Marie Antoinette

Early life (1755–1770)

Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna was born on 2 November 1755 at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Archduchy of Austria. She was the youngest daughter and 15th child of Empress Maria Theresa, ruler of the Habsburg monarchy, and her husband Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. Maria Theresa gave birth to all of her previous children without any problems. During the birth of her last daughter serious complications arose, and doctors feared for the life of the mother. Her godparents were Joseph I and Mariana Victoria, king and queen of Portugal; Archduke Joseph and Archduchess Maria Anna acted as proxies for their newborn sister.

Maria Antonia was born on All Souls' Day, a Catholic day of mourning, and during her childhood her birthday was instead celebrated the day before, on All Saints' Day, due to the connotations of the date. Shortly after her birth she was placed under the care of the governess of the imperial children, Countess von Brandeis. Maria Antonia was raised together with her sister, Maria Carolina, who was three years older and with whom she had a lifelong close relationship. Maria Antonia had a difficult but ultimately loving relationship with her mother, who referred to her as "the little Madame Antoine".

Maria Antonia spent her formative years between the Hofburg Palace and Schönbrunn, the imperial summer residence in Vienna, where on 13 October 1762, when she was seven, she met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two months her junior and a child prodigy. Despite the private tutoring she received, the results of her schooling were less than satisfactory. At age 10 she could not write correctly in German or in any language commonly used at court, such as French or Italian, and conversations with her were stilted. Under the teaching of Christoph Willibald Gluck, Maria Antonia developed into a good musician. She learned to play the harp, the harpsichord and the flute. She sang during the family's evening gatherings, as she was known to have had a beautiful voice. She also excelled at dancing, had "exquisite" poise, and loved dolls.

The death of her older sister Maria Josepha from smallpox during the epidemic in Vienna in October 1767 made an everlasting impression on the young Maria Antonia. In her later life she recalled the ailing Maria Josepha taking her in her arms. She told her that she would not be traveling to Naples to marry King Ferdinand IV of Naples, to whom she was betrothed, but for the family vault.

Dauphine of France (1770–1774)

Following the Seven Years' War and the Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, Maria Theresa decided to end hostilities with her longtime enemy, King Louis XV of France. Their common desire to destroy the ambitions of Prussia and Great Britain, and to secure a definitive peace between their respective countries led them to seal their alliance with a marriage: on 7 February 1770, Louis XV formally requested the hand of Maria Antonia for his eldest surviving grandson and heir, Louis Auguste, Duke of Berry and Dauphin of France.

Maria Antonia formally renounced her rights to Habsburg domains, and on 19 April 1770 she was married by proxy with Louis Auguste at the Augustinian Church, Vienna, with her brother Archduke Ferdinand standing in for the dauphin. On 14 May 1770 she met her husband at the edge of the forest of Compiègne. Upon her arrival in France, she adopted the French version of her name: Marie Antoinette. A ceremonial wedding took place on 16 May 1770 in the Palace of Versailles, and after the festivities the day ended with the ritual bedding. The couple's longtime failure to consummate the marriage plagued the reputations of the royal couple for the next seven years.

The initial reaction to the marriage was mixed. On the one hand, the dauphine was beautiful, personable and well-liked by the common people. Her first official appearance in Paris on 8 June 1773 was a resounding success. On the other hand, those opposed to the alliance with Austria had a difficult relationship with Marie Antoinette, as did others who disliked her for more personal or petty reasons.

Madame du Barry proved a troublesome foe to the new dauphine. She was Louis XV's mistress and had considerable political influence over him. In 1770 she was instrumental in ousting Choiseul, who had helped orchestrate the Franco-Austrian Alliance and Marie Antoinette's marriage, and in exiling his sister, the Duchess of Gramont, one of Marie Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting. Marie Antoinette was persuaded by her husband's aunts to refuse to acknowledge du Barry, which some saw as a political blunder that jeopardized Austria's interests at the French court. Maria Theresa and the Austrian ambassador to France, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau (who sent the empress secret reports on Marie Antoinette's behaviour) pressured Marie Antoinette to speak to du Barry, which she grudgingly agreed to do on New Year's Day 1772. She merely commented to her, "There are a lot of people at Versailles today", but it was enough for du Barry, who was satisfied with this recognition, and the crisis passed.

Queen of France and Navarre (1774–1792)

Early years (1774–1778)

On 10 May 1774, upon the death of Louis XV, the dauphin ascended the throne as King Louis XVI of France and Navarre with Marie Antoinette as his queen consort. At the outset, the new queen had limited political influence with her husband, who, with the support of his two most important ministers, Chief Minister Maurepas and Foreign Minister Vergennes, blocked several of her candidates from assuming important positions, including Choiseul. The queen did play a decisive role in the disgrace and exile of the most powerful of Louis XV's ministers, the Duc d'Aiguillon.

On 24 May 1774, two weeks after the death of Louis XV, the king gave his wife the Petit Trianon, a small château on the grounds of Versailles that Louis XV had built for Madame de Pompadour. Louis XVI allowed Marie Antoinette to renovate it to suit her own tastes; soon rumours circulated that she had plastered the walls with gold and diamonds.

The queen was depicted as spending heavily on fashion, luxuries and gambling even as the country faced a grave financial crisis and the population suffered, but she seems to have been exceptionally frugal, when need be, and once refrained from buying expensive presents for her children on New Years because of the plight of the less fortunate poor. Rose Bertin created dresses for her, hairstyles such as poufs, up to three feet (90 cm) high, and the panache—a spray of feather plumes. She and her court also adopted the English fashion of dresses made of indienne (a material banned in France from 1686 until 1759 to protect local French woolen and silk cloth industries), percale, and muslin.

The Flour War of 1775—a series of riots caused by the high prices of flour and bread—damaged her reputation among the general public. Eventually, Marie Antoinette's reputation was no better than that of previous kings. Many French people were beginning to blame her for the degrading economic situation, suggesting the country's inability to pay off its debt was the result of her wasting the crown's money. In her correspondence, Maria Theresa expressed concern over her daughter's spending habits, citing the civil unrest it was beginning to cause.

As early as 1774, Marie Antoinette had begun to befriend some of her male admirers, such as the Baron de Besenval, the Duc de Coigny, and Count Valentin Esterházy, and also formed deep friendships with various ladies at court. Most noted was Marie-Louise, Princesse de Lamballe, related to the royal family through her marriage to the eldest son and heir of the Duke of Penthièvre. On 19 September 1774, she appointed her superintendent of her household, an appointment she soon transferred to her new favourite, the Duchess of Polignac. In 1774, she took under her the patronage of her former music teacher, the German opera composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, who remained in France until 1779.

Motherhood, changes at court and intervention in politics (1778–1781)

Amidst the atmosphere of a wave of libelles, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to France incognito, using the name Comte de Falkenstein, for a six-week visit during which he toured Paris extensively and was a guest at Versailles. He visited the king and queen (his sister) on 18 April 1777 at the Château de la Muette and spoke frankly to Louis, curious as to why the royal marriage had not been consummated, concluding that no obstacle to the couple's conjugal relations existed save the queen's lack of interest and the king's unwillingness to exert himself.In a letter to his brother Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Joseph II described them as "a couple of complete blunderers." He disclosed to Leopold that the inexperienced Louis had confided in him the course of action he had been undertaking in their marital bed; saying Louis "introduces the member," but then "stays there without moving for about two minutes," withdraws without having completed the act and "bids goodnight." Suggestions that Louis suffered from phimosis, which was relieved by circumcision, have been discredited. Nevertheless, following Joseph's intervention, the marriage was finally consummated in August 1777. Eight months later, in April 1778, it was suspected that the queen was pregnant, which was officially announced on 16 May. Marie Antoinette's daughter, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Madame Royale, was born at Versailles on 19 December 1778. The child's paternity was contested in the libelles, as were all her children's.

In the middle of the queen's pregnancy, two events occurred which had a profound effect on her later life: the return of her friend, the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen the Younger to Versailles for two years, and her brother's claim to the throne of Bavaria, contested by Saxony and Prussia. Marie Antoinette pleaded with her husband for the French to intercede on behalf of Austria. The Peace of Teschen, signed on 13 May 1779, ended the brief conflict, with the queen imposing French mediation at her mother's insistence and Austria gaining the Innviertel territory of at least 100,000 inhabitants—a strong retreat from the early French position which was hostile towards Austria. This gave the impression, partially justified, that the queen had sided with Austria against France.

Meanwhile, the queen began to institute changes in court customs. Some of them were met with the disapproval of the older generation, such as the abandonment of heavy makeup and the popular wide-hooped panniers. The new fashion called for a simpler feminine look, typified first by the rustic robe à la polonaise style and later by the gaulle, a layered muslin dress Marie Antoinette wore in a 1783 Vigée-Le Brun portrait. In 1780 she began to participate in amateur plays and musicals in the Théâtre de la Reine built for her by Richard Mique.

Declining popularity (1782–1785)

Despite the general celebration over the birth of an heir, Marie Antoinette's political influence was perceived to greatly benefit Austria. During the Kettle War in which Joseph II attempted to open the Scheldt river for naval passage, Marie Antoinette succeeded in obliging Vergennes to pay huge financial compensation to Austria. The queen was able to obtain her brother's support against Great Britain in the American Revolution, and she neutralized French hostility to his alliance with Russia.

In 1782, after the governess of the royal children, the Princesse de Guéméné, went bankrupt and resigned, Marie Antoinette appointed her favourite, the Duchess of Polignac, to the position. This decision met with disapproval from the court as the duchess was considered to be of too modest origins to occupy such an exalted position. In contrast, both the king and the queen trusted Madame de Polignac completely, gave her a 13-room apartment in Versailles and paid her well. The entire Polignac family benefited greatly from royal favour in titles and positions, but its sudden wealth and lavish lifestyle outraged most aristocratic families, who resented the Polignacs' dominance at court and also fueled the increasing popular disapproval of Marie Antoinette, mostly in Paris. Mercy-Argenteau wrote to the empress: "It is almost unexampled that in so short a time, the royal favour should have brought such overwhelming advantages to a family".

In June 1783, Marie Antoinette's pregnancy was announced, but on the night of 1–2 November, her 28th birthday, she suffered a miscarriage. However, there is more evidence to suggest that she conceived in late July or early August, supported by evidence in a letter to her sister, Marie-Christine, Duchess of Teschen, on 16 November 1783 at Fontainbleau. On All Saint's Day, November 1, she miscarried of a child that was at least three months' gestation and was told by her physician that the tragedy was caused by a blighted ovum, a very early type of miscarriage that does not exceed 14 weeks of pregnancy.

In 1783 the queen played a decisive role in the nomination of Charles Alexandre de Calonne, a close friend of the Polignacs, as Controller-General of Finances, and of the Baron de Breteuil as the Minister of the Royal Household, making him perhaps the strongest and most conservative minister of the reign. The result of these two nominations was that Marie Antoinette's influence became paramount in government, and the new ministers rejected any major change to the structure of the old regime. More than that, the decree by de Ségur, the minister of war, requiring four quarters of nobility as a condition for the appointment of officers, mainly served the interest of older noble families including poorer provincial ones, who were widely seen as a reactionary interest group by ambitious members of the middle and professional classes, by some more recent nobility, and even by the Parisian populace and press. The measure also blocked the access of 'commoners', mainly sons of members of the professional classes, and of more recently elevated nobility to important positions in the armed forces. As such, the decree became an important grievance for social classes that had been habitually supportive of the monarchy and established order, and which went on to supply the bulk of the early leadership of the French Revolution.

Prelude to the Revolution: scandals and the failure of reforms (1786–1789)

Marie Antoinette began to abandon her more carefree activities to become increasingly involved in politics in her role as queen of France. By publicly showing her attention to the education and care of her children, the queen sought to improve the dissolute image that had begun to shadow her reputation in 1785 from the "Affair of the Diamond Necklace", which involved members of her court defrauding jewelers of the price of an expensive diamond necklace they had originally created for Madame du Barry.

The main actors in the scandal were Cardinal de Rohan, Prince de Rohan-Guéméné, and Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, Comtesse de la Motte. Marie Antoinette had profoundly disliked Rohan since the time he had been the French ambassador to Vienna when she was a child. Despite his high clerical position at the Court, she never addressed a word to him. Others involved were Nicole Lequay, alias Baronne d'Oliva, a prostitute who happened to look like Marie Antoinette; Rétaux de Villette, a forger; Alessandro Cagliostro, an Italian adventurer; and the Count de La Motte, Jeanne de Valois' husband. Madame de La Motte tricked Rohan into buying the necklace as a gift to Marie Antoinette, for him to gain the queen's favour.

When the affair was discovered, those involved were arrested, tried, convicted, and either imprisoned or exiled—except Count de La Motte and Rétaux de Villette, who both managed to flee. Madame de La Motte was sentenced for life to confinement in the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, which also served as a prison for women. Judged by the Parlement of Paris, Rohan was found not guilty and allowed to leave the Bastille. Although later commentators claimed that the affair was extremely damaging to the queen's reputation, even going so far as to say that the affair bolstered support for the French Revolution, neither the court records nor contemporary pamphlets implicated Marie Antoinette. Only later, in 1789 after the Revolution had already begun, did pamphlets and caricatures use the affair of the diamond necklace to criticize the queen for avarice and lasciviousness.

Suffering from an acute case of depression, the king began to seek the advice of his wife. In her new role and with increasing political power, the queen tried to improve the awkward situation brewing between the Parlement and the king. This change of the queen's position signaled the end of the Polignacs' influence and their impact on the finances of the Crown.

French Revolution before Varennes (1789–1791)

The situation escalated on 20 June as the Third Estate, which had been joined by several members of the clergy and radical nobility, found the door to its appointed meeting place closed by order of the king. It thus met at the tennis court in Versailles and took the Tennis Court Oath not to separate before it had given a constitution to the nation. On 11 July at Marie Antoinette's urging, Necker was dismissed and replaced by Breteuil, the queen's choice to crush the revolution with mercenary Swiss troops under the command of one of her favourites, Pierre Victor, Baron de Besenval de Brünstatt. At the news, Paris was besieged by riots that culminated in the storming of the Bastille on 14 July. On 15 July Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette was named commander-in-chief of the newly formed National Guard.

In the days following the storming of the Bastille, for fear of assassination and ordered by the king, the emigration of members of the high aristocracy began on 17 July with the departure of the Count of Artois, the Condés, cousins of the King, and the unpopular Polignacs. Marie Antoinette, whose life was as much in danger, remained with the king, whose power was gradually being taken away by the National Constituent Assembly.

The abolition of feudal privileges by the National Constituent Assembly on 4 August 1789 and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (La Déclaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen), drafted by Lafayette with the help of Thomas Jefferson and adopted on 26 August, paved the way to a Constitutional Monarchy (4 September 1791 – 21 September 1792). Despite these dramatic changes, life at the court continued, while the situation in Paris was becoming critical because of bread shortages in September. On 5 October a crowd from Paris descended upon Versailles and forced the royal family to move to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they lived under a form of house arrest under the watch of Lafayette's National Guard, while the Count of Provence and his wife were allowed to reside in the Petit Luxembourg, where they remained until they went into exile on 20 June 1791.

Marie Antoinette continued to perform charitable functions and attend religious ceremonies, but she dedicated most of her time to her children. She also played an important political, albeit not public, role between 1789 and 1791 when she had a complex set of relationships with several key actors of the early period of the French Revolution. One of the most important was Prime Minister of Finances Necker. She blamed him for his support of the revolution and did not regret his resignation in 1790.

Mirabeau

A significant achievement of Marie Antoinette in that period was the establishment of an alliance with Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Comte de Mirabeau, the most important lawmaker in the assembly. Like Lafayette, Mirabeau was a liberal aristocrat. He had joined the Third Estate and was not against the monarchy but wanted to reconcile it with the revolution. He also wanted to be a minister and was not immune to corruption. On the advice of Mercy, Marie Antoinette opened secret negotiations with him and both agreed to meet privately at the Château de Saint-Cloud on 3 July 1790, where the royal family was allowed to spend the summer, free of the radical elements who watched their every move in Paris. At the meeting, Mirabeau was much impressed by the queen and remarked in a letter to Auguste Marie Raymond d'Arenberg, Comte de la Marck, that she was the only man the king had by him: La Reine est le seul homme que le Roi ait auprès de Lui. An agreement was reached turning Mirabeau into one of her political allies: Marie Antoinette promised to pay him 6000 livres per month and one million livres if he succeeded in his mission to restore the king's authority.

The only time the royal couple returned to Paris in that period was on 14 July to attend the Fête de la Fédération, an official ceremony held at the Champ de Mars in commemoration of the fall of the Bastille one year earlier. At least 300,000 persons participated from all over France, including 18,000 National Guards, with Talleyrand, bishop of Autun, celebrating a mass at the autel de la Patrie ("altar of the fatherland"). The king was greeted at the event with loud cheers of "Long live the King!", especially when he took the oath to protect the nation and to enforce the laws voted by the Constitutional Assembly. There were even cheers for the queen, particularly when she presented Louis Joseph to the public.

Mirabeau sincerely wanted to reconcile the queen with the people, and she was happy to see him restoring much of the king's powers, such as his authority over foreign policy and the right to declare war. Over the objections of Lafayette and his allies, the king was given a suspensive veto allowing him to veto any laws for a period of four years. With time, Mirabeau would support the queen even more, going as far as to suggest that Louis XVI "adjourn" to Rouen or Compiègne. This leverage with the Assembly ended with the death of Mirabeau in April 1791, despite the attempt of several moderate leaders of the revolution to contact the queen to establish some basis of cooperation with her.

Civil Constitution of the Clergy

In March 1791 Pope Pius VI had condemned the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, reluctantly signed by Louis XVI, which reduced the number of bishops from 132 to 93, imposed the election of bishops and all members of the clergy by departmental or district assemblies of electors, and reduced the pope's authority over the Church. Religion played important roles in the lives of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, both raised in the Roman Catholic faith. The queen's political ideas and her belief in the absolute power of monarchs were based on France's long-established tradition of the divine right of kings.

On 18 April, as the royal family prepared to leave for Saint-Cloud to attend Easter mass celebrated by a refractory priest, a crowd, soon joined by the National Guard (disobeying Lafayette's orders), prevented their departure from Paris, prompting Marie Antoinette to declare to Lafayette that she and her family were no longer free. This incident fortified her in her determination to leave Paris for personal and political reasons, not alone, but with her family. Even the king, who had been hesitant, accepted his wife's decision to flee with the help of foreign powers and counter-revolutionary forces. Fersen and Breteuil, who represented her in the courts of Europe, were put in charge of the escape plan while Marie Antoinette continued her negotiations with some of the moderate leaders of the French Revolution.

Flight, arrest at Varennes and return to Paris (21–25 June 1791)

There had been several plots designed to help the royal family escape, which the queen had rejected because she would not leave without the king, or which had ceased to be viable because of the king's indecision. Once Louis finally did commit to a plan, its poor execution was the cause of its failure. In an elaborate attempt known as the Flight to Varennes to reach the royalist stronghold of Montmédy, some members of the royal family were to pose as the servants of an imaginary "Madame de Korff", a wealthy Russian baroness, a role played by Louise-Élisabeth de Croÿ de Tourzel, governess of the royal children.

After many delays, the escape was ultimately attempted on 21 June 1791, but the entire family was arrested less than 24 hours later at Varennes and taken back to Paris within a week. The escape attempt destroyed much of the remaining support of the population for the king. Upon learning of the capture of the royal family, the National Constituent Assembly sent three representatives—Antoine Barnave, Jérôme Pétion de Villeneuve and Charles César de Fay de La Tour-Maubourg—to Varennes to escort Marie Antoinette and her family back to Paris. On the way to the capital they were jeered and insulted by the people. During the trip Barnave, the representative of the moderate party in the Assembly, protected Marie Antoinette from the crowds, and even Pétion took pity on the royal family. Brought safely back to Paris, they were met with silence by the crowd. Thanks to Barnave, the royal couple was not brought to trial and was publicly exonerated of any crime in relation with the attempted escape.

Marie Antoinette's first Lady of the Bedchamber, Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan, wrote about what happened to the queen's hair on the night of 21–22 June, "...in a single night, it had turned white as that of a seventy-year-old woman." (En une seule nuit ils étaient devenus blancs comme ceux d'une femme de soixante-dix ans.)

Radicalisation of the Revolution after Varennes (1791–1792)

After their return from Varennes the queen, her family and entourage were held under tight surveillance by the National Guard in the Tuileries, where the royal couple was guarded night and day. Four guards accompanied the queen wherever she went, and her bedroom door had to be left open at night. Her health also began to deteriorate, thus further reducing her physical activities.

On 17 July 1791, with the support of Barnave and his friends, Lafayette's Garde Nationale opened fire on the crowd that had assembled on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition demanding the deposition of the king. The estimated number of those killed varies between 12 and 50. Lafayette's reputation never recovered from the event and, on 8 October he resigned as commander of the National Guard. Their enmity continuing, Marie Antoinette played a decisive role in defeating him in his aims to become the mayor of Paris in November 1791.

As her correspondence shows, while Barnave was taking great political risks in the belief that the queen was his political ally and had managed, despite her unpopularity, to secure a moderate majority ready to work with her, Marie Antoinette was not considered sincere in her cooperation with the moderate leaders of the French Revolution, which ultimately ended any chance to establish a moderate government. Moreover, the view that the unpopular queen was controlling the king further degraded the royal couple's standing with the people, which the Jacobins successfully exploited after their return from Varennes to advance their radical agenda to abolish the monarchy. This situation lasted until the spring of 1792.

Barnave advised the queen to call back Mercy-Argenteau, who had played such an important role in her life before the revolution, but Mercy-Argenteau had been appointed governor-general of the Austrian Netherlands and could not return to France. At the end of 1791, ignoring the danger she faced, the Princesse de Lamballe, who was in London, returned to the Tuileries. As for Fersen, despite the strong restrictions imposed on the queen, he was able to see her a final time in February 1792.

Marie Antoinette continued to hope that the military coalition of European kingdoms would succeed in crushing the revolution. She counted most on the support of her Austrian family. After the death of Joseph II in 1790, she hoped that his successor and younger brother Leopold II would be willing to support her, and Leopold did issue the largely symbolic Declaration of Pillnitz alongside Prussia, in support of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and against the French Revolution. It was Marie Antoinette's hope that the threat of Austria's advancing military would deter further escalation of revolutionary violence. In a letter to her brother, penned in September 1791, Marie Antoinette expressed how she expected the revolution to react: "...it will be effected by the approach of the war and not by the war itself. The King, his powers restored, will be entrusted with negotiations with the foreign powers, and the princes will return, in the general tranquillity, to reassume their ranks at his court and in the nation." In the same letter, she wrote that the fall of France's monarchy and the subsequent rise of revolutionary principles would be "destructive to all governments." Upon Leopold's death in March 1792, his son Francis, a conservative ruler, continued the Austrian policy of positioning troops near the French border and threatening to intervene militarily, yet went no further despite pressure from French émigrés.

Events leading to the abolition of the monarchy on 10 August 1792

The Declaration of Pillnitz and Leopold's and Francis II's positioning of troops led to France's declaration of war on Austria on 20 April 1792. This resulted in the queen being viewed as an enemy, although she was personally against Austrian claims to French territories on European soil. That summer, the situation was compounded by multiple defeats of the French Revolutionary Army by the Austrians, in part because Marie Antoinette passed on military secrets to them. In addition, at the insistence of Marie Antoinette, Louis vetoed several measures that would have further restricted his power, earning the royal couple the nicknames "Monsieur Veto" and "Madame Veto", nicknames then prominently featured in different contexts, including La Carmagnole.

Barnave remained the most important advisor and supporter of the queen, who was willing to work with him as long as he met her demands, which he did to a large extent. Barnave and the moderates comprised about 260 lawmakers in the new Legislative Assembly; the radicals numbered around 136, and the rest around 350. Initially, the majority was with Barnave, but the queen's policies led to the radicalization of the Assembly, and the moderates lost control of the legislative process. The moderate government collapsed in April 1792 to be replaced by a radical majority headed by the Girondins. The Assembly then passed a series of laws concerning the Church, the aristocracy and the formation of new National Guard units; all were vetoed by Louis XVI. While Barnave's faction had dropped to 120 members, the new Girondin majority controlled the legislative assembly with 330 members. The two strongest members of that government were Jean Marie Roland, who was minister of interior, and General Charles François Dumouriez, the minister of foreign affairs.

On 18 April 1792, a crowd of revolutionaries and the National Guard prevented the royal family from leaving Paris for Saint-Cloud to attend mass. The incident deeply angered Marie Antoinette and reinforced her belief that they were not free. Two days later, on 20 April 1792, the king came to the Assembly to propose a declaration of war against Austria. At this point, sentiment was particularly inflamed against Marie Antoinette, who was accused (not without reason) of colluding with Austria. In May, the Assembly dissolved the King's Constitutional Guard and placed the royal family under the protection of the recently established National Guard of Paris. In June, King Louis XVI dismissed several Brissotin (Girondin) ministers, precipitating the final collapse of the monarchy and eruption of revolutionary violence.

Louis XVI's trial and execution

Charged with treason against the French Republic, Louis XVI was separated from his family and tried in December. He was found guilty by the Convention, led by the Jacobins who rejected the idea of keeping him as a hostage. On 15 January 1793, by a majority of six votes, he was condemned to death by guillotine and executed on 21 January 1793.

Imprisonment

The former queen, now called "Widow Capet", plunged into deep mourning. She still hoped her son Louis-Charles, whom the exiled Count of Provence, Louis XVI's brother, had recognized as Louis XVI's successor, would one day rule France. The royalists and the refractory clergy, including those preparing the insurrection in Vendée, supported Marie Antoinette and the return to the monarchy. Throughout her imprisonment and up to her execution, Marie Antoinette could count on the sympathy of conservative factions and social-religious groups which had turned against the revolution, and also on wealthy individuals ready to bribe republican officials to facilitate her escape. These plots all failed. While imprisoned in the Tower of the Temple, Marie Antoinette, her children and Élisabeth were insulted, some of the guards going as far as blowing smoke in her face. Strict security measures were taken to assure that she was not able to communicate with the outside world. Despite these measures, several of her guards were open to bribery, and a line of communication was kept with the outside world.

After Louis's execution, Marie Antoinette's fate became a central question of the National Convention. While some advocated her death, others proposed exchanging her for French prisoners of war or for a ransom from the Holy Roman Emperor. Thomas Paine advocated exile to America. In April 1793, during the Reign of Terror, a Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, was formed, and men such as Jacques Hébert began to call for Marie Antoinette's trial. By the end of May, the Girondins had been chased from power. Calls were also made to "retrain" the eight-year-old Louis XVII, to make him pliant to revolutionary ideas. To carry this out, Louis Charles was separated from his mother on 3 July after a struggle during which his mother fought in vain to retain her son, who was handed over to Antoine Simon, a cobbler and representative of the Paris Commune. Until her removal from the Temple, she spent hours trying to catch a glimpse of her son, who within weeks had been made to turn against her, accusing his mother of wrongdoing.

Conciergerie

At 1 a.m. on 1 August, she was transferred from the Temple to an isolated cell in the Conciergerie as 'Prisoner nº 280'. Leaving the Tower she bumped her head against the lintel of a door, which prompted one of her guards to ask her if she was hurt, to which she answered, "No! Nothing now can hurt me." This was the most difficult period of her captivity. She was under constant surveillance with no privacy. The "Carnation Plot" (Le complot de l'œillet), an attempt to help her escape at the end of August, was foiled due to the inability to corrupt all the guards. She was attended by Rosalie Lamorlière, who took care of her as much as she could. At least once she received a visit by a Catholic priest.

Trial and execution (14–16 October 1793)

Marie Antoinette was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal on 14 October 1793. Some historians believe the outcome of the trial had been decided in advance by the Committee of Public Safety around the time the Carnation Plot was uncovered. She and her lawyers were given less than one day to prepare her defense. Among the accusations, many previously published in the libelles, were: orchestrating orgies in Versailles, sending millions of livres of treasury money to Austria, planning the massacre of the National Guards in 1792, declaring her son to be the new king of France, and incest—a charge made by her son Louis-Charles, pressured into doing so by the radical Jacques Hébert who controlled him.

This last accusation drew an emotional response from Marie Antoinette, who refused to respond to this charge, instead appealing to all mothers present in the room. Their reaction comforted her since these women were not otherwise sympathetic to her. Upon being pressed further by a juror to address the accusations of incest, the queen replied, "If I did not respond, it was because it would be against nature for a mother to reply to such an accusation. On this I appeal to all mothers who may be here." When a juror, Joachim Vilate, told Robespierre of this over dinner, Robespierre broke his plate in anger, declaring "That imbecile Hébert!"

Early on 16 October, Marie Antoinette was declared guilty of the three main charges against her: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the state, and high treason because of her intelligence activities in the interest of the enemy; the latter charge alone was enough to condemn her to death. At worst, she and her lawyers had expected life imprisonment. In the hours left to her, she composed a letter to her sister-in-law Madame Élisabeth, affirming her clear conscience, her Catholic faith, and her love and concern for her children. The letter did not reach Élisabeth. Her will was part of the collection of papers of Robespierre found under his bed and was published by Edme-Bonaventure Courtois.

Preparing for her execution, she had to change clothes in front of her guards. She wanted to wear a black dress but was forced to wear a plain white dress, white being the colour worn by widowed queens of France. Her hair was shorn, her hands bound painfully behind her back and she was put on a rope leash. Unlike her husband, who had been taken to his execution in a carriage (carrosse), she had to sit in an open cart (charrette) for the hour it took to convey her from the Conciergerie via the rue Saint-Honoré thoroughfare to reach the guillotine erected in the Place de la Révolution, the present-day Place de la Concorde. She maintained her composure, despite the insults of the jeering crowd. A constitutional priest was assigned to hear her final confession. He sat by her in the cart, but she ignored him all the way to the scaffold as he had pledged his allegiance to the republic.

Foreign response

After her execution, Marie Antoinette became a symbol abroad and a controversial figure of the French Revolution. Some used her as a scapegoat to blame for the events of the revolution. Thomas Jefferson, who had served as American ambassador in Paris in the 1780s, wrote in 1821, that "Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine," adding "I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution."

In Edmund Burke's 1790 treatise Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was written during Marie Antoinette's imprisonment in Paris but prior to her execution, he laments "the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever" and "Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex." After receiving the news, Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples and close sister to Marie Antoinette, spiraled into a state of mourning and an anger against the revolutionaries. She quickly suspended protections of reformers and intellectuals in Naples, allowed Neapolitan bishops wide latitude to halt the secularization of the country, and offered succor to the overflowing number of émigrés fleeing from revolutionary France, many of whom were granted pensions.

Bourbon Restoration

Both Marie Antoinette's and Louis XVI's bodies were exhumed on 18 January 1815, during the Bourbon Restoration, when the Count of Provence ascended the newly reestablished throne as Louis XVIII, King of France and of Navarre. Christian burial of the royal remains took place three days later, on 21 January, in the necropolis of French kings at the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

Legacy

For many revolutionary figures, Marie Antoinette was the symbol of what was wrong with the old regime in France. The onus of having caused the financial difficulties of the nation was placed on her shoulders by the revolutionary tribunal, and under the new republican ideas of what it meant to be a member of a nation, her Austrian descent and continued correspondence with the competing nation made her a traitor. The people of France saw her death as a necessary step toward completing the revolution. Furthermore, her execution was seen as a sign that the revolution had done its work.

Marie Antoinette is known for her taste for fine things, and her commissions from famous craftsmen such as Jean Henri Riesener suggest more about her enduring legacy as a woman of taste and patronage. For instance, a writing table attributed to Riesener, now located at Waddesdon Manor, bears witness to Marie Antoinette's desire to escape the oppressive formality of court life, when she decided to move the table from the queen's boudoir, de la Meridienne, at Versailles to her humble interior, the Petit Trianon. Her favourite objects filled her small, private chateau and reveal aspects of Marie Antoinette's character that have been obscured by satirical political prints, such as those in Les Tableaux de la Révolution. She owned several instruments; in 1788 she bought a piano made by Sébastien Érard.

A catalog of Marie Antoinette's personal library of 736 volumes was published by Paul Lacroix in 1863, using his pseudonym P. L. Jacob. The listed books were from her library at the Petit Trianon, including many found in her boudoir, and mostly consist of novels and plays. A random selection of her books includes Histoire de Mademoiselle de Terville by Madeleine d'Arsant de Puisieux, Le Philosophe parvenu ou Lettres et pièces originales contenant les aventures d'Eugène Sans-Pair by Robert-Martin Lesuire, and Oeuvres mêlées... contenant des tragédies et différents ouvrages en vers et en prose by Madeleine-Angélique de Gomez. A larger and more official library belonging to Marie Antoinette was kept at the Tuileries Palace in Paris.

Long after her death, Marie Antoinette remains a major historical figure linked with conservatism, the Catholic Church, wealth and fashion. She has been the subject of many books, films, and other media. Politically engaged authors have deemed her the quintessential representative of class conflict, western aristocracy and absolutism. Some of her contemporaries, such as Jefferson, attributed to her as a cause of the French Revolution.

In popular culture

The phrase "let them eat cake" is often conventionally attributed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no evidence that she uttered it, and it is generally regarded as a journalistic cliché. This phrase originally appeared in Book VI of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work Les Confessions, finished in 1767 and published in 1782: "Enfin Je me rappelai le pis-aller d'une grande Princesse à qui l'on disait que les paysans n'avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche". ("Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: 'Let them eat brioche'.") Rousseau ascribes these words to a "great princess", but the purported writing date precedes Marie Antoinette's arrival in France. Some think that he invented it altogether.

In the United States, expressions of gratitude to France for its help in the American Revolution included naming a city Marietta, Ohio, in 1788. Her life has been the subject of many films, such as Marie Antoinette (1938) and Marie Antoinette (2006). Antonia Fraser wrote a biography of Marie Antoinette called Marie Antoinette: The Journey. In 2022, her story was dramatised by a Canal+ and BBC English-language television series. Antoinette is one of the main characters in the 1979 anime The Rose of Versailles and the 2016 play "The Revolutionists".

Children

In addition to her biological children, Marie Antoinette adopted four children: "Armand" Francois-Michel Gagné, a poor orphan adopted in 1776; Jean Amilcar, a Senegalese slave boy given to the queen as a present by Chevalier de Boufflers in 1787, but whom she instead freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a pension; Ernestine Lambriquet, daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of her daughter Marie-Thérèse and whom she adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and "Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire, who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king, had died. Of these, only Armand, Ernestine, and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived at the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid and reportedly starved to death on the street but in actuality was taken in by one of his teachers and passed a few years later of illness. Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine; Armand lived at court with the king and queen until he left them at the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie-Thérèse, and later sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the Flight to Varennes in 1791.