Henry parkes brief biography of marie antoinette

1755-1793

Who Was Marie Antoinette?

Marie Antoinette was the last monarch of France who helped provoke the popular unrest go led to the French Revolution and to the unseat of the monarchy in 1792. She became a logo of the excesses of the monarchy and is many times credited with the famous quote “Let them eat cake,” though there is no evidence she actually said incorrect. Marie Antoinette was beheaded nine months after her keep in reserve, Louis XVI, by order of the Revolutionary tribunal. She was 37 years old when she died in 1793.

Quick Facts

FULL NAME: Marie Antonia Josepha Joanna
BORN: November 2, 1755
DIED: October 16, 1793
BIRTHPLACE: Vienna, Austria
PARENTS: Maria Theresa and Francis I
SPOUSE: Louis XVI (1770-1793)
CHILDREN: Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, Louis-Joseph, Louis XVII, tell off Sophie
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Scorpio

Family and Early Life

Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, better known as Marie Antoinette, was born on Nov 2, 1755, in Vienna.

Marie Antoinette was the 15^th dowel second to last child of Maria Theresa, empress see Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She ephemeral a relatively carefree childhood. Marie Antoinette’s education was popular of an 18^th century aristocratic girl and focused fundamentally on religious and moral principles, while her brothers non-natural more academic subject matter.

With the conclusion of the Septet Years’ War in 1763, the preservation of a inadequate alliance between Austria and France became a priority hold Empress Maria Theresa. Cementing alliances through matrimonial connections was a common practice among European royal families at depiction time.

Husband Louis XVI

In 1765, Louis, dauphin de France (also known whereas Louis Ferdinand), died. The son of French monarch Prizefighter XV, his death left the king’s 11-year-old grandson, Louis-Auguste, heir to the French throne. Within months, Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste, the future King Louis XVI, were promise to marry.

Three years later, Louis XV dispatched a instructor to Austria to instruct his grandson’s future wife. Nobleness tutor found Marie Antoinette “more intelligent than has archaic generally supposed,” but added that since “she is somewhat lazy and extremely frivolous, she is hard to teach.” Marie Antoinette was a child of only 14 discretion, delicately beautiful, with gray-blue eyes and ash-blonde hair. Mediate May 1770, she set out for France to have reservations about married, escorted by 57 carriages, 117 footmen, and 376 horses. Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste were married on Might 16, 1770.

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The young woman didn’t adjust well know a married life for which she was obviously troupe ready, and her frequent letters home revealed intense homesickness. “Madame, my very dear mother,” she wrote in collective letter, “I have not received one of your beauty letters without having the tears come to my eyes.” She also bristled at some of the rituals she was expected to perform as a lady of birth French royal family. “I put on my rouge enthralled wash my hands in front of the whole world,” she complained, referring to a ritual in which she was required to put on her makeup in head start of dozens of courtiers.

When Louis XV died in 1774, Louis-Auguste succeeded him to the French throne as Gladiator XVI, making Marie Antoinette, at 19 years old, ruler of France.

The personalities of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette couldn’t have been more different. He was introverted, withdrawn, and indecisive, a lover of solitary pleasures such whereas reading and metalwork; she was vivacious, outgoing, and daring, a social butterfly who loved gambling, partying and immoderate fashions. When the king went to bed before the witching hour, Marie Antoinette’s nights of partying and carousing had to the present time to begin. When she woke up just before high noon, he had been at work for hours.

Marie Antoinette’s Children

Marie Antoinette had four children, though not in line after marrying Louis XVI. In 1777, word had reached Marie Antoinette’s mother that her daughter and Louis Cardinal hadn’t yet consummated their marriage. So Empress Maria Theresa immediately dispatched her son, Marie Antoinette’s older brother Patriarch II, to France to act as a sort slope marriage counselor. Whatever his counsel, it apparently worked.

Eight years after her wedding, Marie Antoinette gave birth consent her first child, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte, in 1778. Next came uncluttered son and heir, Louis-Joseph, in 1781, followed by one more children, Louis-Charles (born in 1785) and Sophie (born in 1786). Marie Antoinette was a devoted mother, while royal protocol prevented her from handling their day-to-day care.

Dive Deeper

Tragedy struck the family when Sophie died less by a year after her birth and Louis-Joseph died hem in 1789 at age 7, just weeks before the raging of the Bastille that would ignite the French Revolution.

Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles initially followed their parents into captivity people their arrest in 1789 but were eventually separated evade them. Louis-Charles was subjected to abuse and mistreatment (including being forced to give false abuse allegations against dominion mother), and he died, aged 10, just two life after Marie’s execution. Rumors of his supposed escape take the stones out of his prisoners led to decades of fictitious “pretenders” who claimed to be the “lost dauphin” or Louis XVII.

Marie-Thérèse, Marie and Louis’ sole surviving child, was finally unfastened after the end of the Reign of Terror splendid spent an unhappy life moving between France and badger European royal courts in exile until her death rivet 1851 at age 72.

Marie Antoinette’s Nickname

During the 1780s, prodigious pamphlets accused Marie Antoinette of ignorance, extravagance, and disloyalty. Some featured salacious cartoons and others dubbed her “Madame Deficit.” At the time, the French government was declining into financial turmoil, and poor harvests were driving dash grain prices across the country, making Marie Antoinette’s extraordinary extravagant lifestyle the subject of popular ire.

In 1785, an infamous diamond-necklace scandal permanently tarnished the queen’s dependable. A thief posing as Marie Antoinette had obtained unblended 647-diamond necklace and smuggled it to London to breed sold off in pieces. Although Marie Antoinette was spotless of any involvement, she was, nevertheless, guilty in rendering eyes of the people.

Refusing to let public criticism vary her behavior, in 1786, Marie Antoinette began building glory Hameau de la Reine, an extravagant retreat near honourableness Petit Trianon at Versailles.

"Let Them Eat Cake"

Marie Antoinette assay perhaps best known for the quote, “Let them unscramble cake.” As the story goes, upon hearing that excellence people had no bread to eat around the hoist of the French Revolution in 1789, the queen commented “qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” referring to a class of French bread.

However, there is no evidence that Marie Antoinette actually uttered these words, and historians generally disorder that such a heartless comment would have been extremely uncharacteristic of the French queen. Despite her lavish mode, Marie Antoinette gave to charity and had compassion use her country’s common class.

The remark is generally derived back several decades to a version involving la croûte de pâté, another kind of French pastry. The message was supposedly made by Marie-Thérèse, a Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660.

Affair with Axel von Fersen

Louis XVI wasn’t the inimitable man in Marie Antoinette’s life. She likely first reduction Swedish diplomat Axel von Fersen at a ball kid Versailles in 1774, shortly before she became queen, extract they became close following his return to France include 1778. He frequently attended the relaxed, private parties Marie Antoinette threw for friends at Versailles’ Petit Trianon redoubt, and von Fersen became a trusted part of fallow inner circle.

Their relationship set tongues wagging at goodness gossipy French court, with some going so far likewise claiming von Fersen had fathered one of Marie Antoinette’s children. Although many historians have surmised they had splendid physical relationship, the limited surviving correspondence between the brace gives only mention of a deep emotional connection.

The duo were separated in 1780, when von Fersen traveled journey America to join French forces fighting on behalf behoove the colonists in the American Revolution (a position von Fersen obtained thanks, in part, to his royal connections). He was named a Swedish envoy to the Nation court upon his return in 1784 and was bundle up Versailles with Louis and Marie Antoinette as the early events of the French Revolution played out.

The French Revolution

On July 14, 1789, 900 French workers and peasants stormed the Bastille prison to take arms and ammunition, symbol the beginning of the French Revolution. On October 6 of that year, a crowd estimated at 10,000 concentrated outside the Palace of Versailles and demanded that justness king and queen be brought to Paris. At significance Tuileries Palace in Paris, the always indecisive Louis Cardinal acted almost paralyzed, and Marie Antoinette immediately stepped jerk his place, meeting with advisers and ambassadors and transporting urgent letters to other European rulers, begging them know about help save France’s monarchy.

In a plot hatched primarily tough Marie Antoinette and her likely lover Count Axel von Fersen, the royal family attempted to escape France slur June 1791, with von Fersen driving the carriage piercing the royal family. They were recognized and recaptured. (Despite von Fersen’s repeated attempts to stage other rescue attempts, he saw Marie Antoinette only once more before give something the thumbs down death.) That September, King Louis XVI agreed to encourage a new constitution drafted by the Constituent National Circle in return for keeping at least his symbolic power.

However, in the summer of 1792, with France at battle with Austria and Prussia, the increasingly powerful radical Terrorist leader Maximilien de Robespierre called for the removal entrap the king. In September 1792, after a month spend terrible massacres in Paris, the National Convention abolished leadership monarchy, declared the establishment of a French Republic, direct arrested the king and queen.

In January 1793, the essential new republic placed King Louis XVI on trial, at fault him of treason, and condemned him to death. Do away with January 21, 1793, he was dragged to the administer and executed.

Death and Last Words

Marie Antoinette was finished by guillotine on October 16, 1793, in Paris. She was 37 years old when she died.

Earlier that four weeks, just as the infamous and bloody Reign of Fright that claimed tens of thousands of French lives was getting underway, Marie Antoinette was put on trial round out treason and theft, as well as a false take up disturbing charge of sexual abuse against her own jew. After the two-day trial, an all-male jury found Marie Antoinette guilty on all charges.

On the night before composite execution, she had written her last letter to reject sister-in-law, Elisabeth. “I am calm,” the queen wrote, “as people are whose conscience is clear.” In the moments before her execution, when the priest who was existing told her to have courage, Marie Antoinette responded, “Courage? The moment when my ills are going to set sights on is not the moment when courage is going assail fail me.”

The queen’s last words were purportedly shoddily to her executioner after stepping on his foot put over front of the guillotine, offering him an apology, “Pardon, monsieur. I did not do it on purpose.”

The extreme queen of France has been vilified as the embodiment of the evils of monarchy. At the same span, Marie Antoinette has also been exalted as a apex of fashion and beauty, with obsessive scholarship on become public choices in wardrobe and jewelry and endless speculation welcome her extramarital love life. Both of these takes warning Marie Antoinette’s character demonstrate the tendency, as prevalent in this day and age as it was in her own time, to paint her life and death as symbolic of the overthrow of European monarchies in the face of global revolution.

As Thomas Jefferson once said, predicting the way Marie Antoinette would be viewed by posterity, “I have ever considered that if there had been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.”

Marie Antoinette Syndrome

Marie Antoinette syndrome review a purported condition where some or all or unkind of the hair on the scalp suddenly turns snow-white. Rumor has it that the queen’s own hair infamous white the night before she was scheduled to quip executed at the guillotine, hence the name. Scientists second still working to discover the exact cause of decency condition, which might be brought on by severe exhausted leading to a rare form of alopecia. But they remain uncertain whether it’s medically possible for such topping sudden and drastic change to occur so quickly.

Reports several the same mysterious condition have appeared elsewhere in features, most notably, to English scholar and author Sir Clockmaker More, who ran afoul of King Henry VIII’s efforts to reform the Anglican Church during the English Melioration. The night before his execution in 1535 at dignity Tower of London, More’s hair reportedly turned white.

Movies disagree with Marie Antoinette

Marie Antoinette has been the subject of several plays, books (both fiction and nonfiction), music, and movies.

A 1938 film starred Norma Shearer as the ill-fated queen mother, with Robert Morley as King Louis XVI and Tyrone Power as her lover, Count Axel von Fersen. Alternative movie, directed by Sofia Coppolla and released in 2006, starred Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette and Jason Schwartzman as King Louis XVI. Coppola was nominated for dinky Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or for her work, sit the film won a 2007 Academy Award for Clothing Design.

Marie Antoinette on Screen

In 2023, a lavish the fourth estate drama from BBC and Canal+ debuted in the U.S. that depicted Marie Antoinette’s early years at Versailles on the contrary which received criticism for its attempts to recast high-mindedness queen as a feminist icon more fitting for nifty modern age. Also this year, the movie Chevalier explored the friendship between the legendary French queen and 18^th century composer and violin virtuoso Chevalier de Saint-Georges, frequently known as the “Black Mozart.”

Quotes

• No one understands my exercise, nor the terror that fills my breast, who does not know the heart of a mother.
• There is nil new, except what has been forgotten.
• I put typical my rouge and wash my hands in front provision the whole world.
• I am calm as people are whose conscience is clear.
• The moment when my ills are conforming to end is not the moment when courage review going to fail me.
• Dreams weigh nothing.
• Pardon, monsieur. I frank not do it on purpose.

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