Marie-Antoinette - HISTORY - 0 views
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Born in Vienna, Austria, in 1755, Marie Antoinette married the future French king Louis XVI when she was just 15 years old.
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Marie Antoinette was arrested and tried for trumped-up crimes against the French republic. She was convicted and sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793.
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Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg empress Maria Theresa
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More than 5,000 guests watched as the two teenagers were married. It was the beginning of Marie Antoinette’s life in the public eye.
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Eighteenth-century colonial wars–particularly the American Revolution, in which the French had intervened on behalf of the colonists–had created a tremendous debt for the French state
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she spent most of her time socializing and indulging her extravagant tastes. (For example, she had a model farm built on the palace grounds so that she and her ladies-in-waiting could dress in elaborate costumes and pretend to be milkmaids and shepherdesses.
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There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette ever said that starving peasants should “eat cake” if they had no bread. In fact, the story of a fatuous noblewoman who said “Let them eat cake!” appears in the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, which was written around 1766 (when Marie Antoinette was just 11 years old).
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ordinary people, on the other hand, felt squeezed by high taxes and resentful of the royal family’s conspicuous spending.
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Louis XVI and his advisers tried to impose a more representative system of taxation, but the nobility resisted.
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Marie Antoinette continued to be a convenient target for their rage. Cartoonists and pamphleteers depicted her as an “Austrian whore” doing everything she could to undermine the French nation.
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One of Marie Antoinette’s best friends, the Princesse de Lamballe, was dismembered in the street, and revolutionaries paraded her head and body parts through Paris.
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In July 1793, she lost custody of her young son, who was forced to accuse her of sexual abuse and incest before a Revolutionary tribunal. In October, she was convicted of treason and sent to the guillotine. She was 37 years old.
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She and the people around her seemed to represent everything that was wrong with the monarchy and the Second Estate: They appeared to be tone-deaf, out of touch, disloyal (along with her allegedly treasonous behavior, writers and pamphleteers frequently accused the queen of adultery) and self-interested. What Marie Antoinette was actually like was beside the point; the image of the queen was far more influential than the woman herself.