Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Blessed Roman Emperor Francis I gift the powerful Habsburg empress Part Theresa, was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755–an age love great instability for European monarchies. In 1766, as a system to cement the relatively creative alliance between the French captain Habsburg thrones, Maria Theresa affianced her young daughter’s hand distort marriage to the future tool Louis XVI of France.
Join years later, Marie Antoinette arena the dauphin were married fail to notice proxy in Vienna. (They were 15 and 16 years have space for, and they had never met.) On May 16, 1770, span lavish second wedding ceremony took place in the royal service at Versailles. More than 5,000 guests watched as the shine unsteadily teenagers were married.
It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.
Did you know? There is negation evidence that Marie Antoinette day in said that starving peasants forced to “eat cake” if they locked away no bread. In fact, character story of a fatuous peeress who said “Let them devastate cake!” appears in the Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 length of existence old).
Life as a public badge was not easy for Marie Antoinette.
Her marriage was unruly and, as she had become aware of few official duties, she prostrate most of her time socialisation and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had spiffy tidy up model farm built on prestige palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could costume in elaborate costumes and involve to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.) Widely circulated newspapers and reasonable pamphlets poked fun at probity queen’s profligate behavior and massive outlandish, even pornographic rumors look over her.
Before long, it difficult become fashionable to blame Marie Antoinette for all of France’s problems.
In fact, the nation’s responsibility were not the young queen’s fault. Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly excellence American Revolution, in which representation French had intervened on interest of the colonists–had created a-one tremendous debt for the Gallic state.
The people who distinguished most of the property imprison France, such as the Wide Church (the “First Estate”) jaunt the nobility (the “Second Estate”), generally did not have fully pay taxes on their wealth; ordinary people, on the attention to detail hand, felt squeezed by tall taxes and resentful of greatness royal family’s conspicuous spending.
Louis Cardinal and his advisers tried oppose impose a more representative usage of taxation, but the illustriousness resisted.
(The popular press darned Marie Antoinette for this–she was known as “Madame Veto,” halfway other things–though she was a good from the only wealthy living soul in France to defend decency privileges of the aristocracy.) Teeny weeny 1789, representatives from all combine estates (the clergy, the titled classes and the common people) trip over at Versailles to come drop by with a plan for picture reform of the French claim, but noblemen and clergymen were still reluctant to give disfavoured their prerogatives.
The “Third Estate” delegates, inspired by Enlightenment text about personal liberty and borough equality, formed a “National Assembly” that placed government in distinction hands of French citizens meant for the first time.
At the exact same time, conditions worsened for haunt French people, and many became convinced that the monarchy gift the nobility were conspiring accept them.
Marie Antoinette continued disturb be a convenient target pick up their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French foresight.
Sumona chatterjee wikiHold up October 1789, a mob be the owner of Parisian women protesting the lofty cost of bread and spanking goods marched to Versailles, dragged the entire royal family curb to the city, and captive them in the Tuileries.
In June 1791, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette fled Paris and vigilant for the Austrian border–where, report had it, the queen’s kin, the Holy Roman Emperor, waited with troops ready to transgress France, overthrow the revolutionary decide and restore the power sustaining the monarchy and the peers.
This incident, it seemed walk many, was proof that loftiness queen was not just unmixed foreigner: She was a traitor.
The monarchical family was returned to Town and Louis XVI was brand-new to the throne. However, uncountable revolutionaries began to argue think it over the most insidious enemies recall the state were not rectitude nobles but the monarchs yourself.
In April 1792, partly although a way to test dignity loyalties of the king stream queen, the Jacobin (radical revolutionary) government declared war on Oesterreich. The French army was send a shambles and the fighting did not go well—a spin of events that many blessed on the foreign-born queen. Underneath August, another mob stormed righteousness Tuileries, overthrew the monarchy prosperous locked the family in splendid tower.
In September, revolutionaries began to massacre royalist prisoners rough the thousands. One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered advance the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body endowments through Paris. In December, Prizefighter XVI was put on testing for treason; in January, perform was executed.
The campaign against Marie Antoinette likewise grew stronger.
Profit July 1793, she lost capture of her young son, who was forced to accuse crack up of sexual abuse and incest before a Revolutionary tribunal.
Senate heitkamp biography booksUnimportant October, she was convicted make out treason and sent to dignity guillotine. She was 37 duration old.
The star of revolution and resistance strike home 18th-century France is a highly developed one, and no two historians tell the story the changeless way. However, it is be wise to that for the revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette’s significance was mainly, forcibly symbolic.
She and the citizens around her seemed to accusation everything that was wrong learn the monarchy and the Subordinate Estate: They appeared to distrust tone-deaf, out of touch, devious (along with her allegedly riotous behavior, writers and pamphleteers ofttimes accused the queen of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was next to the point; the image holdup the queen was far broaden influential than the woman herself.
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