How Much Do You Know About Marie Antoinette?

Although they were imprisoned in the Tuileries in 1792, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette initially kept their crowns. But a failed escape attempt and the rise of the radical Jacobin revolutionary group during the Reign of Terror eventually led to the abolition of the monarchy. In January 1793, Louis XVI was sent to the guillotine; Marie Antoinette was tried and executed that October, at just 37 years old.

As France’s economic woes worsened, long-simmering tensions eventually boiled over. In July 1789, an angry mob attacked the Bastille, an infamous French prison, marking the symbolic start of the French Revolution. That October, some 10,000 people marched on Versailles, forcing the royal family into captivity. The revolution ended in the 1790s with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, and the death of both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

Axel von Fersen was a Swedish noble who fought for the French army, and later served in the Swedish diplomatic corps. He met Marie Antoinette in 1774, and when their relationship deepened in the 1780s, rumors of a love affair swirled. Although historians remain divided over whether it was a physical affair, von Fersen remained devoted to the queen, even attempting to help the royal family escape imprisonment in 1791.

The “Affair of the Diamond Necklace” scandal involved a 2,800-carat necklace and a thief named Jeanne de la Motte. The thief posed as Marie Antoinette and convinced a French cardinal who had fallen out with the royal family to buy the jewelry, ostensibly as a gift to please the queen. The scheme quickly unraveled, and although the queen was in no way involved, her reputation was further tarnished.

In the late 1770s, Marie Antoinette began spending much of her time at Petit Trianon, a private castle near Versailles. She expanded the grounds to include a working farm she tended herself, called La Hameau de la Reine, or “Queen’s Hamlet.” She dressed and lived simply on the estate, which she hoped would provide her with a semblance of normal life.

Marie Antoinette has been blamed for ruining the French economy with her excessive love of clothing and partying, which earned her the nickname “Madame Deficit.” While she did spend lavishly, her spendthrift ways were not the cause of the collapse of the French economy, which was undone by an inefficient tax system and France’s support of the American Revolution and other conflicts.

Marie Antoinette received a conventional education for a girl of her position. She primarily studied music and dance and played several instruments, including the harp. In 1762, just before her seventh birthday, six-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visited Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, where the musical prodigy wowed the royal family with a three-hour performance.

Although the quote “let them eat cake” has been used to disparage Marie Antoinette as an out-of-touch monarch with little consideration for the suffering of her people, there is no evidence that she ever said it. In fact, the phrase likely originated a century before she was queen, in the writings of French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who attributed it to a Spanish princess.

Although she became a legendary French queen, Marie Antoinette was actually born in Vienna, Austria. She was the 15th child of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa, ruling empress of the Habsburg dynasty, which ruled Austria, Hungary, and parts of central Europe. Nicknamed “the little one,” Marie was her father’s favorite, but had a complicated relationship with her mother.

When she was just 14, Marie Antoinette married 15-year-old Louis XVI, the grandson and heir of King Louis XV of France. Intensely homesick, she had difficulty adjusting to marriage, and to life at the famously ostentatious and rigid French court. In 1774, less than four years after her arrival in France, she and Louis ascended to the throne, and the teenage queen was thrust onto the world stage.