Ah Maria, What of Marie Antoinette?

Emperor Joseph wasn’t Queen Maria Theressa of Austria’s only wayward child. In fact, he wasn’t even the best known of the lot.

In the great mass of official business that Maria had to attend to, she still found time to correspond with family and friends. After the death of Francis, Maria took, not surprisingly, a great interest in the family affairs of her married children. There were a lot of them. By 1774, only two children remained at home; daughters Marianne, who’s health was poor, and Elizabeth, who was so disfigured by smallpox that she was apparently considered un-marriageable.

Joseph, of course, was the main recipient of the bulk of the writing Maria sent to her kids. Considering her propensity to go on,page after page, with advice to her head-strong co-regent, it is highly probable that he read very little of his mom’s correspondence. The fact that mom ordered him to attend an audience, solely for the purpose of reading to him a letter she considered very important, says much about how he treated the usual letter from her.

Her letters to her children must have numbered in the thousands. Most of these, but not all, were burned, as Maria had requested, by the recipients. Maria destroyed all the letters she received from her children, except for those from Joseph and Marie Antoinette, which were considered by her to be state documents.

While the letters to Joseph and Marie Antoinette were filled with advice neither would take seriously, her letters to her other children were more relaxed and informal. Much was made of grandchildren. Inquires after their health as well as urgent requests for the latest portraits produced mixed results. This excerpt is from a letter to Marie Beatrix;

“The picture of my little granddaughter so long desired has this moment arrived….But it is a frightful painting. And now I sympathize with those who told you not to send me your own picture, if it is at all like that….What a frightful bonnet they have made the child wear….Forgive the comparison but this bonnet reminds me of her worthy grandfather’s periwig….In fine, tis a horrible painting, but the subject is charming and dear and interesting, and a cause of great joy to me.”

Um…thanks mom….I think.

No matter what the latest from Joseph may have been, she was never so busy as to miss an opportunity to gab about the children who were NOT making her life a living hell and the grandkids.

“Week after week, year after year, for ten years this correspondence continued. During all the trials and frustrations arising from her conflict with Joseph….Not a detail escaped her, every illness, every little triumph, was faithfully recorded- the prophetess of woe becomes in these letters the gay, tender, self-deprecating mother she could have been had she not also been required to run an empire.”

Ninety years before the invention of photography, and she was demanding pictures of the grandkids. She was indeed, a woman ahead of her time. And, least we forget, Joseph was not the only problem child who’s idiosyncrasies were a matter of international concern. There was also poor, tragic, and I do mean tragic, Marie Antoinette. Everyone knows what happened to her. No sense going into it here. Such a sad, sad story.

Let me tell you instead about Maria’s plans for the royal flowerbeds at the fabulous Belvedere Palace. Oh my…. She was an 18th century Martha Stewart when it came to her flowerbeds! What?….You want to hear about Marie Antoinette? But it’s so dreary, with the cake thing and the head thing and all that….(sigh) Very well. I suppose it is a useful story in case your own kids find themselves in a similar situation.

According to one historian; “A cause of no joy at all was Marie Antoinette. And in her long series of letters to this errant child in Versailles we see, rising above her impotence in the face of Joseph, laying aside the comfortable gossip with her older children, the figure of the Empress, born to command, wise in the ways of the world. Level-headed and infinitely practical. But she was an Empress with a guilty conscience.” Maria’s guilt arose from the fact that she had done, considering her own experience, a very poor job of raising Marie Antoinette.

On the one hand, Marie’s upbringing probably was no worse than that of any girl of her station, but that’s the point. Considering what Marie was married into, she wasn’t prepared at all. And given mom’s background and her own experience being thrown into the royal lion’s den, it is quite inexcusable. And Maria knew it. And she felt bad about it and tried to fix things after the fact. Too late.

The fact was, Marie wasn’t born to be Queen of France. It wasn’t as though everyone knew she would one day be packing her bags for Versailles. It was possible that, like her many brothers and sisters, she would marry some Grand Duke of Upper Swabovia and settle into a life of fending off inquiries from mom about pictures of the grandkids.

It goes without saying that Marie Antoinette would have been much happier had her life turned out like that. That sort of life was pretty much the life she had been trained for. The reason she didn’t get it was because mom decided to use her daughter to further Austria’s international goals. She did so knowing full well that her daughter wasn’t prepared for it. No matter. Furthering the Hapsburg Dynasty was Maria’s Job. That would be her daughter’s job also. Whither she could do it or not.

“She knew very well that she had failed badly in the upbringing of her youngest daughter. She knew too, that she had sacrificed this enchanting, silly, feckless, ignorant child in the bleakest of political operations and must take on herself the blame for much that followed.”

Quotes from Maria Theresa by Edward Crankshaw. Much thanks, Edward.