Watching Marie Antoinette take her place in the history books was not easy for her mother. Snubbing the king’s mistress would prove the least of Marie’s mistakes.
In 1774, King Louis XV died. The Dauphin became King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette became Queen of France and life did not improve. For Maria Theresa things became, if such were possible, even worse. France was still vital to Austria’s long term strategy of containing Prussia. Maria still had a very full plate, but her daughter becoming a French Queen did not make them easier.
In fact, Marie Antoinette as Queen was in a position to do incalculable damage. Of this possibility, she was oblivious. With her father-in-law dead and her husband on the throne, Madame Dubarry was no longer an issue. But Marie had returned to the unfortunate habit of intriguing with court favorites against politicians and others with whom she had a bone to pick.
There is never a good time for a teen-age absolute monarch to stick her oar into political waters; But late 18th France was a particularly bad time and place. Many of the things written about Marie Antoinette were the product of either contemporary enemies or later writers who were not inclined to write nice things about the Ancien Regime. However much they may have exaggerated, there was more than a kernel of truth to the fact that the French aristocracy was woefully out of touch with what was happening in France. And Marie Antoinette? She didn’t have a clue and didn’t want one.
Others did. People like her mother, who wrote long letters imploring her darling dearest to stop meddling in politics lest something mega-bad happen to her. Maria Theresa had no way of knowing just how bad it would get. No one did, except, perhaps for the English, a people who had a bit of experience in dispatching recalcitrant monarchs. Maria Theresa may not of known precisely where her daughters meddling would lead, but it was nowhere good. Wrote Maria to Marie:
“Where is the good and generous heart of the Archduchess Antoinette? I see only intrigue, vulgar spite, delight in mockery and persecution. An intrigue which would do very well for a Pompadour or a Dubarry, but never for a Queen, a great princess, still less a princess kindly and good of the house of Lorraine and Austria. All the winter long I have trembled at the thought of your too easy success and the flatterers surrounding you, while you have thrown yourself into a life of pleasure and preposterous display. This chasing from pleasure to pleasure without the King, and knowing he takes no joy in it and only goes with you or lets you do what you want out of sheer good nature, had made me before to express my fears. I see now from this letter that these were all too well justified….Your own luck can all too easily change, and by your own fault you may well find yourself plunged into deepest misery….One day you will recognize the truth of this, but then it will be too late. I hope I shall not live until misfortune overtakes you, and I pray God to end my days quickly, since I am no longer any use to you. I could not bear to lose my dear child or see her unhappy, whom I shall love tenderly until I die.”
Marie Antoinette was reported to have been much affected by this letter. As well she might. The nature of this letter, it’s laying the responsibility for her daughter’s fate squarely on her daughters shoulders, was considered so controversial that the letter was not made available to historians until after the Hapsburg monarchy disintegrated in the flames of the First World War. As a letter from one Queen to another, it is astounding. As a letter from a mother to a daughter heedless of the danger she was creating for herself, it is heartbreaking.
Affected as Marie Antoinette may have been, it changed her behavior not a whit. Everything her mother wrote came to pass It was very fortunate that mom did not live to see her daughter’s death at the hands of a Paris mob. But Marie Antoinette’s fate was not carved in stone. She could have saved herself and her family if she had had the sense God gave a turnip, if she had truly been her mother’s daughter and fled the country before the storm broke.
But that was Marie Antoinette’s story….Meanwhile, back in Austria, Maria Theresa was preparing for her own departure from this vale of tears.
– Mr. Al
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