It’s interesting how much people during the 1700s truly hated Marie Antoinette for her lavish and luxurious lifestyle. They hated how much money she spent on her clothes, her jewelry, and her food. Marie Antoinette was the symbol for the excess of the monarchy, and was eventually beheaded by the order of the Revolutionary tribunal 9 months after her husband. But what is the evidence behind her extravagance? And how much of this evidence is true?
It is true that the Queen of France spent large sums of money indulging on her own lifestyle. But, like Louis XVI, many of the reasons she spent so much money were for her to be able to escape from the clutches of royal life. For one, her marriage was difficult. Marie Antoinette was a child of the Habsburgs, and when she was a child, her mother Maria Theresa promised Marie’s hand in marriage to Louis as a way to strengthen the alliance between Austria and France. She and Louis did not get along well, and this strained and caused tension in their relationship. On top of that, Marie also struggles with the duties of a queen, as is expected. She really struggled with being both a wife and a queen. But she eventually found an escape. Upon her marriage, Louis XVI had gifted Marie a small chateau on the grounds of the Palace of Versailles, called the Petit Trianon. Here, Marie built her own small fake village known as the Hameau. She spent much of her time and money on this village. People were frustrated with this because while they had no food to eat and nothing to drink, Marie Antoinette was living the most luxurious life, playing dress-up with her maids and building fake buildings for her own satisfaction.
One of the most interesting factors of the Hameau was the two milk rooms in it. Marie Antoinette liked to dress up like a milkmaid, and in the Hameau, she had two milk rooms built: the pleasure dairy and the functional preparation dairy. While both had the same interior and exterior layouts, the pleasure dairy was made with marble and looked more extravagant. In the functional preparation room, Marie and her maids would fabricate milk products, which would then be brought to the pleasure room for tasting. But she was not the only French royal to indulge in dairy products; doing so had become a French tradition which began with Catherine de Medici in the mid-1500s, meaning that though Marie’s milk room became the most well-known, it was not the first time it had been made and it was not going to be the last, had she not been executed. She cannot be held fully responsible for this aspect of her reign.
Many rumors also spread about what the queen did and did not believe. Rumor has it that when Marie was told that the peasants of France were starving and had no bread to eat, she said, “Let them eat cake!” However, this rumor is likely just that: a rumor. The quote actually first appears in Confessions, a book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, where a noblewoman said the quote. The book was written in 1766, when Marie was just 11 years old, making it very unlikely that she was the one to say it.
Overall, there are a lot of misconceptions about Marie Antoinette’s lifestyle, whether they are about her reasons for acting the way she did or generally false information. Once again, like I mentioned in my previous post about Louis XVI, whether or not she deserved to be executed is up to you to decide, but blaming Marie for all of France’s financial issues seems unreasonable because even though she became a symbol of extravagance, she was not at fault for the false accusations made against her.