Marie Antoinette essays

Marie Antoinette essays 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 nations 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 Antonias 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). As Maria Theresas 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. 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. By 1767, when Maria Antonia was twelve years old, she had become a candidate for the richest matrimonial prize in Europe, to be offered to the grandson of the King of France ( Haslip 13). Ten years had gone since the Westminster Convention signed between England and Prussia had caused a diplomatic revolution, changing the ...