French national day: facts about Marie Antoinette

By Gilbert Kidimu

Marie Antoinette, the last Queen of France, has been both vilified as the personification of the evils of monarchies and exalted as a pinnacle of fashion and beauty, the latter being more pronounced in our time.

When Comedienne, the late Joan Rivers was designing her apartment in New York, she sought inspiration from imagining the kind of place Queen Antoinette would have lived.

The outcome was marble statues, chandeliers, and walls lined with gold defining the luxurious penthouse.

Nevertheless, while today people might fantasize what kind of palace Queen Antoinette would be living in had she lived in present day France; to the French in the 18th century, she was the queen who danced while the people starved; who spent extravagantly on clothes and jewels without a thought for her subjects’ plight.

Some historians however, have described her as a queen more sinned against than sinning. Because she was an Austrian princess, Archduchess Marie Antoinette, the 15th and last child of Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and the powerful Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa; many Frenchmen were reluctant to warm up to her.

They preferred a French Queen. That is why she has been criticised by French historians as much as words can suffice.

But here are a few interesting facts you didn’t know about the famous and infamous Queen of France:

She was only 14 years old when she married the future Louis XVI.

To seal the newfound alliance between long-time enemies Austria and France that had been forged by the Seven Years’ War, the Austrian monarchs offered the hand of their youngest daughter to the heir apparent to the French throne, Dauphin Louis-Auguste.

On May 7, 1770, the 14-year-old royal bride was delivered to the French on an island in the middle of the Rhine River, and a grand procession escorted the archduchess to the Palace of Versailles.

The day after Marie Antoinette met the 15-year-old future king of France, the two were wed in a lavish palace ceremony.

It took seven years for the future king and queen to consummate their marriage.

Politics literally made strange bedfellows in the case of Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste.

Just hours after they first met, the young teenagers were escorted to the bridal chamber on their wedding night by the groom’s grandfather, King Louis XV.

After the king blessed their bed, gave both a kiss and left the room to allow them to start work on producing a royal heir, nothing happened between the two relative strangers that night.

 Apparently, nothing happened for the next seven years either. The dauphin suffered from a painful medical condition that rendered him impotent, and the palace gossip soon circulated around Europe.

Finally in 1777, Maria Theresa dispatched one of her sons, Emperor Joseph II, to Versailles to intervene, and the problem was rectified either because the now King Louis XVI underwent surgery to correct the problem or because, in the words of the emperor, the couple had been “two complete blunderers.”

Within a year, Marie Antoinette bore the first of the couple’s four children.

Marie Antoinette was an idol

Unlike during her years as queen, Marie Antoinette captivated the French public in her early years in the country. When the teenager made her initial appearance in the French capital, a crowd of 50,000 Parisians grew so uncontrollable that at least 30 people were trampled to death in the crush.

Marie Antoinette never said “Let them eat cake.”

When told that starving French peasants lacked any bread to eat, the queen is alleged to have callously declared, “Let them eat cake!” There is no evidence, however, that Marie Antoinette ever uttered that famous quip. The phrase used to encapsulate the out-of-touch and indifferent royals first appeared years before Marie Antoinette ever arrived in France in philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s description of Marie-Therese, the Spanish princess who married King Louis XIV in 1660. The remark was also ascribed to two aunts of Louis XVI before it was apocryphally tied to Marie Antoinette.

A U.S. city is named in honour of Marie Antoinette

When a group of American Revolution veterans founded the first permanent settlement of the Northwest Territory in 1788 at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, they wanted to honour France, which had been instrumental in assisting the patriots against the British.

They named their new community, Marietta, Ohio, after the French queen and even sent her a letter offering the monarch a “public square” in the town.

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