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Marie Antoinette, by turquoisemoon
Marennes, FR

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Marie Antoinette

In some ways Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793) has gone down in history as a frivolous and spoilt woman who was executed because she allowed the people of France to die of starvation while she lived in great luxury.

This is not the case at all. One has to remember that it was the year 1770 when she was married to Louis, hier to the throne of France. Social issues like poverty and starvation were not the norm in any country, ie it was not recognized, generally speaking, as an issue that needed to be vigorously addressed, and it was many years later that those in authority started to look at (and abolish) things like child labour and slavery. So to expect Marie-Antoinette who was not, to all intents and purposes, the brightest button in the box, to sweep in to France with anything other than a vague disregard for the plight of the people around her is completely unreasonable. To boot, she was a woman, who anyway had no say. That saying "let them eat cake" is fiction - Rousseau included this in one of his books over fifty years later.

This is the portrait of the young Marie Antoinette which was sent to the French royal family before the marriage

Marie-Antoinette was Austrian, born in Vienna in to a cheerful family with little of the stiff protocol of French royalty. She was close to her sisters and, long after her marriage to Louis of France, had the famous "Le Petit Trianon" built for her at Versailles so that she could play the way she used to with her sisters in Austria. She was quite possibly lonely, and she never mastered the French language. She had been married 7 years when her first baby, a daughter, was born, which implicates unhappy early years in her marriage. Indeed, Louis was famous for his many mistresses.

Marie-Antoinette was bred for the throne of France. One of her sisters became Queen of the Netherlands, and another Queen of Sicily. She was groomed for the role and accepted it with quiet dignity, being only 14 years old when the marriage took place. Louis was 17. Love didn't come in to it. The royal daughters of Europe expected to be married for political gain and hoped for no more, regardless of what they may have dreamt of.

... and the portrait of Louis, aged 17

One of the conditions the French royal family had before the marriage was that she should imrove her French and have her teeth seen to! That does make me smile, and it is something that always irritates me in costume drama - most people until really very recently, had crooked or bad, yellowed teeth, or teeth missing, acne, pustules, blackheads, chickenpox scars. And most of them stank. None of the ladies looked as though they went to the gym - the recent Anna Karenina film made me laugh (and I switched it off after 10 mins or so) when I saw that actress Keela Somethinorother, portraying Anna Karenina ... it was quite simply funny. Anna Karenina was fat for a start. I also watched parts of the Borgias and Henry VIII - and switched off for the same reasons. When is a film producer going to be brave enough to depict people the way they truly were ?

Marie Antoinette shortly before her death

Anyway, I diverge. I won't go in to the story of the French Revolution, one of the bloodiest and most shameful massacres in the history of man. Marie Antoinette and Louis were imprisoned, the children removed. In those months Marie Antoinette's hair turned completely white - a clear indication of the fear and stress she was under, with no proper understanding of what had happened or why, or if she would ever see her children again. We all know that Louis XVI was beheaded and, for some reason best known to the Revolutionaries, Marie Antoinette, mother of 4 young children, and aged only 37, was also beheaded. When Napoleon took over he commented " executing the Queen was a crime worse than regicide".

Catherine Broughton is a novelist, a poet and an artist. Her books are on Amazon and Kindle, or can be ordered from most leading book stores and libraries. More About Catherine Broughton, to include several short stories and many of her sketches, on http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk

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Click here for more snippets of French history

Click below for Catherine Broughton's novel set in Cyprus, a UK best-seller:-

http://www.amazon.com/The-Man-With-Green-Fingers/dp/1475029411/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1368864475&sr=8-2&keywords=catherine+broughton

Description: Part of a series on my web site http://www.turquoisemoon.co.uk entitled "Snippets of French History". The aim of these snippets is just to give those who want to know the general gist. As I have a large property in France which is frequently let to holiday-makers, I find people are interested in this.

Photo Posted: May 18,2013 Photo Viewed: 390

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