2016-11-02 Wed

Marie Antoinette, the last, infamous queen of France was born today on 2nd November 1755 in Vienna, Austria, Marie. Marie Antoinette was born Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna to Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She was the 15th child and lived a relatively carefree childhood.

Marie Antoinette helped provoke the popular unrest that led to the French Revolution and to the overthrow of the monarchy in August 1792. She became a symbol of the excesses of the monarchy and is often credited with the famous quote "Let them eat cake," although the evidence of this is quite obscure.

Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, has been both vilified as the personification of the evils of monarchy and exalted as a pinnacle of fashion and beauty. Her extravagant court expenditures contributed (though to a minor degree) to the huge debt incurred by the French state in the 1770s and 1780. During these crises, as in those to come, Marie-Antoinette proved to be stronger and more decisive than her husband.

After a crowd stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, the Queen failed to convince Louis to take refuge with his army at Metz. In September, however, she successfully prodded him to resist the attempts of the revolutionary National Assembly to abolish feudalism and restrict the royal prerogative. As a result, she became the main target of the popular agitators. Antoinette the heroine is reflected in the obsessive scholarship on her choices in wardrobe and jewellery, and the endless speculation about her extramarital love life.

Only the Republic of Chad issued stamps of Queen in their royal series in 1971 to commemorate her. Both of these stamps takes on Marie Antoinette's character demonstrate the tendency, as prevalent today as it was in her own time, to depict her life and death as symbolic of the downfall of European monarchies in the face of the global revolution.