An archduchess for an alliance
Maria Antonia was born in Vienna on 2 November 1755, the fifteenth child of the Empress Maria Theresa. She was raised for a single purpose: to seal the new alliance between Austria and France, enemies for most of the two centuries before. In April 1770, at fourteen, she was married by proxy in Vienna and handed over to the French on an island in the Rhine, where everything Austrian was taken from her, down to her clothes.
On 16 May 1770 she married the fifteen-year-old Dauphin at Versailles. The marriage was not consummated for seven years, and the court — and Paris — noticed.
The queen of Versailles
She became queen at eighteen, in May 1774. Bored by the rituals of Versailles, she retreated to the Petit Trianon, a small château the king gave her, and later built a mock village in its gardens where she played at country life. She spent heavily on dresses, gambling and friends, and her favourites received pensions and posts. Her spending was a small part of the crown's debt, but it was the part everyone could see; the pamphlets called her Madame Déficit.
The necklace
A fraud she had no part in, and the scandal that stuck to her anyway
In 1785 a swindler, the self-styled Comtesse de la Motte, persuaded Cardinal de Rohan that the queen secretly wanted a diamond necklace worth 1.6 million livres and would pay him back. A young woman disguised as the queen met the cardinal at night in the gardens of Versailles. The jewellers were never paid, the necklace was broken up and sold in London, and the cardinal was arrested. The Parlement acquitted him in 1786. The queen had done nothing, but the public believed the worst, and never stopped.
Cake she never offered
The line most often tied to her, “Let them eat cake”, is older than her reign. Rousseau told it of “a great princess” in his Confessions, written when Marie Antoinette was a child in Vienna, and no source from her lifetime puts it in her mouth. It stuck because it fitted the queen the pamphlets had invented: foreign, frivolous and indifferent to hunger.
Prison and trial
After the monarchy fell in August 1792 she was held with her family in the Temple. Louis was executed in January 1793; in July her eight-year-old son was taken from her, and in August she was moved to the Conciergerie, the prison of those awaiting the Revolutionary Tribunal. Her trial, on 14 and 15 October, repeated the pamphlets: treason, waste, and an invented charge of abusing her son. She answered it by appealing to every mother in the room.
On 16 October 1793 she was taken to the Place de la Révolution in an open cart, her hands tied and her hair cut short. She was thirty-seven.
“Monsieur, I beg your pardon. I did not do it on purpose.”
