To many, she's known as the aristocratic and out-of-touch queen who once commented "Let them eat cake". But was this all there was to this 18th-century French queen?
In this episode, we'll be telling the story of Marie Antoinette, her privileged upbringing, and the intricate dynamics of her reign.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France.
[00:00:28] In popular imagination she was the aristocratic and out of touch queen who once commented “let them eat cake”.
[00:00:36] But was this all there was to Marie Antoinette, or was there more to this 18th century French queen?
[00:00:44] Let’s not waste a minute, and find out.
[00:00:49] I have a 4-year-old son.
[00:00:51] He is, at the moment, very keen on castles and soldiers. We look at pictures and do puzzles, with one group of soldiers attacking a castle and another group defending it.
[00:01:05] He tells me, “Daddy, these are the good ones and those are the bad ones”.
[00:01:10] The good ones defend, the bad ones attack.
[00:01:13] And he is at an age where things are either good, they are nice, or they are bad, they are nasty.
[00:01:21] You might think, “OK, he’s 4, a child of this age likes things to be clear, good or bad, naughty or nice”.
[00:01:31] But even as adults, we like to put people in these convenient boxes.
[00:01:37] Are they good or are they bad? Are they nice or are they naughty?
[00:01:43] And this is especially the case with historical characters, people from history, people whose stories are told by other people many hundreds of years after they take their last breath.
[00:01:56] With time, and remembered only through second and third-hand accounts, they become two dimensional, often far removed from the reality of their complex characters.
[00:02:10] And women from history are particularly vulnerable to this fate.
[00:02:16] Against a backdrop of male prejudice and without the ability to defend themselves and write their own stories, they are often cast as villains.
[00:02:27] Think about Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn.
[00:02:32] But there is perhaps no greater example of a woman who has been painted as, bad and nasty, as a four-year-old might put it, than Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution.
[00:02:45] So in this episode we are going to explore the question of who the real Marie Antoinette was, we’ll go beyond the myth and ask ourselves whether she was “naughty or nice”.
[00:02:58] As a spoiler alert, if you don’t want to listen right to the end, it probably won’t surprise you to find that the answer is “somewhere in the middle”.
[00:03:07] Now, to answer this question we must first understand a bit more about her upbringing and the world in which she found herself.
[00:03:16] She was born Maria Antonia in 1755 in Vienna, in Austria, the 15th of 16 children born to Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I of Austria.
[00:03:30] She was the epitome of European royalty; her father was Holy Roman Emperor, her parents jointly ruled the Habsburg Empire, and her godparents were the king and queen of Portugal.
[00:03:46] And her surviving siblings would be married off to a wide range of European royalty, from King Ferdinand IV of Naples to Maria Luisa, the daughter of Charles III of Spain.
[00:03:59] As you may know, the destiny of any child born into this kind of European royalty was to be married off to the child of another noble family, so as to strengthen diplomatic relations with them.
[00:04:14] And of course, Maria Antonia, as she was called, was no exception.
[00:04:20] To whom she was to be married would depend on the political situation at the time, and when she came of marriageable age, the priority for the Habsburg Empire, of which her mother was the Empress, was a reconciliation with France, to unite the two powers against Britain and Prussia.
[00:04:41] The other daughters had already been promised to other European royalty, so it was Maria Antonia’s turn.
[00:04:50] And in February of 1770 it became official.
[00:04:56] Maria Antonia had only just turned 14, but the King of France, Louis XV, formally requested her hand in marriage on behalf of his grandson, the then 15-year-old Dauphin of France, the king in waiting, Louis Auguste.
[00:05:14] The pair were officially married a couple of months later, but Louis Auguste wasn’t actually at the marriage; it was a proxy marriage, so Maria Antonia’s brother stood in for him.
[00:05:27] The point is, this 14-year-old girl, Maria Antonia, is already married to the future king of France, and she has never even met him!
[00:05:38] And, as you might imagine, she has lived a very privileged life completely cut off from “normal” society; she hasn’t gone to school, but had private tutors, and her entire existence has been between the walls of various European royal palaces and country homes.
[00:06:00] She travelled to France shortly after, met her husband for the first time, and there was an official ceremony in France.
[00:06:09] This also included a ceremony called a “ritual bedding”, where the young couple were brought to their marital bed by the groom’s family with the implicit understanding that the teenagers would get on with it and little Maria Antonia would do the important job of producing an heir to the French throne.
[00:06:29] In fact, we need to stop calling her Maria Antonia now, as when she first arrived in France she adopted the French version of her name, Marie Antoinette.
[00:06:40] She might have given herself a French name, but she was always considered a foreigner and an outsider.
[00:06:48] And not only that, she was Austrian.
[00:06:52] France and Austria had had a difficult relationship for much of the early 18th century, and there was Maria Antonia, now Marie Antoinette, a perpetual reminder of this new alliance that not everyone at the French court approved of.
[00:07:10] And the French court, like any royal court, was highly political. Everyone was vying for power and influence, and the teenage Marie Antoinette was right in the middle, the most visible representative of France’s powerful rival turned ally.
[00:07:30] It didn’t take long for Marie Antoinette to go from queen-in-waiting to queen of France; in 1774, Louis XV died and his 19-year-old grandson, Louis Auguste, became Louis XVI, king of France.
[00:07:48] Marie Antoinette was only 18, but there she was, the Queen of France.
[00:07:55] Although she might technically have been the most powerful woman in the country, her husband initially kept her away from the business of actually running the country, and she had limited political influence.
[00:08:09] Instead of bringing his wife closer to him, Louis seemed like he wanted to keep a suitable distance from her.
[00:08:17] He gave her a palace in the grounds of Versailles called “Le Petit Trianon”, and gave her free reign to decorate it and use it as she saw fit.
[00:08:29] This allowed the pair to live semi separate lives, and importantly, allowed the king to avoid any kind of sexual relations with his wife.
[00:08:40] Now, there has been a lot written about Marie Antoinette and her husband’s sex life, or rather, the lack of it, and there are lots of theories about why this was the case.
[00:08:53] We aren’t going to go into the slightly intimate detail of the theories as to why, but what is certain is that the couple tried everything to avoid any kind of sexual activity, and there was no sign of Marie Antoinette falling pregnant.
[00:09:10] And this was a problem. France needed an heir, and Marie Antoinette’s popularity was decreasing with every month that she didn’t produce one.
[00:09:23] It was such a problem that it caused Marie's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, to come to Versailles in April of 1777 to find out what was going on.
[00:09:35] Whatever he said to the pair, it seemed to have had some impact, but not immediately.
[00:09:43] It took 5 months for the marriage to be consummated, and a year later Marie Antoinette fell pregnant.
[00:09:51] In December 1778 she gave birth to a baby girl, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, which was much to the joy of the critics who had been muttering that the couple would not be able to produce children.
[00:10:03] But it was far from truly endearing Marie Antoinette in the hearts of the French people.
[00:10:10] She was still viewed with suspicion by many, and this was exacerbated the following year, when she got involved in a territorial dispute between Bavaria and Austria, persuading her husband to intervene on the side of France’s old rival Austria.
[00:10:29] To add to this, she was already seen as profligate, extravagant and wasteful in her spending at a time when the French economy was not in a good state.
[00:10:41] She would gamble and spend her evenings in fashionable salons of Paris.
[00:10:46] She had decked out Le Petit Trianon in a lavish style, sparing no expense. There were even rumours that she had had the walls plastered with gold and diamonds. These were completely unfounded, but it does demonstrate the public perception of the young queen.
[00:11:06] She finally gave birth to the long-awaited son and heir, Louis Joseph, in 1781, which was a huge relief and a point of celebration, but this popularity was fleeting, it would not last.
[00:11:21] And what’s more, the paternity of her children would continue to be questioned, with suggestions that these were the children not of the French king, but of a Swedish count.
[00:11:34] Moving into the 1780s, she was portrayed in pamphlets as a suspicious and unsympathetic high-spending Austrian, there were continued accusations of sexual deviance and her taking lovers.
[00:11:48] In other words, she was portrayed as a dangerous foreigner who was making a mockery of France and had absolutely no sympathy or understanding for the life of the average person in the country.
[00:12:03] Now, on that last point, given what we know about the life of Marie Antoinette, it’s hard to imagine how anyone who had lived such a secluded and aristocratic life could have ever understood anything of the life of normal people of France. She had lived in palaces her entire life, she had only known nobles and royalty, and let’s remember, she had got engaged at the age of 14, was made queen at 18, and she was only 25 in 1780.
[00:12:36] But Marie Antoinette would find that when the public turns against you, it’s very hard to turn this around. In 1785 she was accused of defrauding a jeweller by reneging on an offer to buy a very expensive necklace. It turned out that Marie Antoinette was completely innocent, but what mattered was that she was accused.
[00:13:01] In the eyes of much of the French public, it didn’t matter whether she was guilty or innocent; her involvement in the scandal was enough to vilify her.
[00:13:12] Against all of this was a French economy that was going from bad to worse. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s husband, had initially looked like he was open to reforms of the French state, including requiring the nobles and the clergy to start paying taxes, but he changed his mind, in part persuaded against doing this by Marie Antoinette.
[00:13:39] By this time his wife had started to take a more active role in French politics, with her famously indecisive husband seeking her advice on political matters. Her influence was well-known to the French public, and she was seen as an architect of the dire state of the French national finances to such an extent that pamphlets started to refer to her as "Madame Déficit", “Mrs Deficit”.
[00:14:08] And moving to the latter half of the 1780s, Marie Antoinette was not only vastly unpopular with the French public, but she had more serious problems closer to home.
[00:14:21] Her son and heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Louis Joseph, was in bad health.
[00:14:29] He'd been quite a sickly young boy, but by 1786, when he was 5, it seemed like he had tuberculosis. The disease grew worse and worse, and the king-in-waiting died in 1789 at the age of 7.
[00:14:48] Marie Antoinette, as any parent would be, was utterly distraught.
[00:14:53] But she was alone in her anguish; as the young prince took his final breath, the country was in the middle of great political upheaval, and weeks later The French Revolution would break out.
[00:15:09] By October of that year Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were put under house arrest essentially, in this unusual situation in which they were still king and queen of the country, but the political situation was turning more and more against them.
[00:15:27] And, to really condense the story of the French Revolution into a few sentences, Marie Antoinette’s attempts to rectify the situation failed, an escape attempt failed, an attempt to bring on an invasion of France failed, in September of 1792 the French monarchy was officially abolished, and Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January the following year, January of 1793.
[00:15:55] By the way, we do have an entire episode on the French Revolution, it’s episode number 152, so if you’d like to listen to 28 minutes about the subject instead of 28 seconds, then the episode number is 152.
[00:16:11] But, to bring the story back to Marie Antoinette, on the 21st of January 1793, this Austrian princess, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, sister of another Holy Roman Emperor, former Queen of France, was now without a title, without a husband, without a son, without anyone to turn to, and deeply unpopular with a French public that had just sliced off her husband’s head.
[00:16:40] She no doubt knew that her prospects were somewhat dire.
[00:16:45] She had to wait until October that year to be officially tried by a Revolutionary Tribunal, but the verdict came back. Guilty on three counts: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason.
[00:17:06] On the 16th of October 1793, she was taken through the streets of Paris, not in the gilded carriage that she was used to but in an open cart, the crowd jeering and shouting at her. Her hands were tied behind her as she was led up the scaffold. She was guillotined at 12:15 p.m, her head held up to the crowd and her body thrown into an unmarked grave.
[00:17:38] She was only 37 years old.
[00:17:42] Now, as far as the legacy of Marie Antoinette, she is often remembered as a symbol of the excesses of the French monarchy, extravagance personified, politically naive and out of touch with reality. And what’s more, a foreigner who never stopped being loyal to her motherland, France’s great rival Austria.
[00:18:06] As you’ve heard, a lot of this is not without justification: she clearly had a taste for the finer things in life, she did not understand the daily life of the average French person, and clearly she massively misjudged the prevailing sentiment in France at the time, and paid for it with her life.
[00:18:28] But to paint her as a pleasure-loving free-spending peasant-hating scheming foreigner is somewhat of a simplification, and it’s to completely ignore the reality of much of her life.
[00:18:43] To cast her only as a well-meaning victim is perhaps an exaggeration, but it is not so far from the truth; she was used as a political pawn from when she was a child, forced to marry a man she clearly lacked any affection or respect for, certainly at the start of their relationship. She was forced to leave her family and country and was thrown into the French court at the age of 15, a den of snakes where everyone around her was trying to bring her down.
[00:19:16] To take Marie Antoinette’s side for one minute, what chance did she really have?
[00:19:22] Clearly, she lacked the maturity to survive in the situation into which she was thrown, but she was only 15 when she got there!
[00:19:32] To expect her to have had an understanding of the nuances of the French court, to have understood politics and economics, both domestic and international, while having lived in a tiny aristocratic bubble all her life, it is a lot to ask, and poor Marie Antoinette was clearly not up to the task.
[00:19:54] From what historians now know about Marie Antoinette, she was actually rather charitable, donating extensively to charitable causes and providing financial support to struggling families. She was a patron of the arts, supporting musicians and playwrights. She was, from what we know, a caring and loving mother, and devoted to her children.
[00:20:18] And some of the things that have been written about her, for example that she once said “let them eat cake”, when told about French citizens not having enough to eat, they are simply not true; there is no evidence that she ever said this.
[00:20:34] So, to wrap things up, perhaps we can bring it back to the classification of soldiers from right at the start of the episode.
[00:20:42] Marie Antoinette, good or bad, naughty or nice?
[00:20:47] I hope you’ll now agree that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
[00:20:54] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marie Antoinette, of “let them eat cake” fame.
[00:21:00] As always, I hope it was an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:05] We've got loads of members from France, so I’d particularly like to know what you think of Marie Antoinette.
[00:21:10] What other aspects of her character should we know about?
[00:21:14] How is she remembered in modern France?
[00:21:17] Villain? Heroine? Somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:23] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France.
[00:00:28] In popular imagination she was the aristocratic and out of touch queen who once commented “let them eat cake”.
[00:00:36] But was this all there was to Marie Antoinette, or was there more to this 18th century French queen?
[00:00:44] Let’s not waste a minute, and find out.
[00:00:49] I have a 4-year-old son.
[00:00:51] He is, at the moment, very keen on castles and soldiers. We look at pictures and do puzzles, with one group of soldiers attacking a castle and another group defending it.
[00:01:05] He tells me, “Daddy, these are the good ones and those are the bad ones”.
[00:01:10] The good ones defend, the bad ones attack.
[00:01:13] And he is at an age where things are either good, they are nice, or they are bad, they are nasty.
[00:01:21] You might think, “OK, he’s 4, a child of this age likes things to be clear, good or bad, naughty or nice”.
[00:01:31] But even as adults, we like to put people in these convenient boxes.
[00:01:37] Are they good or are they bad? Are they nice or are they naughty?
[00:01:43] And this is especially the case with historical characters, people from history, people whose stories are told by other people many hundreds of years after they take their last breath.
[00:01:56] With time, and remembered only through second and third-hand accounts, they become two dimensional, often far removed from the reality of their complex characters.
[00:02:10] And women from history are particularly vulnerable to this fate.
[00:02:16] Against a backdrop of male prejudice and without the ability to defend themselves and write their own stories, they are often cast as villains.
[00:02:27] Think about Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn.
[00:02:32] But there is perhaps no greater example of a woman who has been painted as, bad and nasty, as a four-year-old might put it, than Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution.
[00:02:45] So in this episode we are going to explore the question of who the real Marie Antoinette was, we’ll go beyond the myth and ask ourselves whether she was “naughty or nice”.
[00:02:58] As a spoiler alert, if you don’t want to listen right to the end, it probably won’t surprise you to find that the answer is “somewhere in the middle”.
[00:03:07] Now, to answer this question we must first understand a bit more about her upbringing and the world in which she found herself.
[00:03:16] She was born Maria Antonia in 1755 in Vienna, in Austria, the 15th of 16 children born to Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I of Austria.
[00:03:30] She was the epitome of European royalty; her father was Holy Roman Emperor, her parents jointly ruled the Habsburg Empire, and her godparents were the king and queen of Portugal.
[00:03:46] And her surviving siblings would be married off to a wide range of European royalty, from King Ferdinand IV of Naples to Maria Luisa, the daughter of Charles III of Spain.
[00:03:59] As you may know, the destiny of any child born into this kind of European royalty was to be married off to the child of another noble family, so as to strengthen diplomatic relations with them.
[00:04:14] And of course, Maria Antonia, as she was called, was no exception.
[00:04:20] To whom she was to be married would depend on the political situation at the time, and when she came of marriageable age, the priority for the Habsburg Empire, of which her mother was the Empress, was a reconciliation with France, to unite the two powers against Britain and Prussia.
[00:04:41] The other daughters had already been promised to other European royalty, so it was Maria Antonia’s turn.
[00:04:50] And in February of 1770 it became official.
[00:04:56] Maria Antonia had only just turned 14, but the King of France, Louis XV, formally requested her hand in marriage on behalf of his grandson, the then 15-year-old Dauphin of France, the king in waiting, Louis Auguste.
[00:05:14] The pair were officially married a couple of months later, but Louis Auguste wasn’t actually at the marriage; it was a proxy marriage, so Maria Antonia’s brother stood in for him.
[00:05:27] The point is, this 14-year-old girl, Maria Antonia, is already married to the future king of France, and she has never even met him!
[00:05:38] And, as you might imagine, she has lived a very privileged life completely cut off from “normal” society; she hasn’t gone to school, but had private tutors, and her entire existence has been between the walls of various European royal palaces and country homes.
[00:06:00] She travelled to France shortly after, met her husband for the first time, and there was an official ceremony in France.
[00:06:09] This also included a ceremony called a “ritual bedding”, where the young couple were brought to their marital bed by the groom’s family with the implicit understanding that the teenagers would get on with it and little Maria Antonia would do the important job of producing an heir to the French throne.
[00:06:29] In fact, we need to stop calling her Maria Antonia now, as when she first arrived in France she adopted the French version of her name, Marie Antoinette.
[00:06:40] She might have given herself a French name, but she was always considered a foreigner and an outsider.
[00:06:48] And not only that, she was Austrian.
[00:06:52] France and Austria had had a difficult relationship for much of the early 18th century, and there was Maria Antonia, now Marie Antoinette, a perpetual reminder of this new alliance that not everyone at the French court approved of.
[00:07:10] And the French court, like any royal court, was highly political. Everyone was vying for power and influence, and the teenage Marie Antoinette was right in the middle, the most visible representative of France’s powerful rival turned ally.
[00:07:30] It didn’t take long for Marie Antoinette to go from queen-in-waiting to queen of France; in 1774, Louis XV died and his 19-year-old grandson, Louis Auguste, became Louis XVI, king of France.
[00:07:48] Marie Antoinette was only 18, but there she was, the Queen of France.
[00:07:55] Although she might technically have been the most powerful woman in the country, her husband initially kept her away from the business of actually running the country, and she had limited political influence.
[00:08:09] Instead of bringing his wife closer to him, Louis seemed like he wanted to keep a suitable distance from her.
[00:08:17] He gave her a palace in the grounds of Versailles called “Le Petit Trianon”, and gave her free reign to decorate it and use it as she saw fit.
[00:08:29] This allowed the pair to live semi separate lives, and importantly, allowed the king to avoid any kind of sexual relations with his wife.
[00:08:40] Now, there has been a lot written about Marie Antoinette and her husband’s sex life, or rather, the lack of it, and there are lots of theories about why this was the case.
[00:08:53] We aren’t going to go into the slightly intimate detail of the theories as to why, but what is certain is that the couple tried everything to avoid any kind of sexual activity, and there was no sign of Marie Antoinette falling pregnant.
[00:09:10] And this was a problem. France needed an heir, and Marie Antoinette’s popularity was decreasing with every month that she didn’t produce one.
[00:09:23] It was such a problem that it caused Marie's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, to come to Versailles in April of 1777 to find out what was going on.
[00:09:35] Whatever he said to the pair, it seemed to have had some impact, but not immediately.
[00:09:43] It took 5 months for the marriage to be consummated, and a year later Marie Antoinette fell pregnant.
[00:09:51] In December 1778 she gave birth to a baby girl, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, which was much to the joy of the critics who had been muttering that the couple would not be able to produce children.
[00:10:03] But it was far from truly endearing Marie Antoinette in the hearts of the French people.
[00:10:10] She was still viewed with suspicion by many, and this was exacerbated the following year, when she got involved in a territorial dispute between Bavaria and Austria, persuading her husband to intervene on the side of France’s old rival Austria.
[00:10:29] To add to this, she was already seen as profligate, extravagant and wasteful in her spending at a time when the French economy was not in a good state.
[00:10:41] She would gamble and spend her evenings in fashionable salons of Paris.
[00:10:46] She had decked out Le Petit Trianon in a lavish style, sparing no expense. There were even rumours that she had had the walls plastered with gold and diamonds. These were completely unfounded, but it does demonstrate the public perception of the young queen.
[00:11:06] She finally gave birth to the long-awaited son and heir, Louis Joseph, in 1781, which was a huge relief and a point of celebration, but this popularity was fleeting, it would not last.
[00:11:21] And what’s more, the paternity of her children would continue to be questioned, with suggestions that these were the children not of the French king, but of a Swedish count.
[00:11:34] Moving into the 1780s, she was portrayed in pamphlets as a suspicious and unsympathetic high-spending Austrian, there were continued accusations of sexual deviance and her taking lovers.
[00:11:48] In other words, she was portrayed as a dangerous foreigner who was making a mockery of France and had absolutely no sympathy or understanding for the life of the average person in the country.
[00:12:03] Now, on that last point, given what we know about the life of Marie Antoinette, it’s hard to imagine how anyone who had lived such a secluded and aristocratic life could have ever understood anything of the life of normal people of France. She had lived in palaces her entire life, she had only known nobles and royalty, and let’s remember, she had got engaged at the age of 14, was made queen at 18, and she was only 25 in 1780.
[00:12:36] But Marie Antoinette would find that when the public turns against you, it’s very hard to turn this around. In 1785 she was accused of defrauding a jeweller by reneging on an offer to buy a very expensive necklace. It turned out that Marie Antoinette was completely innocent, but what mattered was that she was accused.
[00:13:01] In the eyes of much of the French public, it didn’t matter whether she was guilty or innocent; her involvement in the scandal was enough to vilify her.
[00:13:12] Against all of this was a French economy that was going from bad to worse. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s husband, had initially looked like he was open to reforms of the French state, including requiring the nobles and the clergy to start paying taxes, but he changed his mind, in part persuaded against doing this by Marie Antoinette.
[00:13:39] By this time his wife had started to take a more active role in French politics, with her famously indecisive husband seeking her advice on political matters. Her influence was well-known to the French public, and she was seen as an architect of the dire state of the French national finances to such an extent that pamphlets started to refer to her as "Madame Déficit", “Mrs Deficit”.
[00:14:08] And moving to the latter half of the 1780s, Marie Antoinette was not only vastly unpopular with the French public, but she had more serious problems closer to home.
[00:14:21] Her son and heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Louis Joseph, was in bad health.
[00:14:29] He'd been quite a sickly young boy, but by 1786, when he was 5, it seemed like he had tuberculosis. The disease grew worse and worse, and the king-in-waiting died in 1789 at the age of 7.
[00:14:48] Marie Antoinette, as any parent would be, was utterly distraught.
[00:14:53] But she was alone in her anguish; as the young prince took his final breath, the country was in the middle of great political upheaval, and weeks later The French Revolution would break out.
[00:15:09] By October of that year Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were put under house arrest essentially, in this unusual situation in which they were still king and queen of the country, but the political situation was turning more and more against them.
[00:15:27] And, to really condense the story of the French Revolution into a few sentences, Marie Antoinette’s attempts to rectify the situation failed, an escape attempt failed, an attempt to bring on an invasion of France failed, in September of 1792 the French monarchy was officially abolished, and Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January the following year, January of 1793.
[00:15:55] By the way, we do have an entire episode on the French Revolution, it’s episode number 152, so if you’d like to listen to 28 minutes about the subject instead of 28 seconds, then the episode number is 152.
[00:16:11] But, to bring the story back to Marie Antoinette, on the 21st of January 1793, this Austrian princess, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, sister of another Holy Roman Emperor, former Queen of France, was now without a title, without a husband, without a son, without anyone to turn to, and deeply unpopular with a French public that had just sliced off her husband’s head.
[00:16:40] She no doubt knew that her prospects were somewhat dire.
[00:16:45] She had to wait until October that year to be officially tried by a Revolutionary Tribunal, but the verdict came back. Guilty on three counts: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason.
[00:17:06] On the 16th of October 1793, she was taken through the streets of Paris, not in the gilded carriage that she was used to but in an open cart, the crowd jeering and shouting at her. Her hands were tied behind her as she was led up the scaffold. She was guillotined at 12:15 p.m, her head held up to the crowd and her body thrown into an unmarked grave.
[00:17:38] She was only 37 years old.
[00:17:42] Now, as far as the legacy of Marie Antoinette, she is often remembered as a symbol of the excesses of the French monarchy, extravagance personified, politically naive and out of touch with reality. And what’s more, a foreigner who never stopped being loyal to her motherland, France’s great rival Austria.
[00:18:06] As you’ve heard, a lot of this is not without justification: she clearly had a taste for the finer things in life, she did not understand the daily life of the average French person, and clearly she massively misjudged the prevailing sentiment in France at the time, and paid for it with her life.
[00:18:28] But to paint her as a pleasure-loving free-spending peasant-hating scheming foreigner is somewhat of a simplification, and it’s to completely ignore the reality of much of her life.
[00:18:43] To cast her only as a well-meaning victim is perhaps an exaggeration, but it is not so far from the truth; she was used as a political pawn from when she was a child, forced to marry a man she clearly lacked any affection or respect for, certainly at the start of their relationship. She was forced to leave her family and country and was thrown into the French court at the age of 15, a den of snakes where everyone around her was trying to bring her down.
[00:19:16] To take Marie Antoinette’s side for one minute, what chance did she really have?
[00:19:22] Clearly, she lacked the maturity to survive in the situation into which she was thrown, but she was only 15 when she got there!
[00:19:32] To expect her to have had an understanding of the nuances of the French court, to have understood politics and economics, both domestic and international, while having lived in a tiny aristocratic bubble all her life, it is a lot to ask, and poor Marie Antoinette was clearly not up to the task.
[00:19:54] From what historians now know about Marie Antoinette, she was actually rather charitable, donating extensively to charitable causes and providing financial support to struggling families. She was a patron of the arts, supporting musicians and playwrights. She was, from what we know, a caring and loving mother, and devoted to her children.
[00:20:18] And some of the things that have been written about her, for example that she once said “let them eat cake”, when told about French citizens not having enough to eat, they are simply not true; there is no evidence that she ever said this.
[00:20:34] So, to wrap things up, perhaps we can bring it back to the classification of soldiers from right at the start of the episode.
[00:20:42] Marie Antoinette, good or bad, naughty or nice?
[00:20:47] I hope you’ll now agree that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
[00:20:54] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marie Antoinette, of “let them eat cake” fame.
[00:21:00] As always, I hope it was an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:05] We've got loads of members from France, so I’d particularly like to know what you think of Marie Antoinette.
[00:21:10] What other aspects of her character should we know about?
[00:21:14] How is she remembered in modern France?
[00:21:17] Villain? Heroine? Somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:23] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:05] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking about Marie Antoinette, the 18th century queen of France.
[00:00:28] In popular imagination she was the aristocratic and out of touch queen who once commented “let them eat cake”.
[00:00:36] But was this all there was to Marie Antoinette, or was there more to this 18th century French queen?
[00:00:44] Let’s not waste a minute, and find out.
[00:00:49] I have a 4-year-old son.
[00:00:51] He is, at the moment, very keen on castles and soldiers. We look at pictures and do puzzles, with one group of soldiers attacking a castle and another group defending it.
[00:01:05] He tells me, “Daddy, these are the good ones and those are the bad ones”.
[00:01:10] The good ones defend, the bad ones attack.
[00:01:13] And he is at an age where things are either good, they are nice, or they are bad, they are nasty.
[00:01:21] You might think, “OK, he’s 4, a child of this age likes things to be clear, good or bad, naughty or nice”.
[00:01:31] But even as adults, we like to put people in these convenient boxes.
[00:01:37] Are they good or are they bad? Are they nice or are they naughty?
[00:01:43] And this is especially the case with historical characters, people from history, people whose stories are told by other people many hundreds of years after they take their last breath.
[00:01:56] With time, and remembered only through second and third-hand accounts, they become two dimensional, often far removed from the reality of their complex characters.
[00:02:10] And women from history are particularly vulnerable to this fate.
[00:02:16] Against a backdrop of male prejudice and without the ability to defend themselves and write their own stories, they are often cast as villains.
[00:02:27] Think about Cleopatra or Anne Boleyn.
[00:02:32] But there is perhaps no greater example of a woman who has been painted as, bad and nasty, as a four-year-old might put it, than Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution.
[00:02:45] So in this episode we are going to explore the question of who the real Marie Antoinette was, we’ll go beyond the myth and ask ourselves whether she was “naughty or nice”.
[00:02:58] As a spoiler alert, if you don’t want to listen right to the end, it probably won’t surprise you to find that the answer is “somewhere in the middle”.
[00:03:07] Now, to answer this question we must first understand a bit more about her upbringing and the world in which she found herself.
[00:03:16] She was born Maria Antonia in 1755 in Vienna, in Austria, the 15th of 16 children born to Empress Maria Theresa and Emperor Francis I of Austria.
[00:03:30] She was the epitome of European royalty; her father was Holy Roman Emperor, her parents jointly ruled the Habsburg Empire, and her godparents were the king and queen of Portugal.
[00:03:46] And her surviving siblings would be married off to a wide range of European royalty, from King Ferdinand IV of Naples to Maria Luisa, the daughter of Charles III of Spain.
[00:03:59] As you may know, the destiny of any child born into this kind of European royalty was to be married off to the child of another noble family, so as to strengthen diplomatic relations with them.
[00:04:14] And of course, Maria Antonia, as she was called, was no exception.
[00:04:20] To whom she was to be married would depend on the political situation at the time, and when she came of marriageable age, the priority for the Habsburg Empire, of which her mother was the Empress, was a reconciliation with France, to unite the two powers against Britain and Prussia.
[00:04:41] The other daughters had already been promised to other European royalty, so it was Maria Antonia’s turn.
[00:04:50] And in February of 1770 it became official.
[00:04:56] Maria Antonia had only just turned 14, but the King of France, Louis XV, formally requested her hand in marriage on behalf of his grandson, the then 15-year-old Dauphin of France, the king in waiting, Louis Auguste.
[00:05:14] The pair were officially married a couple of months later, but Louis Auguste wasn’t actually at the marriage; it was a proxy marriage, so Maria Antonia’s brother stood in for him.
[00:05:27] The point is, this 14-year-old girl, Maria Antonia, is already married to the future king of France, and she has never even met him!
[00:05:38] And, as you might imagine, she has lived a very privileged life completely cut off from “normal” society; she hasn’t gone to school, but had private tutors, and her entire existence has been between the walls of various European royal palaces and country homes.
[00:06:00] She travelled to France shortly after, met her husband for the first time, and there was an official ceremony in France.
[00:06:09] This also included a ceremony called a “ritual bedding”, where the young couple were brought to their marital bed by the groom’s family with the implicit understanding that the teenagers would get on with it and little Maria Antonia would do the important job of producing an heir to the French throne.
[00:06:29] In fact, we need to stop calling her Maria Antonia now, as when she first arrived in France she adopted the French version of her name, Marie Antoinette.
[00:06:40] She might have given herself a French name, but she was always considered a foreigner and an outsider.
[00:06:48] And not only that, she was Austrian.
[00:06:52] France and Austria had had a difficult relationship for much of the early 18th century, and there was Maria Antonia, now Marie Antoinette, a perpetual reminder of this new alliance that not everyone at the French court approved of.
[00:07:10] And the French court, like any royal court, was highly political. Everyone was vying for power and influence, and the teenage Marie Antoinette was right in the middle, the most visible representative of France’s powerful rival turned ally.
[00:07:30] It didn’t take long for Marie Antoinette to go from queen-in-waiting to queen of France; in 1774, Louis XV died and his 19-year-old grandson, Louis Auguste, became Louis XVI, king of France.
[00:07:48] Marie Antoinette was only 18, but there she was, the Queen of France.
[00:07:55] Although she might technically have been the most powerful woman in the country, her husband initially kept her away from the business of actually running the country, and she had limited political influence.
[00:08:09] Instead of bringing his wife closer to him, Louis seemed like he wanted to keep a suitable distance from her.
[00:08:17] He gave her a palace in the grounds of Versailles called “Le Petit Trianon”, and gave her free reign to decorate it and use it as she saw fit.
[00:08:29] This allowed the pair to live semi separate lives, and importantly, allowed the king to avoid any kind of sexual relations with his wife.
[00:08:40] Now, there has been a lot written about Marie Antoinette and her husband’s sex life, or rather, the lack of it, and there are lots of theories about why this was the case.
[00:08:53] We aren’t going to go into the slightly intimate detail of the theories as to why, but what is certain is that the couple tried everything to avoid any kind of sexual activity, and there was no sign of Marie Antoinette falling pregnant.
[00:09:10] And this was a problem. France needed an heir, and Marie Antoinette’s popularity was decreasing with every month that she didn’t produce one.
[00:09:23] It was such a problem that it caused Marie's brother, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, to come to Versailles in April of 1777 to find out what was going on.
[00:09:35] Whatever he said to the pair, it seemed to have had some impact, but not immediately.
[00:09:43] It took 5 months for the marriage to be consummated, and a year later Marie Antoinette fell pregnant.
[00:09:51] In December 1778 she gave birth to a baby girl, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, which was much to the joy of the critics who had been muttering that the couple would not be able to produce children.
[00:10:03] But it was far from truly endearing Marie Antoinette in the hearts of the French people.
[00:10:10] She was still viewed with suspicion by many, and this was exacerbated the following year, when she got involved in a territorial dispute between Bavaria and Austria, persuading her husband to intervene on the side of France’s old rival Austria.
[00:10:29] To add to this, she was already seen as profligate, extravagant and wasteful in her spending at a time when the French economy was not in a good state.
[00:10:41] She would gamble and spend her evenings in fashionable salons of Paris.
[00:10:46] She had decked out Le Petit Trianon in a lavish style, sparing no expense. There were even rumours that she had had the walls plastered with gold and diamonds. These were completely unfounded, but it does demonstrate the public perception of the young queen.
[00:11:06] She finally gave birth to the long-awaited son and heir, Louis Joseph, in 1781, which was a huge relief and a point of celebration, but this popularity was fleeting, it would not last.
[00:11:21] And what’s more, the paternity of her children would continue to be questioned, with suggestions that these were the children not of the French king, but of a Swedish count.
[00:11:34] Moving into the 1780s, she was portrayed in pamphlets as a suspicious and unsympathetic high-spending Austrian, there were continued accusations of sexual deviance and her taking lovers.
[00:11:48] In other words, she was portrayed as a dangerous foreigner who was making a mockery of France and had absolutely no sympathy or understanding for the life of the average person in the country.
[00:12:03] Now, on that last point, given what we know about the life of Marie Antoinette, it’s hard to imagine how anyone who had lived such a secluded and aristocratic life could have ever understood anything of the life of normal people of France. She had lived in palaces her entire life, she had only known nobles and royalty, and let’s remember, she had got engaged at the age of 14, was made queen at 18, and she was only 25 in 1780.
[00:12:36] But Marie Antoinette would find that when the public turns against you, it’s very hard to turn this around. In 1785 she was accused of defrauding a jeweller by reneging on an offer to buy a very expensive necklace. It turned out that Marie Antoinette was completely innocent, but what mattered was that she was accused.
[00:13:01] In the eyes of much of the French public, it didn’t matter whether she was guilty or innocent; her involvement in the scandal was enough to vilify her.
[00:13:12] Against all of this was a French economy that was going from bad to worse. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette’s husband, had initially looked like he was open to reforms of the French state, including requiring the nobles and the clergy to start paying taxes, but he changed his mind, in part persuaded against doing this by Marie Antoinette.
[00:13:39] By this time his wife had started to take a more active role in French politics, with her famously indecisive husband seeking her advice on political matters. Her influence was well-known to the French public, and she was seen as an architect of the dire state of the French national finances to such an extent that pamphlets started to refer to her as "Madame Déficit", “Mrs Deficit”.
[00:14:08] And moving to the latter half of the 1780s, Marie Antoinette was not only vastly unpopular with the French public, but she had more serious problems closer to home.
[00:14:21] Her son and heir to the French throne, the Dauphin Louis Joseph, was in bad health.
[00:14:29] He'd been quite a sickly young boy, but by 1786, when he was 5, it seemed like he had tuberculosis. The disease grew worse and worse, and the king-in-waiting died in 1789 at the age of 7.
[00:14:48] Marie Antoinette, as any parent would be, was utterly distraught.
[00:14:53] But she was alone in her anguish; as the young prince took his final breath, the country was in the middle of great political upheaval, and weeks later The French Revolution would break out.
[00:15:09] By October of that year Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were put under house arrest essentially, in this unusual situation in which they were still king and queen of the country, but the political situation was turning more and more against them.
[00:15:27] And, to really condense the story of the French Revolution into a few sentences, Marie Antoinette’s attempts to rectify the situation failed, an escape attempt failed, an attempt to bring on an invasion of France failed, in September of 1792 the French monarchy was officially abolished, and Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in January the following year, January of 1793.
[00:15:55] By the way, we do have an entire episode on the French Revolution, it’s episode number 152, so if you’d like to listen to 28 minutes about the subject instead of 28 seconds, then the episode number is 152.
[00:16:11] But, to bring the story back to Marie Antoinette, on the 21st of January 1793, this Austrian princess, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, sister of another Holy Roman Emperor, former Queen of France, was now without a title, without a husband, without a son, without anyone to turn to, and deeply unpopular with a French public that had just sliced off her husband’s head.
[00:16:40] She no doubt knew that her prospects were somewhat dire.
[00:16:45] She had to wait until October that year to be officially tried by a Revolutionary Tribunal, but the verdict came back. Guilty on three counts: depletion of the national treasury, conspiracy against the internal and external security of the State, and high treason.
[00:17:06] On the 16th of October 1793, she was taken through the streets of Paris, not in the gilded carriage that she was used to but in an open cart, the crowd jeering and shouting at her. Her hands were tied behind her as she was led up the scaffold. She was guillotined at 12:15 p.m, her head held up to the crowd and her body thrown into an unmarked grave.
[00:17:38] She was only 37 years old.
[00:17:42] Now, as far as the legacy of Marie Antoinette, she is often remembered as a symbol of the excesses of the French monarchy, extravagance personified, politically naive and out of touch with reality. And what’s more, a foreigner who never stopped being loyal to her motherland, France’s great rival Austria.
[00:18:06] As you’ve heard, a lot of this is not without justification: she clearly had a taste for the finer things in life, she did not understand the daily life of the average French person, and clearly she massively misjudged the prevailing sentiment in France at the time, and paid for it with her life.
[00:18:28] But to paint her as a pleasure-loving free-spending peasant-hating scheming foreigner is somewhat of a simplification, and it’s to completely ignore the reality of much of her life.
[00:18:43] To cast her only as a well-meaning victim is perhaps an exaggeration, but it is not so far from the truth; she was used as a political pawn from when she was a child, forced to marry a man she clearly lacked any affection or respect for, certainly at the start of their relationship. She was forced to leave her family and country and was thrown into the French court at the age of 15, a den of snakes where everyone around her was trying to bring her down.
[00:19:16] To take Marie Antoinette’s side for one minute, what chance did she really have?
[00:19:22] Clearly, she lacked the maturity to survive in the situation into which she was thrown, but she was only 15 when she got there!
[00:19:32] To expect her to have had an understanding of the nuances of the French court, to have understood politics and economics, both domestic and international, while having lived in a tiny aristocratic bubble all her life, it is a lot to ask, and poor Marie Antoinette was clearly not up to the task.
[00:19:54] From what historians now know about Marie Antoinette, she was actually rather charitable, donating extensively to charitable causes and providing financial support to struggling families. She was a patron of the arts, supporting musicians and playwrights. She was, from what we know, a caring and loving mother, and devoted to her children.
[00:20:18] And some of the things that have been written about her, for example that she once said “let them eat cake”, when told about French citizens not having enough to eat, they are simply not true; there is no evidence that she ever said this.
[00:20:34] So, to wrap things up, perhaps we can bring it back to the classification of soldiers from right at the start of the episode.
[00:20:42] Marie Antoinette, good or bad, naughty or nice?
[00:20:47] I hope you’ll now agree that the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle.
[00:20:54] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Marie Antoinette, of “let them eat cake” fame.
[00:21:00] As always, I hope it was an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:21:05] We've got loads of members from France, so I’d particularly like to know what you think of Marie Antoinette.
[00:21:10] What other aspects of her character should we know about?
[00:21:14] How is she remembered in modern France?
[00:21:17] Villain? Heroine? Somewhere in the middle?
[00:21:20] I would love to know, so let’s get this discussion started.
[00:21:23] You can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:21:31] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:21:36] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
