Maria Antonia, as she was first christened, was born the fourteenth of seventeen children to Joseph and Empress Maria-Theresa of the Hapsburg Empire. The Hapsburg Court was rather poor by contemporary standards and Maria Antonia, understandable for living in such a large family, did not get a lot of attention. She was, however, used to getting what she wanted. There is an anecdote concerning her childhood in which a little boy who was visiting the court slipped and fell while playing with the Hapsburg children. Marie Antoinette, who was almost exactly the boy's age, caught him. He kissed her and told her "I'll marry you someday." The boy was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
At 14, she was married off to the 16-year-old Dauphin of Austria's worst enemy---France--,all her clothes were burned and she was christened by the name history would know her, Marie Antoinette. Louis XVI, as he was to become in 1774, was certainly not the kind of boy that a dreamy romantic teenage girl such as the Hapsburg Princess was looking for. They were unable to have children at first because his foreskin was too tight, but the French populace placed the blame for the lack of a royal family on "la Austrienne" whose frivolity and high-handedness, as well as her connection to France's old enemy, made her highly unpopular. Marie and Louis eventually had four chidlren. Louis-Joseph, the eldest son, died in 1789 at the time of the convening of the Estates-General. Sophie, one of the daughters, died at age one in 1787. Louis-Charles, who became the Dauphin, died in prison in 1795. Marie-Therese, Madame Royale, lived through the Revolution and married the Duke d'Angouleme. Wishing to be more with her family, Marie Antoinette withdrew from court life, which sparked much resentment among the nobles, and spent much of her time at the comparative simplicity of the Petit Trianon
In the eve of the Revolution, Marie Antoinette's credibility was further undermined by the ridiculous scandal of the Diamond Necklace affair in which Jeanne leMott and her husband, with the ignorant help of Cardinal Rohan, purchased a $15 million livre necklace in the Queen's name leaving her with the bill...and the blame. The trials that followed severely undermined whatever reputation Marie Antoinette had left by this time. She was accused of dallying with both her ladies in waiting and the King's brother the Comte d'Artois. Cheap prints of the Queen in lewd acts could be bought at street corners. Angry sans-culotte women blamed her for the shortage of bread.
Marie Antoinette was much more forceful than her husband in condemning the Revolution. Feeling that all the Revolutionaries were evil, she refused the help of Mirabeau and Lafayette instead asking for her brother Joseph II of Austria (who was a rather weird man himself---he wanted all bodies buried in a common grave as a gesture of egalitarianism and conservation of wood). It was said that her hair turned white in a single night during the September Massacres, when she saw the head of her friend, the Princess de Lamballe paraded past the prison on a stick. Her lover, Count Axel Fersen, masterminded the Varennes flight, but that failed. Marie Antoinette had already hit menopause at 38 when she went to trial. Hebert, as Citizen Prosecutor, accused her of teaching her son to masturbate, a charge to which she "appealed to every mother here" to defend herself. She was beheaded on October 16, 1793, her last words were "Pardon me, monsieur" after accidently stepping on Sanson's foot.
Fictional Representations
One of the first things to remember about Marie Antoinette is that for most of her life she was bored. Raised at one court and married into another at fourteen, she found the detailed and intensely public etiquette of Versailles tedious, tiring and rather intrusive. Romantic and impulsive, she was looking for fun and she found it in any way she could; by betting and losing 10,000 livres at a time at the gambling table, by carrying on an affair with the handsome Swedish diplomat Count Axel Fersen, by building the Petit Trianon in imitation of a simple peasant village. (when the Parisian populace saw it they definitely had some criticism about its accuracy ;)) Like the revolutionaries whom she hated so much and so indiscriminately, Marie Antoinette loved Rousseau. She and her girlfriends, a close-knit group including Madame de Polignac and the Princess de Lamballe among others , (the Queen was so close to these two that it was alleged she was a lesbian) liked to play at being simple shepardesses, and inaugurated more natural hairdos and muslin dresses into the elaborately fashionable Court of Versailles. Marie Antoinette was frivolous and very ignorant of the poverty of the people, but she did not say "Let them eat cake"----Rousseau had actually recorded that of a Greek Princess in 1751, four years before Marie Antoinette's birth. Marie Antoinette's true character became more apparent after the birth of her three children and especially after the Revolution, where she showed herself to be a proud and courageous woman, but a woman stubbornly refusing to accept that times had changed for the monarchy.
