Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette was an Austrian archduchess who became queen of France as the wife of Louis XVI, and was executed during the French Revolution in 1793. Her extravagance, foreign birth and supposed influence over the king made her the most hated figure of the old monarchy, the target of a flood of slanderous pamphlets, and many of the stories still told about her, including the famous remark about cake, are false.

Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna was born on 2 November 1755 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, the fifteenth of sixteen children of the empress Maria Theresa and the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She grew up in the relatively informal family life of the Habsburg court and received a limited education. After the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756 brought the Habsburg Monarchy and France into alliance, her mother arranged marriages to bind the two powers together, and in 1769 she was engaged to Louis-Auguste, the dauphin and heir of Louis XV.

She was married by proxy in Vienna in April 1770 and in person at the Palace of Versailles on 16 May 1770, aged fourteen. She had to learn the elaborate etiquette of the French court, and her mother, through letters and the Austrian ambassador Count Mercy-Argenteau, watched and criticised her constantly. Louis XV died in May 1774, and she became queen at eighteen.

For seven years the marriage was not consummated, a source of humiliation for the couple and of mocking speculation at court and abroad. Their first child, Marie-Thérèse, was born only in December 1778. A son, Louis-Joseph, followed in 1781, a second son, Louis-Charles, in 1785, and a daughter, Sophie, who died in infancy, in 1786.

The young queen spent heavily on clothes, jewellery and gambling, and preferred a small circle of favourites to the formal court. Louis gave her the Petit Trianon, a small château in the grounds of Versailles, where she lived more privately and later built a model rural village, the Hameau, in which she could play at country life. Her real political influence was limited for most of the reign, though it grew in the late 1780s. The Swedish nobleman Axel von Fersen became a close friend and probably her lover; historians still debate the nature of their relationship.

In 1785 the queen's reputation was damaged by the Affair of the Diamond Necklace. A con artist, Jeanne de la Motte, persuaded Cardinal de Rohan that the queen wished secretly to buy an enormously expensive necklace and used a woman impersonating Marie Antoinette to deceive him. The queen had known nothing of the scheme, but when the cardinal was acquitted by the Parlement of Paris in 1786, many people assumed she had been involved. Pamphlets accused her of sexual immorality and of sending French money to Austria; she was nicknamed "l'Autrichienne", the Austrian woman, and "Madame Déficit", blamed for a financial crisis caused mainly by war debts. The story that she said "let them eat cake" on hearing that the poor had no bread has no reliable source; a similar remark appears in Rousseau's Confessions, written when she was a child, attributed to an unnamed great princess.

Her elder son Louis-Joseph died in June 1789, as the Estates-General was meeting. During the Revolution she was among the king's advisers most opposed to concessions. In October 1789 a crowd invaded Versailles, some of them breaking into her apartments, and the royal family was forced to move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. She took a leading part in planning the family's escape, organised with Fersen, which ended in their arrest at Varennes in June 1791. She then corresponded secretly with her brother, the emperor Leopold II, and others, hoping for foreign pressure to restore royal power, and after war broke out with Austria in April 1792 she passed military information to the Austrians.

After the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792, the family was imprisoned in the Temple. In September her close friend the Princesse de Lamballe was murdered in the September Massacres, and her head was paraded on a pike before the queen's window. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. In July her surviving son, recognised by royalists as Louis XVII, was taken from her, and in August she was moved to the Conciergerie prison.

Marie Antoinette was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal on 14 and 15 October 1793. She was charged with treason and conspiracy, including sending money to Austria and helping the enemy, and with a fabricated charge, brought by the radical journalist Jacques Hébert, that she had sexually abused her son. Her dignified reply to the last accusation won sympathy even in the courtroom. She was convicted and guillotined on the Place de la Révolution on 16 October 1793, aged 37. Her son died in the Temple prison in 1795; her daughter Marie-Thérèse was released to Austria the same year and was the only member of the family to survive.

After the restoration of the monarchy, her remains were reburied at the basilica of Saint-Denis in 1815. For the revolutionaries she symbolised the corruption and selfishness of the old regime, and for nineteenth-century royalists she became a martyr. Modern historians, using her letters and court records, have generally portrayed her as a woman of ordinary abilities placed in an impossible position, neither the monster of the pamphlets nor the saint of royalist legend. Her taste in fashion and decoration, and her life at Trianon, continue to attract interest, and she remains one of the best-known figures of the history of France and of the Kingdom of France in its last years.