In more than one sense, Marie-Antoinette was a victim of circumstance. In her youth, she was a pawn on the diplomatic chessboard of Europe, as France and Austria attempted to navigate the complex web of allegiances that shaped the continent in the wake of the Seven Years’ War. The 11th daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, Marie-Antoinette was just 14 years old when she was married to the dauphin Louis, grandson of France’s King Louis XV, on May 16, 1770. The stigma of being a representative of Austria when a connection with Vienna was unpopular in France remained with her throughout her life. She was also unfortunate that the timid, uninspiring Louis proved to be an inattentive husband. By the time he ascended the throne in May 1774, Marie-Antoinette had withdrawn to seek companionship and distraction among a circle of favourites and politically vulnerable companions whom she might have avoided if her private life had been more satisfactory. Her most intimate friend from this time onward was the princesse de Lamballe. It was ultimately her husband’s personal weakness and political nullity that forced Marie-Antoinette to play such a prominent political role during the Revolution.
The role that she played in French internal and foreign policy between the accession of Louis XVI and the outbreak of the Revolution has probably been much exaggerated. Her efforts, for example, to secure the return to power of Étienne-François de Choiseul, duc de Choiseul, in 1774 were unsuccessful. The fall of finance minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot in 1776 must be attributed to the hostility of chief royal adviser Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas, and to the differences that arose between Turgot and foreign minister Charles Gravier, comte de Vergennes, over French participation in the American Revolution rather than to the direct intervention of the queen. Marie-Antoinette was not, at that time, interested in politics except as a way of securing favours for her friends, and her political influence never exceeded that formerly wielded by the royal mistresses of Louis XV.
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Louis XVI’s inability to consummate their marriage and the queen’s resultant childlessness in the 1770s inspired rivals—including the king’s own brothers, who stood to inherit the throne if she did not produce a legitimate heir—to circulate slanderous reports of her alleged extramarital affairs. These vilifications culminated in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (1785), in which the queen was unjustly accused of having formed an immoral relationship with a cardinal. The scandal discredited the monarchy and encouraged the nobles to vigorously oppose (1787–88) all the financial reforms advocated by the king’s ministers. This incident was all the more unfortunate for the queen’s reputation because, since the birth of her daughter Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte in December 1778 and of the dauphin Louis in October 1781, she led a quieter and more conventional life. Her second son, the future Louis XVII, was born in March 1785.
Though the queen had supported Jacques Necker’s return to power at the end of August 1788 and had approved of the concession of double representation to the Third Estate, her unpopularity was at its height when the Estates-General convened at Versailles in May 1789. This was because she was regarded, though without justification, as an associate of the reactionary coterie of the king’s brother Charles, comte d’Artois, and because of the aspersions cast on her character by the king’s cousin, Louis-Philippe-Joseph, duc d’Orléans. At the end of May she seemed to have intervened little in politics, as she was distracted by the illness of her elder son, who died early in June.
During the crises of 1789 as well as those to come, Marie-Antoinette proved to be stronger and more decisive than her husband. After a crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the queen failed to convince Louis to take refuge with his army at Metz. In August–September, however, she successfully prodded him to resist the attempts of the Revolutionary National Assembly to abolish feudalism and restrict the royal prerogative. As a result, she became the main target of the popular agitators, whose animosity contributed to the legend that, on being told that the people had no bread, she callously remarked, “Let them eat cake!” (“Qu’ils mangent de la brioche!”).
In October 1789 popular pressure compelled the royal family to return from Versailles to Paris, where they became hostages of the Revolutionary movement. During this time the queen had been deprived of the company of many of her most intimate friends, as they had emigrated after the fall of the Bastille, but she continued to display great personal courage that sustained the royal family both then and throughout its later disasters.
Because of Louis XVI’s irresolution, Marie-Antoinette was to play an increasingly important part in the secret intrigues to liberate the royal family from its virtual captivity in Paris. In May 1790 the queen reached out to the comte de Mirabeau, a prominent member of the National Assembly who hoped to restore the authority of the crown. She never fully trusted Mirabeau, however, and the king refused to contemplate a civil war, which would have been the inevitable result of Mirabeau’s initial plans. They called for an escape to the interior of France and an appeal for royalist support in the provinces. After Mirabeau’s death in April 1791, the queen turned to émigrés and friends outside France for help. It was with the assistance of the Swedish count Hans Axel von Fersen, French aristocrat Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, and royalist general François-Claude-Amour de Bouillé that the plans were laid for the flight of the royal family to Montmédy, on the eastern frontier. They arranged for the king and queen to escape from Paris on the night of June 20, but Revolutionary forces apprehended the royal couple at Varennes (June 25) and escorted them back to Paris.
Discredited by the royal family’s failed escape, Marie-Antoinette attempted to shore up the rapidly deteriorating position of the crown by opening secret negotiations with the leaders of the constitutional monarchists in the Constituent Assembly, namely Antoine Barnave and Theodore and Alexandre de Lameth. Barnave and the Lameth brothers were anxious to check the progress of republicanism and to bring the Revolution to a close, and they gathered like minds under the banner of the Club of the Feuillants. The basis of their secret understanding with the queen was that, after the constitution had been revised so as to bolster the executive power of the king, it should be loyally accepted and implemented by Louis XVI. In foreign policy the aim of the Feuillants was to persuade the émigrés to return and to prevent Emperor Leopold II (Marie-Antoinette’s brother) from being committed to a counterrevolutionary crusade against France.
The queen remained wary of Barnave and the Feuillants, and, although she acquiesced in the king’s acceptance of the constitution in September 1791, she warned Leopold II that she was not in favour of either their domestic or foreign policy. Instead, she urged the necessity of an armed congress of the powers to negotiate from strength for the restoration of the royal authority. This duplicity paralyzed the pacific policy of the Feuillants and did not dissuade the émigrés from their more aggressive designs for the restoration of the ancien régime. After France declared war on Austria in April 1792, Marie-Antoinette’s continuing intrigues with the Austrians further enraged the French. Popular hatred of the queen provided impetus for the storming of the Tuileries Palace and the overthrow of the monarchy on August 10, 1792.
Marie-Antoinette spent the remainder of her life in Parisian prisons. The princess de Lamballe, who remained loyal to the queen throughout the Revolution, was imprisoned along with her. Lamballe refused to take an oath against the monarchy, and on September 3, 1792, she was delivered to the hands of a Parisian mob; they cut off her head and paraded it on a pike outside Marie-Antoinette’s windows. Louis XVI was executed on orders from the National Convention in January 1793, and in August the queen was put in solitary confinement in the Conciergerie. She was brought before the Revolutionary tribunal on October 14, 1793, and was guillotined two days later.
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