HISTORY YOU NEVER KNEW: Marie Antoinette Was Born Hours After An Disaster That Helped Lead To Her Death
READERS: I’ve decided to change up my writing and add some non-political stuff to my blog to showcase my writing. History is probably my favorite topic and really is the foundation from which the rest of my interests stem; politics, geography, and literature. I wanted to do posts about interesting tidbits in history that I’ve learned over the years that I often enjoy bringing up in casual conversation, often to impress people, and publish them as close to the historical dates they happened. I am starting with November 1, 1755. On that day an earthquake and tsunami struck Lisbon, Portugal in what is one of the worst natural disasters in European history. The earthquake had a profound effect on Europe in the subsequent decades. The day after the earthquake, on November 2, 1755, one of the most well-known historical figures of the 18th Century was born: Marie Antoinette, the future queen of France. This article is about how those two events, which occurred just 38 hours apart, are intertwined.
Marie Antoinette was literally born into a world that had been shaken to its core.
Less than 36 hours before Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg entered the world in Vienna, one of the worst natural disasters to ever befall Europe struck 1,500 miles away in another royal capital; Lisbon, Portugal.
The earthquake, one of the largest in history, and the tsunami it triggered on November 1, 1755, destroyed the city. It killed as many as 50,000 people in Portugal, then an extremely pious Catholic nation.
What does this have to do with the future French queen born a day later?
Everything.
The earthquake rocked Lisbon on a Holy Day of Obligation, All Saints Day. Portugal’s excessively religious population was headed to Mass when the ground shook at twenty minutes to ten o’clock in the morning. As Lisbon residents fled the collapsing churches to the safety of the waterfront, they were taken by surprise by a massive tsunami wave that swept into the city. Whoever wasn’t crushed by falling buildings or incinerated by the resulting fires drowned in the rushing waters. Many died while at prayer.
When the flood waters receded and the fires were snuffed out, the survivors were left dumbfounded. How could Portugal, a country that meticulously followed God’s law to a fault, the most righteous kingdom among men, be subject to this type of disaster, while heretics and blasphemers hundreds and thousands of miles away are unaffected? The disaster was fuel for the Enlightenment, the period in which philosophers all over Europe began questioning the longstanding status quo. One of the most prominent thinkers of the era, Voltaire, a Frenchman, referenced the disaster in his 1759 novel Candide, asking:
Was there more vice in fallen Lisbon found
Then Paris, where voluptuous joys about?
Was less debauchery to London known
Where opulence luxurious holds the throne?
The Portuguese people and the rest of Europe were left to ask: If God punishes evil, then why good and pious Lisbon?
That question set off a spark that would eventually grow into a continent-wide inferno; one that would shake the foundations of European society and ultimately take Marie Antoinette’s head.
While Lisbon burned, the Habsburg Royal Family in Vienna lived in happy oblivion. Marie Antoinette’s mother, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was celebrating the birth of her 15th child, unaware of the disaster that came like an ominous warning for the new baby girl. In an ironic twist, Maria Theresa chose the King and Queen of Portugal to be the new child’s godparents.
Maria Theresa’s path to power was not easy. She was the daughter of Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV who succeeded his brother Joseph I after the latter died without any male heirs.
When Charles succeeded him, he too had the same problem - no male heirs. Charles wanted Maria Theresa to succeed him not only as Austrian Empress but also as Holy Roman Empress. The position however was typically held by someone chosen by various German dukes called electors, and they were unlikely to choose a woman over other male candidates. In the end, a new emperor, the husband of Charles’ niece, Maria Amalia, was elected and Maria Theresa was able to succeed her father as Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, though a continent-wide war broke out upon her succession.
Marie Antoinette’s fate was written well before she was born. The relationship with France was extremely important for her mother to secure. With the Habsburgs no longer sitting on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, France, the Habsburg’s greatest enemy for generations, saw an opportunity to clip the powerful dynasty’s wings. For eight years, the War of Austrian Succession swallowed Europe, as France and its allies sought to dethrone Maria Theresa and install an ally in her place.
Luckily for Maria Theresa, the new Holy Roman Emperor died suddenly in 1745. The queen had been positioning her husband, Francis Stephen, the Duke of the province of Lorraine with French royal blood to be his successor. In 1745, Francis was elected Holy Roman Empire and the empire and the Austrian dominions were once again reunited.
Francis and Maria Theresa had a brood of daughters, six of whom survived to adulthood. Like most princesses of their era, the archduchesses were brought up to be educated and cultured. They were also brought up to marry into other royal families and protect their parents’ hard-fought political wins. The youngest, Marie Antoinette was her father’s favorite child and looked the most like her mother as a girl. Her characteristics, however, were those of her father; a precocious, social girl who dabbled in a wide variety of interests, especially music and art. She was just shy of seven years ago when a child musical prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed for her at Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace. Mozart was less than a year younger than Marie Antoinette and two children seemed to hit it off. At one point during the visit, Mozart slipped and fell on the palace’s polished marble floors. The young future queen helped him to his feet and the two shared pleasantries.
Francis dawdled over his baby daughter in a way that was uncharacteristic of a European monarch. In one instance, Francis held up his party’s departure from Vienna for his eldest son’s wedding in Innsbruck in order for him to have a proper, elongated goodbye to his sobbing daughter, who was to stay behind. She was what we today would describe as “a daddy’s girl.”
It was Maria Theresa who was the disciplinarian of the household. She was also laser-focused on her political situation. In the 1760s, Maria Theresa was plagued by constant wars with neighboring Prussia over control of much of Central Europe. She needed alliances, the strongest of which could be her former archrival and her mother-in-law’s native France. Her youngest daughter, Marie Antoinette, was chosen to marry the heir to the French throne and secure France’s support.
It is not surprising that of all the Habsburg girls, Marie Antoinette secured the biggest prize. Being her father’s favorite, he no doubt strongly supported and encouraged marrying his daughter into his mother’s family. Despite recent losses in America, France was still perhaps the most powerful country in continental Europe and Versailles was the Ritz-Carlton of European courts. A ticket to the French court was a grand prize for a European princess.
It helped that Marie Antoinette already had French royal blood. Her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Charlotte, was a French princess born to Phillippe, Duke of Orleans, the brother of King Louis XIV, and Phillipe’s German wife, Liselotte. In an interesting coincidence, Liselotte herself was a great-great-granddaughter of Mary, Queen of Scots, making Marie Antoinette a direct descendant of that similarly fated queen.
It is a tragic irony that Francis’ love and devotion to his youngest daughter and his desire to see her sit on the most powerful throne in Europe led him to sign off on sending her to an early and tragic death. How could he have known that the bubble the French court lived in would cause it to be the first and most prominent victim of the Age of Enlightenment?
By the time Marie Antoinette was en route to France in 1770 to marry King Louis XV’s heir and grandson, Portugal had, minus a few scars that still exist today, recovered completely from the earthquake fifteen years earlier. The Portugal of 1770 was a very different one than what existed on the last day of October 1755, however.
The Portuguese King and Marie Antoinette’s godfather, Joseph I, suffered from a severe case of what we would today describe as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder associated with his experiences during the earthquake. Though he was away from Lisbon when it struck, his palace was destroyed and he developed a severe case of claustrophobia, refusing to ever live indoors again. Unable to handle the day-to-day job of the monarch, he ceded power to his chief advisor and prime minister, the Marquis of Pombal.
Pombal was heavily inspired by the Enlightenment and the philosophy of thinkers like Voltaire. With the support of the general public, angry and confused that their strict adherence to Catholicism did not protect them from nature’s wrath, he stripped the Catholic nobility of power, expelled the Jesuits, and embarked on some of the most ambitious social reforms any kingdom in Europe had attempted.
The reforms Pombal pushed in Portugal began to catch the eye of thinkers in other European countries, notably France, which had been suffering from the same socioeconomic strife Portugal had endured after the earthquake. When Marie Antoinette crossed the border into France, she arrived in a country in tatters. France was broke, having had its coffers drained in a futile war against Britain in North America.
The ailing king of France, Louis XV, left the business of the nation in the hands of his incompetent advisors, who had no concern that the long-pacified French population would get tired of being taxed into poverty to pay for French ambition and the nobility’s opulence.
How could they? For more than a century, the French nobility had all been locked in their gilded prison, the Palace of Versailles, away from the common people, unable to assess the tone of the population. Frightened by the swiftness in which his uncle Charles I of England was overthrown and executed in a revolution instigated by nobles in 1649, King Louis XIV thought the best way to prevent a noble-led insurrection against him was to have them all live in the same palace where he could keep a watchful eye on them. This decision would ultimately lead to the aristocracy’s aloofness and inability to sense the civil unrest that led to the French Revolution.
Marie Antoinette found herself also locked away at Versailles. Having grown up in the relatively easygoing nature of the Austrian court, she was taken aback at some of the obsolete and grandiose customs of the French court.
As other monarchies kept one ear to the ground to sense the growing social change borne out of the Enlightenment, the aristocrats at Versailles lived in a state of ignorant bliss. They racked up insane debts paying for lavish parties and ornate furnishings to keep themselves occupied in Versailles.
The teenage Marie Antoinette made the best of her new surroundings. Her marriage and early life at Versailles were not happy ones. Her husband, the future Louis XVI, was quite immature for his age, more interested in hunting and making keys than making love to his future queen. Marie Antoinette was often bored in her new home and found some entertainment in those opulent parties and gossip sessions, especially with her husband’s spinster aunts.
The biggest adjustment for the young dauphine was the blatant immorality on display at Versailles. Despite Christian teachings being against adultery, monarchs often had mistresses, but in other courts such behavior was typically discreet.
French kings were known for openly cavorting with mistresses and even giving them power, something that would be shocking to a young girl raised in the prim and proper Habsburg court. Louis XV’s previous mistress, the Madame de Pompadour, governed essentially as France’s prime minister while sharing the king’s bed. It was she who pushed for France to fight Great Britain in America, and she bore the blame for France’s defeat and the financial catastrophe that ensued. It was also she who pushed France to become allies with its former enemy Austria, a move that ultimately led Francis and Maria Theresa to agree to their youngest daughter’s marriage.
Pompadour held openly pro-Enlightenment views and was a friend of Voltaire. She ascended to power at Versailles in the years after the Portugal earthquake and no doubt shared the views of Enlightenment philosophers that the disaster was evidence to refute the long-standing social order of Europe. Her reformist views ran counter to those of much of the French nobility, many of whom also felt her presence was an insult to Louis XV’s legal wife and beloved Polish-born queen, Marie Leszczynska.
Pompadour died six years before Marie Antoinette came to court. Had she lived, it’s possible Versailles wouldn’t have been so ignorant of the changing political climate in Europe. When she died, her views died with her, and the Enlightenment was banished from Versailles.
By 1770, a new mistress had already taken to the king’s side. She was not as politically astute and influential as Pompadour, in fact, she was a former prostitute with little candor and no manners. Further, she arrived at a time when Louis XV’s queen and his daughter-in-law were both dead, meaning there was no “matriarch” of the French royal family to outrank the king’s mistress. The monarch had no surviving sons and his daughters did not enjoy a status equal to a queen or a dauphine. The new mistress, Madame du Barry, took advantage of the power vacuum and inserted herself into the court as a de facto queen.
Enter Marie Antoinette. Now that France had a future queen, Madame du Barry was knocked down a peg. The new dauphine outranked the king’s mistress. Du Barry’s resentment and Marie Antoinette’s disgust toward the licentious mistress created an awkward atmosphere at Versailles. Louis XV found her granddaughter-in-law charming but grew upset at her admonishment of du Barry, who often whined to her lover about her mistreatment at his court.
Though Madame du Barry was widely disliked, especially by the king’s daughters, Marie Antoinette’s reputation was not much better. She was an Austrian at a court of French nobles who were brought up to see Austria as the enemy. She also was unfamiliar with the social aspects of life at Versailles, which made her an outcast. No doubt her disgust for the loose morals and opulence at the palace came out as well, further instigating resentment. Marie Antoinette also had not yet produced an heir and her place started to fall into question.
The dauphine was advised to speak to the king’s mistress and acknowledge her to keep in the king’s good graces. So on New Year's Day, 1772, Marie Antoinette, in front of the entire court, went up to du Barry and put on a performance.
“There are a lot of people at Versailles today,” she told the former prostitute with a smile. Du Barry responded “Yes there are” and the two went their separate ways. Marie Antoinette did what she had to do, but she vowed never to speak to her again.
Luckily she wouldn’t have to endure du Barry’s sneering glances much longer. Just two years later, on May 10, 1774, Louis XV died of smallpox and du Barry was banished from court. His death couldn’t have come at a worse time though. Like the tsunami triggered by the earthquake two decades earlier, Enlightenment ideas crashed into the faraway shores of North America. Britain’s American colonies were tired of paying punishing taxes to pay for the debt incurred by the war against France and the aristocratic lifestyles of the British nobility. Inspired by Enlightenment thinkers, they clamored for independence and self-determination. If the Americans succeeded, the even more overtaxed and overworked French might get some ideas. What France needed now was a monarch with strong political acumen; someone who could rule with authority and rally the public to his side, or at the very least intimidate any dissenters into silence.
Instead, they got a bumbling teenager at the mercy of incompetent and tone-deaf advisors, and his sweet but naive Austrian wife. You know the rest.