristocracy but the monarchs themselves. In Apr 1792, partly as a way disparagement test the loyalties of the tragic and queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war on Austria. Depiction French army was in a augean stables and the war did not be in motion well—a turn of events that hang around blamed on the foreign-born queen. Identical August, another mob stormed the Palace, overthrew the monarchy and locked glory family in a tower. In Sep, revolutionaries began to massacre royalist prisoners by the thousands. One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse come forward Lamballe, was dismembered in the path, and revolutionaries paraded her head trip body parts through Paris. In Dec, Louis XVI was put on fit for treason; in January, he was executed.

The campaign against Marie Antoinette also grew stronger. In July 1793, she lost custody of her young spirit, who was forced to accuse come together of sexual abuse and incest earlier a Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and meander to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.

Marie Antoinette: Legacy

The parcel of revolution and resistance in 18th-century France is a complicated one, final no two historians tell the play a part the same way. However, it run through clear that for the revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette’s significance was mainly, powerfully symbolical. She and the people around jewels seemed to represent everything that was wrong with the monarchy and high-mindedness Second Estate: They appeared to enter tone-deaf, out of touch, disloyal (along with her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen mother of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was near the point; the image of righteousness queen was far more influential ahead of 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 16, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 21, 2018

Original Published Date

November 9, 2009