Marie Antoinette Born: Future Queen Meets Revolution

Marie Antoinette left Vienna at fourteen to become the wife of the French Dauphin, arriving at the border in May 1770 in a ceremony that required her to change out of her Austrian clothes into French ones, symbolically shedding her nationality. She married the future Louis XVI five days later at Versailles. He was fifteen. They would not consummate the marriage for seven years. Born Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna on November 2, 1755, she was the fifteenth of sixteen children of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. Her marriage was a diplomatic alliance between the Habsburg and Bourbon dynasties, designed to cement peace between Austria and France after generations of warfare. As queen, she became the target of a public resentment that was partly earned and partly manufactured. Her spending on clothes, jewels, and the Petit Trianon, a private retreat at Versailles, was extravagant by any measure, though it represented a small fraction of France's actual fiscal crisis, which was driven by war debts, structural tax inequality, and an aristocracy that refused to pay its share. The phrase "Let them eat cake" was never documented as her words; it appeared in Rousseau's Confessions, written before she arrived in France. The Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785, a scam in which a cardinal was duped into purchasing a massively expensive necklace supposedly for the queen, destroyed what remained of her public reputation. She was innocent, but the scandal confirmed the public's belief that she was corrupt and frivolous. When the Revolution began in 1789, the royal family was moved from Versailles to Paris and eventually imprisoned in the Temple. Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. Marie Antoinette was tried before the Revolutionary Tribunal in October 1793 on charges that included treason, sexual abuse of her son, and conspiracy with foreign powers. The trial was a foregone conclusion. She was guillotined on October 16, 1793, at the Place de la Revolution. She was 37. She reportedly stepped on the executioner's foot ascending the scaffold and said: "Pardon me, sir. I did not mean to do it."