Maria Antonia spent her formative years between the Hofburg Palace and Schönbrunn, the imperial summer residence in Vienna,[6] where on 13 October 1762, when she was seven, she met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, two months her junior and a child prodigy.

[6] Maria Antonia formally renounced her rights to Habsburg domains, and on 19 April 1770 she was married by proxy with Louis Auguste at the Augustinian Church, Vienna, with her brother Archduke Ferdinand standing in for the Dauphin.

[47][48] Amidst the atmosphere of a wave of libelles, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II came to France incognito, using the name Comte de Falkenstein, for a six-week visit during which he toured Paris extensively and was a guest at Versailles.

He met his sister and her husband on 18 April 1777 at the Château de la Muette, and spoke frankly to his brother-in-law, curious as to why the royal marriage had not been consummated, arriving at the conclusion that no obstacle to the couple's conjugal relations existed save the Queen's lack of interest and the King's unwillingness to exert himself.

[57][58] In the middle of the queen's pregnancy, two events occurred which had a profound effect on her later life: the return of her friend, the Swedish diplomat Count Axel von Fersen the Younger[59] to Versailles for two years, and her brother's claim to the throne of Bavaria, contested by Saxony and Prussia.

[63] The new fashion called for a simpler feminine look, typified first by the rustic robe à la polonaise style and later by the gaulle, a layered muslin dress Marie Antoinette wore in a 1783 Vigée-Le Brun portrait.

[65] Repayment of the French debt remained a difficult problem, further exacerbated by Vergennes and also by Marie Antoinette prodding[67] Louis XVI to involve France in the American Revolutionary War.

The primary motive for the queen's involvement in political affairs in this period may arguably have had more to do with court factionalism than any true interest on her part in politics themselves,[68] but she played an important role in aiding the American Revolution by securing Austrian and Russian support for France, which resulted in the establishment of the First League of Armed Neutrality that stopped Britain's attack, and by weighing in decisively for the nomination of Philippe Henri, Marquis de Ségur, as Minister of War and Charles Eugène Gabriel de La Croix as Secretary of the Navy in 1780, who helped George Washington defeat the British in the American Revolutionary War, which ended in 1783.

[72] A second visit from Joseph II, which took place in July 1781 to reaffirm the Franco-Austrian alliance and also to see his sister, was tainted by false rumours[73] that Marie Antoinette was sending money to him from the French treasury.

[76] During the Kettle War, in which her brother Joseph attempted to open the Scheldt river for naval passage, Marie Antoinette succeeded in obliging Vergennes to pay huge financial compensation to Austria.

Initially banned by the king due to its negative portrayal of the nobility, the play was finally allowed to be publicly performed because of the Queen's support and its overwhelming popularity at court, where secret readings of it had been given by Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette, who had insisted on the arrest of the Cardinal, was dealt a heavy personal blow, as was the monarchy, and despite the fact that the guilty parties were tried and convicted, the affair proved to be extremely damaging to her reputation, which never recovered from it.

Continuing deterioration of the financial situation despite cutbacks to the royal retinue and court expenses ultimately forced the King, the Queen and the Controller-General of Finances, Charles Alexandre de Calonne, at the urging of Vergennes, to call a session of the Assembly of Notables, after a hiatus of 160 years.

[125] The queen attempted to fight back with propaganda portraying her as a caring mother, most notably in the painting by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun exhibited at the Royal Académie Salon de Paris in August 1787, showing her with her children.

[130] While from late 1787 up to his death in June 1789 Marie Antoinette's primary concern was the continued deterioration of the health of the Dauphin, who suffered from tuberculosis,[131] she was directly involved in the exile of the Parlement, the May Edicts, and the announcement regarding the Estates General.

As the Third Estate declared itself a National Assembly and took the Tennis Court Oath, and as people either spread or believed rumours that the Queen wished to bathe in their blood, Marie Antoinette went into mourning for her eldest son.

On the advice of Mercy, Marie Antoinette opened secret negotiations with him and both agreed to meet privately at the Château de Saint-Cloud on 3 July 1790, where the royal family was allowed to spend the summer, free of the radical elements who watched their every move in Paris.

[157] An agreement was reached turning Mirabeau into one of her political allies: Marie Antoinette promised to pay him 6000 livres per month and one million if he succeeded in his mission to restore the King's authority.

[168][169] On 17 July 1791, with the support of Barnave and his friends, Lafayette's Garde Nationale opened fire on the crowd that had assembled on the Champ de Mars to sign a petition demanding the deposition of the King.

[171] Moreover, the view that the unpopular queen was controlling the King further degraded the royal couple's standing with the people, which the Jacobins successfully exploited after their return from Varennes to advance their radical agenda to abolish the monarchy.

[182] On 20 June 1792, "a mob of terrifying aspect" broke into the Tuileries, made the King wear the bonnet rouge (red Phrygian cap) to show his loyalty to the Revolution, insulted Marie Antoinette, accusing her of betraying France, and threatened her life.

In consequence, the Queen asked Fersen to urge the foreign powers to carry out their plans to invade France and to issue a manifesto in which they threatened to destroy Paris if anything happened to the royal family.

The Brunswick Manifesto, issued on 25 July 1792, triggered the Insurrection of 10 August[183] when the approach of an armed mob on its way to the Tuileries Palace forced the royal family to seek refuge at the Legislative Assembly.

Throughout her imprisonment and up to her execution, Marie Antoinette could count on the sympathy of conservative factions and social-religious groups which had turned against the Revolution, and also on wealthy individuals ready to bribe republican officials to facilitate her escape.

[191] In April 1793, during the Reign of Terror, a Committee of Public Safety, dominated by Maximilien Robespierre, was formed, and men such as Jacques Hébert began to call for Marie Antoinette's trial.

Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1821, claimed that "Her inordinate gambling and dissipations, with those of the Count d'Artois, and others of her clique, had been a sensible item in the exhaustion of the treasury, which called into action the reforming hand of the nation; and her opposition to it, her inflexible perverseness, and dauntless spirit, led herself to the Guillotine," adding that "I have ever believed that, had there been no Queen, there would have been no revolution.

She quickly suspended protections of reformers and intellectuals in Naples, allowed Neapolitan bishops wide latitude to halt the secularization of the country, and offered succor to the overflowing number of émigrés fleeing from revolutionary France, many of whom were granted pensions.

Her favourite objects filled her small, private chateau and reveal aspects of Marie Antoinette's character that have been obscured by satirical political prints, such as those in Les Tableaux de la Révolution.

[228] This phrase originally appeared in Book VI of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical work Les Confessions, finished in 1767 and published in 1782: "Enfin Je me rappelai le pis-aller d'une grande Princesse à qui l'on disait que les paysans n'avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" ("Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: 'Let them eat brioche'").

In the 2024 Summer Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, heavy metal band Gojira's performance showed a depiction of the freshly severed head of Marie Antoinette singing, in reference to the French Revolution.