Marie Antoinette Role and French Revolution Essay

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Known as much for her fashion choices as for her role in the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette is in many ways a quintessential queen in that the patriarchal historical record severely undermines her power. Marie Antoinette was far from being an architect of the Revolution and yet her role in it cannot be underestimated. Misogynistic misunderstandings and misconceptions about the role of women in positions of power have caused Antoinette’s legacy to have been distorted gravely, to the point where she has been incorrectly credited with saying “let them eat cake.”[footnoteRef:1] Vilified as she was, Marie Antoinette signifies the ways women wielded power even when they were stripped of official or legitimate political agency. [1: “Marie Antoinette Biography.” Last modified Jan 4, 2018. https://www.biography.com/people/marie-antoinette-9398996 ]



Marie Antoinette was born into power, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor and Maria Theresa, the empress of the mighty Habsburg dynasty based in Vienna.[footnoteRef:2] Yet as a female, Marie Antoinette learned early in life that she had no real will of her own. When she was only fifteen, she was being played like a political pawn for her parents and sent to Paris to marry the then-dauphin King Louis XVI. The marriage was strategic and proved fateful not just for Marie Antoinette, but for the entire continent. [2: “Marie-Antoinette.” History. Last modified Feb 5, 2018. http://www.history.com/topics/marie-antoinette]



During the first few years of her service as Queen of France, Marie Antoinette’s strong personality shone forth. She is described as being “happy,” and also “well liked by the French citizens,” to the point of drawing tremendous crowds everywhere she went in public.

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[footnoteRef:3] Most importantly, Marie Antoinette became notorious for extravagant displays of wealth including donning lavish dresses and throwing decadent parties. The expenditures of the French crown exposed the corruption at the root of the monarchy—not just in France but in all of Europe. It did not take long before Marie Antoinette became the definitive symbol of royal corruption, fuelling revolutionary sentiment. [3: “Marie Antoinette Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Last modified 2018. http://www.notablebiographies.com/Lo-Ma/Marie-Antoinette.html]



However, historians have recently derided common accounts of the role Marie Antoinette played in fomenting pre-Revolutionary tension in Europe. “Historians either ignored the women who participated in the French Revolution, restricted them to marginalia or reduced them to stereotypes.”[footnoteRef:4] Marie Antoinette has become a stereotype, a caricature, a mythologized figure who through such fictionalized accounts loses her genuine power. The misogynistic view of women like Marie Antoinette distorts history and demonizes women. Documentary evidence reveals the superficiality of the criticisms launched against the Queen: for one, she was derided for her “sexual audacity,” accused of having numerous affairs not just with men but also with women and children, usurping traditional gender roles and norms for women.[footnoteRef:5] She was also a victim of fraud and defamation involving a diamond necklace trade she never actually authorized: she was the “victim of one of….....

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Bibliography

Covington, Richard. “Marie Antoinette.” Smithsonian Magazine, Nov 2006, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/marie-antoinette-134629573/

Diamond, M.J. “Olympe De Gouges and the French Revolution: The Construction of Gender as Critique.” In Women and Revolution: Global Expressions, edited by M.J. Diamond, Springer, Dordrecht, 1998.

“Marie-Antoinette.” History. Last modified Feb 5, 2018. http://www.history.com/topics/marie-antoinette

“Marie Antoinette Biography.” Last modified Jan 4, 2018. https://www.biography.com/people/marie-antoinette-9398996

“Marie Antoinette Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography. Last modified 2018. http://www.notablebiographies.com/Lo-Ma/Marie-Antoinette.html

Weber, Caroline. “The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette, and: The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800 (review).” Eighteenth Century Studies 33, 2 (2000): 314-315.

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