Marie Antoinette, JOSEPHE JEANNE, the most ill-fated among the queens of France, was born on the day of the great earthquake at Lisbon, 2d November 1755, the fourth daughter of Maria Theresa and the Emperor Francis I. From her cradle she was destined by her ambitious mother to be queen of France, and to that end was educated, although but indifferently, by the Abbé de Vermond. The marriage was negotiated by the Duc de Choiseul early in 1770, and took place on May 16, but was darkened a fortnight later by an ill-omened panic during the great fête of fireworks given in its honour by the city of Paris, in which some hundreds of people perished. The beautiful young dauphiness soon found her position full of difficulties, and the stiff and stately etiquette of the old French court wearied her to death. A mere child in years, married to a dull, decorous, and heavy husband, who was, moreover, for some years indifferent to her person, she found relief in a capricious recklessness of conduct and a disregard for conventions, and so from the commencement laid herself open to serious scandals for which there never was any real ground but her own indiscretion. Her night drives to Paris, her appearance at masked balls, her extravagance and undisguised love for the card-table, and her open favour to handsome and profligate young men, were misread into shameless immoralities, and she had lost her reputation long before she awoke to a sense of her responsibilities. In May 1774 the death of Louis XV. made her actual queen of France, and she soon deepened the distrust and dislike of her subjects by her undisguised devotion to the interests of Austria, as well as her thoughtless opposition to all the measures devised by Turgot and Necker for relieving the financial distress of the country. The miseries of France became in the popular imagination identified with the extravagant pleasures of the queen, and in the miserable affair of the Diamond Necklace her guilt was at once taken for granted, not only by Paris but the whole country, and 'the Austrian' became the object of the frenzied hatred of a starving people. The act of accusation against Calonne was in the eyes of the mob that of the court and of the queen. Showers of virulent pamphlets rained from all sides, and 'Madame Déficit' and 'Madame Veto' were some of the names in which a maddened people shrieked their hatred against their sovereign.
Meantime the joyous frivolity of the girl had changed into the courage and obstinacy of the woman who made herself a centre of opposition to all new ideas, and prompted the poor vacillating king into a retrograde policy to his own undoing. She was capable of strength rising to the heroic—as Mirabeau once said, the only man the king had about him was his wife. And she possessed the power of inspiring enthusiasm in all noble souls with whom she came into contact, as is evidenced by the personal influence she exercised over Fersen, Mirabeau, and Barnave. Amid the horrors of the march of women to Versailles (Octo- ber 5-6, 1789) she alone maintained her courage, and she showed herself on the balcony to the raging mob with a serene heroism that for a moment overawed the fiercest into respect. That same day the royal family and the Assembly left Versailles for Paris amid the plaudits of all the rascaldom of both sexes within the city. But Marie Antoinette lacked consistency even in the part she essayed to play, and to the last she failed to understand the nature of the troublous times into which she had been flung. She had an instinctive abhorrence of the liberal nobles like Lafayette and Mirabeau, and, if she professed to consult them, she also consulted with other men, and refused to trust them altogether. Again the indecision of Louis and his dread of civil war hampered her plans, and the intrigues of the emigrés did her cause more harm than all her domestic enemies together.
The queen was at length prevailed on by Count de Mercy-Argenteau, at the instigation of Count de la Marck, to make terms with Mirabeau, and she gave the great tribune an interview at Saint-Cloud, July 3, 1790. But she was too self-willed and independent frankly to follow his advice, for she abhorred his dream of a constitutional monarchy based on the free consent of an enfranchised people. His death in April 1791 removed the last hope of saving the monarchy, and less than three months later occurred the fatal flight to Bouillé at the frontier, intercepted at Varennes, against which Mirabeau had ever pleaded as a fatal step. The storming of the Tuileries and slaughter of the brave Swiss guards (10th August 1792), the transference to the Temple, the trial and execution of the king (21st January 1793), quickly followed, and ere long her son was torn from her arms, and she herself sent to the Conciergerie like a common criminal (2d August 1793). After eight weeks more of sickening insult and brutality, the 'Widow Capet' was herself arraigned in her ragged dress and gray hair before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Under the torture of her trial she bore herself with the calm dignity and resignation of the martyr: one truthful touch stands out with infinite pathos across the century between—'she was sometimes observed moving her fingers, as when one plays on the piano.' Her answers were short with the simplicity of truth: 'You persist, then, in denial?'—'My plan is not denial: it is the truth I have said, and I persist in that.' One charge unspeakable in its infamy was tendered by Hébert, which he had got her wretched son aged eight years to sign. 'A mother can make no answer to such questions; I appeal to every mother here present,' was her only reply. A deep murmur ran through the court—'Miserable fool,' said Robespierre, 'he will make our enemies objects of compassion.' After two days and nights of questioning came the inevitable sentence, and on the same day, October 16, 1793, she left the world and all its madness behind her, under the axe of the guillotine. It was just three-and-twenty years since she had left Vienna amid universal grief, in all the brightness of beauty and hope.
See the Histories of the French Revolution by Thiers, Mignet, Michelet, Louis Blanc, Carlyle, Von Sybel, and H. Morse Stephens passim; also Madame Campan's Mémoires sur la Vie privée de Marie Antoinette (1823); De Lescure's La vraie Marie Antoinette (1863); D'Hunolstein's Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette (1864); Feuillet des Conches' Louis XVI., Marie Antoinette, et Madame Elizabeth, Lettres et Documents inédites (1865); Arneth and Geoffroy, Marie Antoinette: Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le Comte de Mercy-Argenteau (1874); the elaborate studies by M. P. de Nollac (1890; trans. 1898) and M. de la Rocheterie (1890; trans. 1893); works by Anna Bicknell (1898) and Clara Tschudi (1898); M. C. Bishop, The Prison Life of Marie Antoinette (1893); and for the affair of the Diamond Necklace, G. C. D'Est Ange's Marie Antoinette et le Procès du Collier (1889). For an account of her portraits, about 500 in number, see Lord Ronald Gower's Iconographie de Marie Antoinette (Paris, 1883); and for the closing scenes in her life, Campardon's Tribunal Révolutionnaire (vol. i.) and Marie Antoinette à la Conciergerie (1863), Lord Ronald Gower's Last Days of Marie Antoinette (1885), and L. de Saint-Amand, Les derniers Années de Marie Antoinette (1889; Eng. trans. 1891).