Even people who don’t know history, or never heard of the French Revolution, know her name: Marie Antoinette, the last French queen, the one who lost her head on the guillotine.
And what most of us were led to believe about the Austrian-born queen is that she was a vile and selfish person, with no regard for the people or their needs. Who can forget her famous line, ‘let them eat cake’— allegedly said when told that the mob outside Versailles was begging for bread? What kind of person would say that, right?
But Marie Antoinette never said that. One of the most fascinating characters in history, she certainly had her share of crazy things said and done, but this story, as well as many others like it, was never proven. They just became part of the narrative, incorporated into it by her detractors. The real Marie Antoinette, who married the heir to the French throne Louis Auguste (later Louis XVI) at 14, becoming queen at a time when European monarchies were at the height of their power, may never be known entirely. Nevertheless, what we do know for sure shows that she was far from the cold woman she became famous as. If anything, she was more a victim than a villain.
My interest in Marie Antoinette started at an early age: my father had a book about her on an upper shelf in his library, the part supposedly forbidden to us kids — and my favorite. On its cover there was a beautiful woman full of jewels, her back to an ornate gilded mirror. She looked very beautiful in a long white wig and a shiny dress, but her intense blue eyes seemed sad. Years later, in school, I learned her tragic story.
And what I learned, the amazing drama of her life, made me even more curious. It took me to biographies of her — more recently to ‘Marie Antoinette’, by Antonia Fraser, perhaps the most complete. I read letters the French queen wrote from Paris to her mother in Austria and visited places she lived in Vienna and in Paris. The last one — a small cell in the Conciergerie, in Paris, where she spent her last days as a prisoner of the French Revolution — moved me to tears, as it would anyone with a sense of justice: it was there that her infamous trial took place, a mockery of justice that lasted only 2 days, during which serious claims against her were made without proof or chance of defense. The prosecution even accused her of having an incestuous relationship with her only son, something everyone knew to be false. Sad.
For all the privileges she was born into, Marie Antoinette’s troubles started very early. The 15th child of Empress Maria Teresa — the wonder of Europe for her strength and decisiveness as head of the Habsburg Empire — and her husband, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Francis I, Marie Antoinette was born Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna on November 2nd, 1755, the somber Day of the Dead in the Catholic Church. For that reason her birthday was always commemorated the day before, All Saints, a more joyous date.
An Archduchess of Austria by birth, she was a beautiful and sweet girl in her childhood, but a slow learner in school. She had instead talent for music and dance, a beautiful voice and an exquisite way of carrying her head, a feature of her appearance noticed by all. She also loved dolls — even looked like one, said all — and was very close to her father, a charming, pleasure-loving man devoted to his family. Marie Antoinette fondest memories were of him and of her early years, specially of vacations spent in Laxenburg, an adapted hunting lodge outside Vienna, where the imperial family could pretend to be ‘normal’. Curiously, as French queen, later in life, she had a similar place built outside Versailles, the Petit Trianon, where she spent most of her time.
Her beloved father died when she was 9 years old, and a strange episode surrounds his death, as Marie Antoinette later told people: her parents were about to depart on a trip, when her father suddenly paused on his way to the carriage, and rushed back to hug and kiss her again, with tears in his eyes. She confided to some that she believed her father had some presentiment of the great unhappiness that would be her life. She never saw him alive again — he died of a massive stroke during that trip, on 18 August, 1765.
Her mother was devastated with the passing of her husband, and wore black for the rest of her life. A tragic and somber figure, more and more distant from the children, she was nevertheless still the empress, and a master at marrying them off to forge diplomatic alliances with other powerful royal houses of Europe and secure Austria’s influence. Marie Antoinette and her siblings were like pieces in their mother’s political chessboard, and later, as queen of France, she confided to a lady-in-waiting that “I never really loved my mother, only feared her”. Of course it didn’t help that Maria Teresa’s clear favorite was Archduchess Marie Christine, 13 years older than Marie Antoinette, bossy and highly intelligent, something Marie Antoinette was not known for.
What she was known for was a delightful face, a sweet disposition and an enormous need to please. Despite being uneducated and having difficulty concentrating on anything for long, she could win people to her with her affability and soft manners, something even her mother noticed. So, after letters were exchanged between the empress and French king Louis XV, their two countries agreed to have Marie Antoinette marry the notoriously clumsy Louis Auguste, grandson of the French king and heir to the throne.
A curious detail: her mother’s government waited until the young archduchess had her first menstrual cycle, before proceeding with the formalities of such a grand royal wedding. When that happened, Maria Teresa wrote to Louis XV that the ‘the little girl is now a woman’. What she meant, of course, is that her daughter could produce an heir to the throne of France, adding that ‘she loves children and prefers their company to that of adults’.
The wedding ceremony was conducted by proxy in Vienna on 19 April, 1770. Marie Antoinette had never seen her future husband in person, the two had never met, but two days later, perhaps one of the saddest of her life, she left Vienna for Versailles, to be handed over to the French. After an emotional goodbye to her mother and siblings, she joined, with a large entourage, a stately caravan of 57 carriages, all decorated with the arms of Austria and France. For 3 weeks this royal procession crossed all of Central Europe, stopping in each major town for tributes to the archduchess. In her elaborate velvet and gold carriage, Marie Antoinette was said to be exhausted, even distressed. When the caravan finally left her mother’s domains behind, she cried. “I will never see my mother or my country again’, she allegedly said. Premonition?
The highly formal handover must have been difficult for her to endure: when the French border was reached, on May 6, 1770, the first court officials of king Louis XV took over, sending the Austrian caravan - and everyone in it - back home. Then, in a precise ritual, Marie Antoinette was officially handed over to her French ladies-in-waiting, all noble women of the highest rank, who proceeded in stripping her naked of all her Austrian clothes, and in dressing her in French garments. Nothing from a foreign court would be allowed to enter France, explained the rigid and severe Countess of Noailles, a dry woman obsessed with formality and etiquette, who would be her first attendant. Even her beloved dog Mobs was sent back to Austria — no one from her native country was to accompany Marie Antoinette in her new life.
With her royal caravan — and everyone she knew — gone, after a tearful farewell, Marie Antoinette was left alone among strangers, in a strange country - at 14 years of age. A future queen, she was now property of France, and from her womb would come an heir to the French throne.
On to Versailles.
(to be continued)
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