Marie Antoinette
Marie Antoinette was immature, brazenly self-indulgent, impetuous and wholly unprepared for the role history cast for her. Her sad attempts to consummate her marriage read like bedroom farce, and she did little to quell the rumors of her increasingly dangerous liaisons. Bolstered by the staged receptions that she mistook for papular approval, she was out of touch with the nation's economic troubles, the social and political climate of prorevolutionary France, and eventually retreated from both her husband and the public behind a wall of courtiers and into a world of opulent fantasy ( Lever 6). On November the second of 1755, the Empress Maria Theresa gave birth to her fifteen child, a daughter named Maria Antonia. Austria was at the time enjoying a brief period of prosperity and peace, but the chastening celebration was shadowed by the terrible earthquake which devastated three quarters of the town of Lisbon and prevented Maria Antonia's godfather, the King of Portugal, from attending the ceremony. In later years the tragedy of Lisbon was often referred to as the first portent of disaster in a life which began under the happiest of auspieces in the midst of a loving and united family (Haslip 10).
What most people saw, however was pride and selfishness. But typhus and smallpox, hose two fatal diseases of the eighteen century, carried off two of her sisters within a year, leaving a third, the most beautiful of all, as an invalid. Maria Antonia and Louis Auguste were to be sacrificed to the ill-fated Franco-Australian alliance because of political pawns in the game of state craft ( Haslip 20). Far worse, it soon became clear that although Louis XVI had given his wife an allowance double that of the last Queen, she was in debt. It had been a tradition in France, since time immemorial, that queens did not own real property; but when, in 1774, Louis XVI gave her the Petit Trianon and its gardens, Marie Antoinette had it enclosed with railings and gates to keep the public out, and had rules posted in her own name instead of the King's. She was allowed to remain happily playing in the gardens of Schonbrunn while one by one her elder sisters were married off, Caroline to the King of Naples, Amelia to the infante of Parma, yet another King Loui's grandsons. Ten years had gone since the Westminster Convention signed between England and Prussia had caused a diplomatic revolution, changing the balance of power in Europe and throwing those two hereditary enemies, France and Austria, into each other's arms. This was partly because she became obsessed with fashion, spending the equivalent of some two million dollars a year for her clothes by 1777; partly because, she had the crown jewels at her disposal, she kept buying diamonds; and partly because she gambled frequently and recklessly, often losing the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars at cards in a single night ( Nardo 57). The latter, who owed his meteoric career to the favor of Madame de Pompadour, had be ome foreign minister at the end of the war. Yet this was a situation Maria Antonia chose to ignore. Meanwhile no attempt had been made to prepare the little Maria Antonia for her duty as future Queen. Against his better judgment, he committed himself to an unpopular alliance which might never have survived the humiliating Peace of Paris had it not been for the diplomatic talents of two statesmen, Kaunitz in Austria and Choiseul in France. eresa's youngest daughter with seven older sisters to be married off before her, Maria Antonia seemed destined to a quiet, uneventful life as the wife of one of the innumerable Wittelsbach or Hapsburg cousins. That, however, bored her; and because was constantly in debt, she was unable to contribute financially to the various institutions that expected her patronage ( Nardo 62).
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Acceptance Essays
