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The best-known saying of Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793) has long been recognized as a fake: "If you have no bread, you should eat cake." Anecdote.
But the malicious quote with which the French queen is said to have commented on the plight of many subjects shows once again that she made an ideal plaything in the political arena.
Because the 15th child of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was by no means prepared for the day that would fundamentally change her life: on May 16, 1770, she married the Dauphin of France, whose queen she was next to Louis XVI.
four years later it was.
The connection had nothing to do with love, only with politics, but the 14-year-old Archduchess Maria Antonia, who was separated from her entourage on May 7, 1770 on an island on the Rhine near Strasbourg and newly dressed as Marie-Antoinette, was missing anything Understanding.
The husband: King Louis XVI.
of France (1754–1793)
Source: Heritage Images / Getty Images
Even as a child, Maria showed a talent for evading class, be it through lack of concentration or fleeing into the garden.
This was allowed to pass because, in view of the number of children, the Empress had really large parts reserved for older siblings.
That changed suddenly at the end of the 1760s, when the alliance between France and Austria came under pressure.
Although it had been confirmed by several marriages between the Bourbons and Habsburgs, it was now to be concluded in the royal bed as well.
In 1769, Louis XV.
officially for his grandson for the hand of Mary.
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He was 16 months older than the bride, but similarly unprepared, less on the social than on the erotic parquet. Presumably because of a narrowing of the foreskin, the marriage was not consummated for years. However, Marie-Antoinette was accused of not having children and made the list of her missteps longer and longer. The lack of education and language skills made it difficult for her to access the complex court society at Versailles, in which her husband's aunts and his grandfather's mistresses set up intrigues.
Wrong party affiliations, strict admonitions (and political claims) from the mother, suspicions of having sexual relations with other men or even women, her arrogance with which she tried to conceal her insecurity, the addiction to luxury and games, their enormous costs soon made the rounds, all of which ensured that Marie-Antoinette remained a stranger at court even after her husband had ascended to the throne.
When their first child, a daughter, was born in 1778 (her imperial brother Joseph II is said to have shown his brother-in-law the way during a visit), their sympathy levels rose for a short time.
But the strains of the war against England made clear once again the dramatic financial situation of the kingdom, whose subjects were afflicted by numerous bad harvests.
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Marie-Antoinette's involvement in the so-called collar affair, in which fraudsters sneaked the price for a sinfully expensive necklace, finally stamped Marie-Antoinette as a non-person in the eyes of the audience, who could also credibly put the sentence quoted at the beginning into their mouths.
Their withdrawal from the public could no longer mend the relationship.
The queen was not a cause of the outbreak of the revolution, but a symbol for the bankruptcy of the Ancien Régime.
To do this, she followed her husband under the guillotine on October 16, 1793.
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