On October 16, 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette of France was beheaded at the Place de la Révolution in Paris. All this woman's fault was that she was born a princess, and then unsuccessfully married.
Ominous signs of fate
There are people, at the moment of birth, marked with the seal of fate. And then evil fate haunts them all their lives. Obviously, the Austrian princess, who later became the French queen, was among them.
On November 2, 1755, a girl was born in the family of Emperor Franz I of Lorraine in Vienna. This was the fifteenth birth of Empress Maria Theresa. And although they did not promise any trouble to the woman in labor, since the previous fourteen passed without any particular complications, this time the mother almost lost her life.
And on the eve in Portugal, there was a terrible destructive earthquake: in a matter of minutes, more than 80 thousand people died, and Lisbon turned into a heap of ruins.
By the way, the king and queen of Portugal were godparents of the newborn archduchess, although they themselves were not present at the baptism, and their representatives were Archduke Joseph and Archduchess Maria Anna.
The difficult birth of the queen mother and the Lisbon earthquake were interpreted by the court astrologer as signs foreshadowing the tragic fate of the newborn.
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The next time evil fate made itself felt fifteen years later, during the marriage of Marie Antoinette to the heir to the French throne, the future Louis XVI.
The culmination of the celebration was supposed to be folk festivities on May 30, 1770 in the Place Louis XV (which is now called the Place de la Concorde). The people were promised a treat with wine, bread and meat at the expense of the treasury. Of course, so many Parisians came running that they could not fit on the square and people blocked the nearby streets. In such a crowd, the seemingly insignificant reason can cause panic and crush. This time the pyrotechnics "distinguished themselves". The fireworks they fired exploded with a crackle and hiss just above the crowd. The frightened people scattered about. They trampled each other, trying to get out of the crowd, many fell into construction pits dug in the square. As a result of the failed celebration, 139 people were killed and hundreds were injured.
Does it remind you of anything? In the same way, an omen of the end of the Romanov dynasty, and with it the Russian Empire, was the crush on the Khodynskoye field during the coronation of Nicholas II, in which 1,379 people died and more than 900 were crippled. But neither the French nor the Russian monarchs were able to heed these unequivocal signs fate, for which they later paid.
By the will of fate, in one of these pits, where the Parisians fell, trampled during the celebration of the wedding of Marie Antoinette and Louis, 23 years later the decapitated body of the French queen was thrown.
Mozart's "Bride"
Failed to heed the ominous signs at the birth of the princess and the Austrian court. The young Archduchess, named Maria Antonia, grew up surrounded by care, affection and universal adoration. The most beautiful among her sisters, Tonia, as she was called in the family circle, was also the most playful and mischievous child. She more willingly devoted time to games and fun than serious pursuits. Even music and dance lessons were a burden to her. Her mentor, Abbot Vermont, noted that Maria Antonia did not want to develop her mind, limiting herself to superficial knowledge. According to the memoirs of her contemporaries, at the age of 12, the princess wrote in German with continuous grammatical errors, did not like conversations on serious topics and did not read a single book to the end.
But at the same time, Tonia was a kind girl. When very young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was giving concerts in Vienna, he was invited to the Imperial Palace. In the hall, a child slipped on the shiny parquet floor and fell. Maria Antonia lifted him up, consoled him, and made him sit on her lap.
“Approaching then to her mother the Empress, Wolfgang, pointing at Mary with his finger, announced:“When I grow up, I will marry her,”the French historian Marcel Brion describes this case.
Of course, this naive statement of a young genius could not cause anything but emotion: such a misalliance at the Austrian and any other European court was simply unthinkable. And the princess, through the efforts of her mother Maria-Theresa, who was called the mother-in-law and grandmother of all Europe, became the bride of the French Dauphin Louis.
In April 1770, Maria Antonia entered a tent on the Austro-French border. There she was stripped of all Austrian clothes and dressed in the latest French fashion. On the other side of the tent, she went to France, Marie Antoinette.
To the ball - in a nightie
The heir to the French throne, fifteen-year-old Louis, did not differ in male beauty. He was fat and pimpled. However, his disposition was good-natured and flexible. Marie Antoinette liked him, and their marriage could well have been successful if not for the physical handicap of her husband, which is why the couple could not conceive a child for seven years. This caused all sorts of rumors at court, and the queen was accused of sterility. Marie Antoinette did not find anything better than to drown her dissatisfaction and annoyance in the sea of entertainment: games, balls, masquerades. It should be noted that she became a trendsetter at the Versailles court. The queen had the courage to go out in home clothes: a skirt, a bodice and a swing blouse. This style, called negligee, was followed by the ladies of the court. Also, Marie Antoinette began to appear at balls and official evenings in a simple white muslin dress, very frank for that time, that looked more like a nightie. She went hunting in a men's suit, which ladies could not afford before. Other fashion innovations introduced by the queen include floral prints (patterns on the dress in the form of flowers, bouquets, floral ornaments) and high fancy hairstyles.
Seven years after his marriage, the king nevertheless decided on an operation and became a full-fledged man. The couple had four children: two sons and two daughters, but only two survived - Maria Teresa and her younger brother Louis. Family life gradually improved, but the queen did not change her habits.
The king closed his eyes to his wife's riotous life, but her pleasures were too expensive for the treasury. In the Little Trianon - a small palace near Versailles - there was an almost continuous celebration, money was spent without counting. For example, several thousand wax candles were burned in one night, while the cost of one candle was equal to the earnings of an ordinary worker per week. And in 1778 the queen, addicted to the card game, lost 171 thousand francs.
Marie-Antoinette's leisurely lifestyle caused outrage in French society. Rumors and gossip were spread about her, often not corresponding to the truth, but accepted by the people, exhausted under the burden of taxes, at face value. This backfired on the deposed queen in the days of the revolution.
Innocent victim of the revolution
In 1789, the French Revolution broke out. The royal family was transferred from Versailles to Paris, to the Tuileries castle, under house arrest. Marie Antoinette convinced her husband to escape. She wanted to get to Vienna to return with Austrian troops and suppress the popular revolt. Count Fersen, a former favorite of the queen, in vain begged her to split the family and take everyone out of France one by one. Marie Antoinette stood her ground - the family should go together. As a result, in one of the villages, the fugitives were identified, arrested and returned under escort to Paris.
On August 10, 1792, the insurgent people broke into the Tuileries. The royal family was imprisoned. Power in the country passed to the Convention.
On January 21, 1793, Louis XVI was executed. On the scaffold, he behaved with truly royal dignity. His last words were: “I am not guilty of the crimes of which I am accused. May the Lord forgive my murderers."
On the night of September 2 to 3, a brutal mob massacred 160 prisoners in La Force prison. Among them was a friend of Marie Antoinette, Princess de Lambal. This beautiful woman's clothes were torn off, she was abused, her body was literally shredded to pieces, and her head was planted on a pike and carried past the windows of the Temple prison, in which Marie Antoinette was kept. The Queen, seeing this terrible scene, fainted.
And then it was her turn. In October 1793, the trial of Marie-Antoinette began. She was accused of treason to France and conspiracy with the enemy, waste and debauchery, and also in connection with her son Louis-Charles. The latter accusation is especially absurd, since the child was less than 10 years old at the time. 41 witnesses testified at the trial. But almost all of them testified perjury. Nevertheless, the queen was sentenced to behead off.
On October 16, Marie Antoinette, trimmed bald, with her hands shackled behind her back, retaining complete composure and without dropping her royal dignity, she herself ascended the scaffold and herself lay under the knife of the guillotine. Before that, she accidentally stepped on the executioner's foot, and her last words were: "Excuse me, monsieur, I did not deliberately." After a few seconds, the queen's head rolled to the feet of the raging Parisian rabble.
Valery NIKOLAEV