Aletta Fischer

Mr. Cian

French I

3-21-16

Marie Antoinette- France’s Most Hated Queen

Marie Antoinette was born in Vienna, Austria in 1755. She was the 15th child in her family.

When she and King Louis XVI of France got married, it was the first time they had ever met.

She was 15 years old and he was 16 years old. More than 5,000 guests attended their wedding.

Their marriage was difficult and faced many problems. While Marie wanted affection from

Louis, he was stubborn and uninterested.

Since Marie had very little duties, she spent her time and money on expensive and useless things.

Local newspapers made fun of the queen for doing so and rumors had started to spread about her.

Before long, everyone just resulted to blaming Marie Antoinette for France’s problems. France’s

problems were not exactly the queen’s fault. The American Revolution created a massive debt

for France. The rich people of France did not have to pay taxes on their wealth. The ordinary

people felt trapped by high taxes and were resentful of the royal family’s spending habits. King

Louis XVI tried to create a more efficient tax system but the nobility of France resisted. People

blamed Marie Antoinette for this and came up with the name “Madame Veto” for her.

Conditions worsened for the ordinary French people and many claimed that the monarchy and

nobility were plotting against them. In October, an angry mob of Parisian women stormed to the

Versailles palace and protested about the high cost of bread and other goods. They marched the
royal family to the city and imprisoned them. The royal couple then fled the city and headed

towards France where, apparently, the queen’s brother had troops ready to invade France. This

made people believe that not only was the queen a foreigner and a terrible ruler, but she was a

traitor. The royal family returned to Paris and were restored to the throne.

Many of the revolutionaries decided that the enemy was not the nobles but the monarchs

themselves. As a test on the king and queen’s loyalty, the Jacobin government declared war on

Austria. The war did not go well for the French (Most people blamed the foreign-born queen for

this). In August, another angry mob stormed the Tuileries, overthrew the monarchy and locked

the royal family in a tower. The next month, people (revolutionaries) began to massacre the

royalist prisoners by the thousands. One of the queen’s best friends was dismembered on the

street and her body parts and head were put on display throughout Paris. In December, Louis

XVI was put on trial for treason and in January, he was taken to the guillotine. The campaign

against Marie Antoinette grew stronger as a result of this. She was later accused of sexual assault

and incest and lost custody of her son. Her trial lasted two days and she was convicted guilty.

This was already a month into the Reign of Terror, which claimed tens of thousands of French

lives. In October, she was sent to the guillotine at 37 years old. The night before she was

dragged to the guillotine, she wrote a letter to her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, saying how she was

calm. Before being driven to the middle of the town for everyone to watch her execution, a man

came into her prison cell and cut her long hair to allow a quick, clean cut of the blade.

Marie Antoinette was actually a teen idol in France. She captivated the French public so much

that about 30 people had died from being trampled to death by 50,000 uncontrollable Parisians.

This was when she first made her appearance as a teenager before her years as queen.
The queen’s famous hairdo was once actually inspired by a battleship replica. Her hair nearly

reached four feet high at a daily basis. Her head was often accessorized with trinkets, feathers,

and on one occasion, an enormous model of the French warship La Belle Poule to commemorate

its sinking of a British ship.

When the queen died, she was buried in an unmarked grave and exhumed. Her body was put in a

coffin and dumped in a grave behind the Church of Madeline. Later, the bodies of Louis XVI

and Marie Antoinette were ordered to be given a proper burial place alongside other French

royals.

It is said that Marie Antoinette’s famous line, “Let them eat cake” was never said by her. There

is actually no evidence that the queen said those words if they didn’t have bread. 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, which means Marie Antoinette would

have been 11 year sold at the time.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I have ever believed that if there had been no Queen, there would

have never been a revolution”. I believe this is true because Marie Antoinette was the main

reason the French were angry. She was seen as irresponsible and too young to be fit for ruling a

country. The French people did not think she was a good queen and instead of taking her

responsibilities seriously, she went out partying and spent money that could have been used to

help the French economy.

With her extravagant spending and ridiculous hairdos, Marie Antoinette was not liked or seen as

a good French leader, therefore she was executed.

http://www.history.com/topics/marie-antoinette

http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-marie-antoinette

http://www.biography.com/people/marie-antoinette-9398996#death-and-legacy