2019-10-16 Wed

Born as Maria Antonia Josepha Joanna, the Last Empress of France, Marie Antoinette, was executed today on 16th October 1793 at the age of 37.

Marie Antoinette was born to Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, and Holy Roman Emperor Francis I. She was the 15th child and lived a relatively carefree childhood. At the age of 14, she became Dauphine of France upon her marriage to Louis-Auguste and Queen of France and Navarre as her husband ascended the throne of France.

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. She has been termed as the personification of the evils of monarchy as her extravagant court expenditures contributed to the huge debt incurred by the French state in the 1770s and 1780.

When the people of France stormed the Bastille on 14th July 1789, she was kept in to the house arrest. When the monarchy was abolished Marie Antoinette was tried and on 16th October she was convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal of high treason and executed by guillotine on the Place de la Revolution.

Only the Republic of Chad issued stamps of Queen in their royal series in 1971 to commemorate her. Both of these stamps take 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.

Image Courtesy: http://philatelia.ru

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