Marie Antoinette (part one): Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

Vulgar History Podcast

Marie Antoinette (part one): Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman

September 10, 2025

Ann Foster:
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Hello, and welcome to the Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and it’s Marie Antoinette Month, which means for the last couple weeks we’ve been talking about Marie Antoinette’s friends and her mom. Today, we’re going to begin our discussion of Marie Antoinette herself. 

So, I want to shout out the incredible resources that I turned to research this episode, which is going to be part one of, I think, four, and I think these are going to be long episodes because I want to really get into all of this. I’m really grateful for the people who have done research on Marie Antoinette’s life, such that these books exist, so I could do my research. And they are: In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette and Her Daughters by Nancy Goldstone, Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser. That one I would say if you are just beginning a Marie Antoinette journée, as I was a bit ago, that was a great introductory one, and that’s actually the book that is the basis for Sofia Coppola’s film. I also read and referred to Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Caroline Weber. And an upcoming book, it’s coming out in October, I think, I got an early advanced copy of it, and I was really grateful to be able to do that (thank you, NetGalley), Marie Antoinette: Teen Queen to Guillotine by Melanie Burrows. 

We’re getting into the story, I don’t want to do too much preamble because there’s a lot of story to get into, but I will just say having consulted four different biographies about Marie Antoinette, it’s really interesting to see how different people make certain guesses or assumptions about why Marie Antoinette did certain things because we don’t know why she did certain things; we just know she did these things. So, looking at different people, kind of guessing what the motivations were, like, I’ve put together a narrative in my mind, but it really just kind of goes to show this is how history scholarship works. We’re all just kind of—by we, I include myself as a podcaster and as an author myself—you’re just looking at what people did in history and making your best guesses as to, like, why did that seem like the best option at the time? So, it’s interesting. It’s interesting to see because there’s a couple of situations we’re going to get to in this episode where, like, two of the authors of books came to different conclusions as to why this happened. You know, it’s like, choose your own adventure. We decide what it all means. 

But I think for someone like Marie Antoinette, a discussion of Marie Antoinette, which I promise I’m getting to, but you know what? Welcome to Vulgar History, I do a lot of tangents. When you’re talking with somebody like Marie Antoinette, who’s a famous name, like, whenever we’re at a name… Like Marie Antoinette is someone who I think is on a level of like Cleopatra, you know, you go to Spirit Halloween, like, there’s a costume of her, she’s that level of name recognition. For me, where I just kind of vaguely know who she is, it’s just sort of getting into, but who was she really? Like, who’s the person behind this brand? It’s the same as if you’re looking at maybe a celebrity today, or if you’re looking at, like, Marilyn Monroe or something, it’s like, okay, well, this is who the brand is. This is how people saw her, how people reacted to her, how people remember her. But like, who was she really? That’s what we’re going to be looking at over the next four, asterisks, I retain the right to have it be more than four episodes, the four weeks. 

So, Marie Antoinette, first of all, not really her name. She was born Maria Antonia was her name because she was not French. She just Frenchified her name when she went to France. She was Maria Antonia. If you listened to the episode we did a couple weeks ago about her mom, Maria Theresa, everybody in that family, the women in the family, the Habsburg family, all had Maria as their kind of first name, but they all went by their middle name. So, she was Maria Antonia, but people just called her Antoine or Antonia or Toinette when she was growing up. Just for the sake of consistency, I’m just going to call her Marie Antoinette throughout because there’s a lot of people in this story and it’ll get confusing if I start giving them all different names. 

So, she was born November 2, 1755, and this is in the midst of— Again, if you listened to the Maria Theresa episode from a couple of weeks ago, which is like, if you just popped into this episode, that’s fine, but if you want to know more about like the wars that were going on, we talk about that a lot there. So, there’s various wars that have been going on in Austria, where Marie Antoinette was born, and she was born during kind of a peacetime era. This is one of the only peacetime eras in Austria for the last, I don’t know, 25 years or something. But 1755, it’s what? 22-ish years before the American Revolution breaks out, but like, shit’s going down in America. And I did a bunch of episodes last year about the American Revolution, and that really connects to what’s happening with the French Revolution. So, I do want to lay this groundwork as well, just so you know, like, shit’s happening in America, and that’s to do with the tension between—because at that point, 1755, America, which wasn’t called that, I guess, was a British colony, and by British colony, I mean, owned by Britain. Britain and France, longtime enemies. I guess, technically, England and France, longtime enemies. Scotland and France, kind of cool. But anyway, all of what I’m saying is that there’s been various wars going on in, like, the New World, and it’s tension between England and between France. This had all led to Maria Theresa, the Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, making a treaty with Louis XV, who is the king of France at this time.

So, Marie Antoinette was kind of born just at the dawn of, like, an Austrian-French alliance, which is interesting because she’s an Austrian person who is later married to go into France. If you want to go back to what specifically led to this Austrian-French alliance, it was an overeager, in 1754, an overeager American colonel exceeded his orders and opened fire on a sleeping French reconnaissance unit, which rekindled hostilities between England and France. And because of this, this is where Austria— Well, France was like, “We need some help, like let’s team up with Austria.” Anyway, that overeager colonel was named George Washington. So, this is the first of many… You remember that show 13 Reasons Why? Marie Antoinette, technically, these episodes are called How Do You Solve a Problem like Marie Antoinette? And to me, the problem is like, how did her life turn out the way that it did? How did the French Revolution happen? And it’s not just one or two reasons, and it’s not 13 reasons; I’m going to estimate it’s at least 100 reasons. And if you’re a really dedicated listener, like keep a tally as I come up with reasons in these episodes and let me know at the end how many reasons it was, because I think so many things had to go in a specific way to make the French Revolution even happen. And then, for Marie Antoinette’s role in it to play out as it did, which is like, maybe you don’t know the story of Marie Antoinette, but I think most people know she got her head cut off in the French Revolution, spoiler, but like, I think at the Spirit Halloween store, the Marie Antoinette costume probably has her head cut off or something. So, I think we all kind of know that’s what’s coming. 

In researching it, there’s so many specific things that had to go wrong, all at the same time, for it all to go down. Like, comparatively, we did these episodes last year about the American Revolution, or even the Haitian Revolution, it’s just kind of like people were fed up and rebelled against the monarchy who was in charge of the colony. And that’s what the American Revolution and the Haitian Revolution both have in common. People got fed up and were just like, “Fuck this! We want to rule ourselves. We don’t want to be ruled by a European power,” and then they succeeded. I mean, the fallout of that was different for America versus Haiti, but it was sort of a straightforward trajectory of, like, people getting fed up and then rebelling against the colonial forces. The French Revolution is so much more complicated than that, and that’s part of why it was undone pretty quickly afterwards. Anyway, it’s complicated, but this is where I just want to throw America in here. 

Another thing that you can keep track of, if you’re a longtime listener of this podcast, is how many people’s names are going to come up in Marie Antoinette’s story, who we talked about in previous episodes, because it’s going to be a lot. Because what happened, the way that her life unfurled and the way that the French Revolution happened, had a lot of international connections. We’re going to be mentioning a lot of people who came up in previous episodes, which is going to explain to you why it took me a year and three months from the beginning of the season to get to the point where we are now, which is the Marie Antoinette of it all. So again, George Washington, quasi-responsible for Marie Antoinette becoming Queen of France. That’s the first step of all of this. 

So, Marie Antoinette was the fifteenth child born to Maria Theresa. Maria Theresa was bringing some really hearty genes into the Habsburg family, which really needed it. Well, Maria Theresa herself, her parents were barely related, and then her husband was barely related to her, so for the Habsburgs, it’s like, this is why these children are thriving, not because of her excellent parenting, but we talk about that in the Maria Theresa episode. Anyway, so Marie Antoinette was the youngest daughter born to Maria Theresa. 

All of the daughters of Maria Theresa kind of looked the same. The same way that if you look at the Duggar siblings, it’s like, clearly, you’re all siblings of each other; you’re all kind of pretty in the same way. But on a scale of like, these are all the children, these are all the daughters, Marie Antoinette was one of the prettiest of these children. She had huge blue eyes. In all the portraits of her from when she’s a little girl through to when she’s an adult woman, you can see she’s got these huge eyes, which are really striking and really blue. Her hair was reddish; if you’re watching the video of this on Patreon, similar colour to what my hair is currently now, kind of strawberry blonde-ish colour. She was cute looking as a little kid, but she also just had this really cheerful, kind of chill, fun personality. She was her father’s favourite, which is interesting because she had 14 older siblings, and then two more brothers after her. So, how do you stand out in a family that big is just by being, like, cute and by being sort of charming and lovely and kind of basic, and I say that as a basic bitch myself. 

Marie Antoinette was not a complex person; she was not, you know, like, a serious little studious kid. She was just really easy to get along with, and I could see if you have a huge family and you’re in the midst of constant wars, you’re just like, I like this kid. I like this one that’s just kind of like, you’re like, “Hey, do you want to play this game?” “Sure.” I think partially this is her personality, just inherently naturally, and partially, I think she saw that to get along in this big family, it benefited her to be, like, a chill, easy person. I will say myself, as the youngest of not a family this big, I have two older sisters, I found that the way to get along, to get attention in my family, was to be whiny and complain a lot. I think other younger siblings might have that same experience. Marie Antoinette, already showing emotional intelligence that the way to become her father’s favourite was to be actually chill and nice. So, she does have emotional intelligence, we’ll see that throughout this saga. 

She also was, and maybe part of why she was her father’s favourite is because she was also, personality-wise, similar to him. Like, her mother Maria Theresa was, like, intense; she was really crafty and cunning and coming up with plans and like pulling herself up by her bootstraps and like self-educating herself and her father, Marie Antoinette’s father, Francis, Holy Roman Emperor, was just kind of like a hot guy who liked going to parties and having a nice time. And that is kind of Marie—This is what I mean, it’s just like a basic person. Nothing wrong with that. Marie Antoinette and her father could have both done well on, like, a Love Island situation. This is the sort of person they are. Unfortunately, they were born into, like, wartime Austria, 18th century. 

So, Marie Antoinette, growing up with her siblings and her family in the royal court in Vienna, had like, although she was the youngest daughter, and she was kind of not paid attention to except for when she was being people pleasing, like, she got along with her siblings. There were sort of two batches of siblings in her family, not because her mother stopped procreating in the middle, but just because smallpox kept happening, and it was these middle kids who died. So, there’s sort of, like, family number one. Some of Marie Antoinette’s older siblings were, I want to say, like, 20 or 25 years older than her, and then there’s this younger batch of siblings. So, she, Marie Antoinette, hung out with kind of the younger batch of siblings. And even within that, in the palace— Again, I keep bringing up the Duggars, but I don’t know any other famous huge family. But similar to the Duggars, it’s like the girls all lived on one side of the house and the boys lived on the other side of the house. So, Marie Antoinette was closest to her sisters, who were her same age. The sister who was closest in age to her was called Maria Carolina, but her nickname was Charlotte, and I’m going to call her Charlotte because there’s a lot of repeated names in this family. 

Anyway, the two of them just got up to mischief, but even within that, Charlotte was, like, three years older than her, but Charlotte was kind of seemingly always the one who’s instigating it, and Marie Antoinette was going along with it. She’s not a little kid showing, like, leadership potential or whatever. Her sister is the one who’s kind of got the strong personality, and Marie Antoinette’s just kind of, like, there for a good time. Just so you know, kind of, I think the vibe that people have as a child doesn’t always, but often, I think kind of reflects kind of who your personality is outside of extraneous other forces. People can be very different in behaviour from a child to an adult, but in her case, I think this really shows just kind of, this is just what she’s like. 

She had a nice time growing up in Vienna with her siblings. They had beautiful—they probably still do—beautiful winters there with, like, lots of snow and she and her family, her siblings, would go outside tobogganing and sledding and ice skating and just kind of like, having a nice time. As compared to the French royal court, where her future husband was growing up, it was kind of laid back and chill. This is at a time, I don’t think Maria Theresa and her husband, Francis, were necessarily, like, big on Rousseau’s philosophy. Rousseau was the most popular philosopher at this time, we’ve talked about him in, like, every episode this season. But his whole thing was like, it would be cool… Like, people will do better if they get to be outside in nature and live “as God intended.” Rousseau’s writing this in a time where there’s a lot of sort of, like, societal change, and a lot of, at that point, what would have felt like a lot of technological change and Rousseau was like, “Let’s just get back to our roots as, like, human animals and plant gardens and have a nice time.” Now, asterisks, Rousseau is saying this because this is also, he had read writings by people like John Smith, who you might know from the story of Pocahontas, whose real name was Matoaka, and I did an episode about her a while ago. Rousseau had read these kinds of, like, racist, colonial, tall tales about what it was like in the Americas and what the Indigenous people were like, and how they were living these “simpler” lives, and so Rousseau was like, “We should be like that too.” So, I don’t know if Maria Theresa and her husband and the family were specifically following a Rousseauian philosophy, but it was just sort of like, they liked living sort of quasi-domestic— When they didn’t have to go to do some sort of like, fancy royal family church service or whatever, like, they liked to be in the house dressing kind of plain, just living like anybody else. 

There’s a portrait actually that one of Marie Antoinette’s sisters, Maria Christina, whose nickname is Mimi, who was her mother’s favourite because Maria Christina was kind of, like, bossy and bitchy like her mother was— Is everyone’s parents’ favourite child always the one who’s like the person? I don’t know. Anyway, Mimi was also a painter, like, all of the girls in the family, probably the boys too, were given painting lessons, and there’s a lot of music and dancing and art, and it was that sort of family. Anyway, Mimi painted this painting of the family on Christmas morning, like, a painting of the family and what the family was doing on Christmas morning. And so, the mom and dad are there, and they’re both dressed pretty plain, considering it’s, like, the Holy Roman Emperor and Holy Roman Empress. Maria Theresa is dressed almost as plainly as one could be in this situation. Francis is dressed kind of like Scrooge with a nightcap and a nightgown on, and then Mimi herself is there in the painting dressed almost like how the maids would have been dressed, which is not to say she’s in costume as a maid, but just like, a plain dress. This is the domestic scene that she portrayed her family as. And then two of the brothers are there, the two littlest brothers are there playing with the toys they just got because it’s Christmas. One of them looks kind of upset about the toy, one of them is having more fun. And then little Marie Antoinette is there, and this is the first portrait I saw of her when I was like, “Oh, I see who she is. I get this person,” because I, too, am a youngest sister. 

Little Marie Antoinette is standing there holding a doll, and the doll is probably the size, like, equivalent to her. She’s like six years old in this picture. The doll is maybe like, Barbie doll size, and Marie Antoinette is just looking right at the viewer of the painting; no one else in the painting is looking quite as directly. She’s just standing there holding this doll, looking like the most thrilled little girl in all of the world, and she is kind of dressed like the doll. Everyone else in the portrait is just sort of royal family casual, and Marie Antoinette is wearing sort of like, the sort of gown you stereotypically think about a little girl might wear in the late 18th century, like, a fancy dress, and the doll is wearing a similar dress. It’s interesting because no one else is dressed this fancy. So, I think she’s the sort of little girl who—and I have friends who have children who are like this—who just likes to wear their Elsa dress every day. Or sometimes you see kids who like to wear their Spider-Man costume every day. I think Marie Antoinette, on a daily basis, would be wearing sort of the less restrictive Viennese royal family outfits, but she likes to dress up sometimes, she likes to wear her costume. And in this painting, she’s wearing her costume, and I’m just like, I get her. I see this girl, and I know what she’s about. 

So, she had this really (all things considered) charming, idyllic childhood, really, for a person in this situation. And a lot of that is because, like, as much as her mother was absentee and off fighting wars and being the Empress, like, there was staff and servants around, but also the siblings really got along with each other. I’m emphasizing this because that’s not what it was like at Versailles, and that’s not what it’s going to be like at Versailles when she gets there. But she was raised, you can tell sometimes when you meet somebody, it’s like, oh, you were raised by a family that loved you. You have the confidence of a person who developed that by just being supported in various ways by your family, and that is what Marie Antoinette has in her childhood and good for her. 

So, her family was very, as I mentioned, artistic, musical. Marie Antoinette was very talented at playing the harpsichord and at dancing, like ballet dancing sorts of things. She had the sort of grace that really good dancers just have inherently. You can teach anybody dance steps, and some people are going to become really good dancers, but the really great dancers are people who inherently have that sort of grace about them. I saw this documentary, it was on Disney+ ages ago, in like 2020, about the American Ballet School or something, and it showed how they were trying to find new recruits for the ballet school and they were going to just rec centers and, like, just hang out spots all over New York City and maybe other cities, and just looking at kids, like little kids, I don’t know, 4 or 5 years old, and maybe some of them had never done ballet before but just getting them to point their toes and, like, do some basic steps. And you can just see, like, some people’s foot can curve in a way that means, oh, they could become a really good ballet dancer. Other people can become a pretty good ballet dancer, but these kids who have this natural foot movement, it’s like, “Oh, they could be a great ballet dancer.” And Marie Antoinette, I think, had that inherent skill about her. Even in her adult years—I don’t want to jump ahead too far—but when she has haters, even the haters, even the people, even the Cicero to Marie Antoinette’s Fulvia, the haters could never say anything that she wasn’t graceful. She was just a graceful person. That is what she’s like. 

So, this musical family. They have concerts in their palace and stuff, and when she was 6 years old, a 6-year-old prodigy came to do it, to perform at a gathering at the family palace, at Schönbrunn, and this prodigy, you may be able to guess, was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He had been invited to entertain the royal family. He was also a Viennese, I think. So, he was 6 years old, Marie Antoinette was 6 years old, and she and the younger kids were all invited to come to this event. They weren’t always invited to come to all of the events. Anyway, Mozart was just, like, he was so sweet and so cute, but he was not used to the floors in the palace were really polished or waxed or whatever. And so, at one point, I don’t know if he was performing or just sort of walking, he slipped and fell. And then, before he could get himself back up, a little 6-year-old Marie Antoinette ran to him and picked him up. And he said, “You are good. I shall marry you.”

This is, you know, it’s a sort of story that sounds like, is this true? Could this be true? But it’s, like, everything you’re going to hear about Marie Antoinette, this is one hundred percent, I think, a thing that happened because there’s so many examples in her life where, basically, people fall in front of her and she runs to help them, or people swoon or faint and she’s the first person on the scene to help them. She is very attentive and also empathetic, and again, I mentioned, like, the emotional intelligence. She wants to put people at ease. So, this is who she is. She’s just this sweet little girl, the sweet little baby angel, just growing up in this kind of like, you know, Narnia place, not that it’s snowy all the time, but it seems like later in life, her fond memories of her childhood are all snow-based, to the extent that when she was in France and every time it snowed, she was filled with this sort of, like, nostalgic happiness. She’s just excited when it snows because she remembers all these fun things she did in the snow when she was a child. 

So, while she’s being a little kid and having a nice time and whatever, wars are happening. That’s what her mother is busy doing. So, her mother’s archenemy was Frederick the Great. And Marie Antoinette, from ages birth until I think around this, like, age 6 or 7, this is where Austria was not actively at war with Frederick the Great. So, the first six years of her life were maybe especially less stressful because her mother was not actively leading armies and wars. But then, at this point, Frederick the Great fucked around, found out and, anyway, they went back to war. So, they’re back to war, but still, she’s at home, she’s just chilling with her siblings, learning to play the harpsichord, whatever, just like having a nice little time. 

I do want to mention, like, she’s still a little kid at this point, 6 or 7 years old, but I think it became evident fairly early on that she was skilled at gracefulness, at dancing, she had emotional intelligence, but she was not book smart. She struggled with reading and with writing, and a lot of her struggles, in one of the books that I cited, so Nancy Goldstone’s book, she does outright suggest that Marie Antoinette maybe had what we would now consider somebody with ADHD, or potentially, certainly, learning difficulties, potentially dyslexia or something. She found reading really hard. She struggled with it, and there weren’t people around there with strategies to get her to succeed in this. Actually, she had a governess who really liked her, and again, this is kind of like the emotional intelligence. Marie Antoinette was just so nice and pleasant, and her mother wanted to have regular report cards, like, how was she doing? And the governess couldn’t be like, “Uhhh, actually she doesn’t know how to read or write, and doesn’t want to learn.” So, what the governess would do eventually is she would just, like, write the essays in pencil, then Marie Antoinette would trace over the letters because she was illiterate, like, she didn’t know what the letters even said, but she would trace over it in ink, and then they would hand that to Maria Theresa, and then it would seem like Marie Antoinette was learning the lessons, but she was not. 

But she was the sort of person—and this isn’t necessarily an ADHD thing because I’m also this sort of person and I don’t have that—but if she’s not good at something, she’s not interested in it. She doesn’t want to stick with it long enough to get good at it. Like, when I was in school, I was good at history, obviously, anything that was story-based; I loved history, I loved English, I love reading and writing. But like, math and science, I was not inherently skilled at those things, and I didn’t love becoming good at them. We’ll see this later in her life as well. I’m focusing so much on Marie Antoinette as a kid, because this is really who she is before she gets to Versailles, and she gets to Versailles at such a young age, she doesn’t have much of a chance to become anything other than this child who she is. But when something is hard, she didn’t have the focus to stick with it, and I think that’s partially her personality and partially, like, the ADHD of it all. But she just was young—well, at this point, 7 years old—she was the youngest daughter of this family, she was beloved, she found ways to make it seem like she was doing better at school than she was, and she was getting away with it. She could have gone on her whole life this way, but we’ll see what happens. 

Anyway, when she was about 10 years old, her whole family, basically, her father, her mother, and the oldest sibling pack, were all going off to Innsbruck to prepare for one of her older brother’s weddings. So, the whole family was getting ready to go; the littlest kids were just kind of like, “Boo-hoo, we want to go too.” And her dad actually held up the whole procession of carriages because he’s like, “I need to go say goodbye to my favourite, Marie Antoinette,” much to the irritation of Maria Theresa, who’s just like, “Let’s go. We have a schedule.” Francis is like, “No, no, no. I need like, I need to hug Marie Antoinette.” So, he made everybody wait until a little Marie Antoinette, 10-year-old Marie Antoinette, could be brought out so he could hug her. And they were like, “Why did you do that, man?” And he’s like, “I longed to kiss that child,” he said. That’s his fave, and I think he knew that she needed to see him one more time. 

And then, on route to or from this wedding, he suddenly died of a heart attack. So, that was the last time Marie Antoinette ever saw her dad. Her mother returned from this journey, really, really upset. We talked in the Maria Theresa episode that she was, ” like, dick-matized by her husband; she was obsessed with him and had been since she was a girl. But like anybody, your husband suddenly died in front of you, obviously, she’s traumatized. So, she came back completely changed; she was just in mourning for the rest of her life, she painted the walls of her house black. Her mother was changed, and so Marie Antoinette’s life shifted somewhat because her father died, and that’s a huge change for anybody. But also, the father was kind of like the… He smoothed things over. Her mother’s really intense and whatever, and her father would sort of make everybody get along a bit better. But now, the mother’s there, intense, but also in this intense mourning and everything. 

So, for the next— We’re skipping ahead, but two years go by; she goes from 10 to 12. She’s hanging out most of the time with her sister, Charlotte, and still having a relatively carefree childhood because she’s the youngest daughter and her mother doesn’t really pay attention to her. So, she and her sister, Charlotte, they would have picnics and play in the garden and, like, pull tricks on their governess, and the governess was like, “Okay, don’t learn how to read. That’s fine.” Part of the reason why her mother was not super paying attention to her—besides the fact that her mother was, like, in mourning and at war and had all these other siblings—it’s at this point, there’s, I think, five unmarried older sisters. 

So, the job of these girls—who are all technically archduchesses, that was their title—was to be married off to somebody in some other kingdom or duchy or country, who Austria wanted to do an alliance with. You see this in history constantly, like, this is not specific to just this family, but that’s kind of the role of daughters. The role of sons is to inherit the kingdom or the duchy or whatever, the empire; the role of daughters is to be married somewhere else to cement an alliance. The reason you do that is because, for instance, Austria and France. If you want to be like, “We’re going to work together, Austria and France. We had been enemies, but now we’re friends, and to show that we mean that, we’re going to marry your boy to my girl, and then that means now we’re family, so we have to stay. It would be really awkward to not be in an alliance anymore because now we’re married to each other,” especially once those two people, the two people who marry each other, have a child, and that child represents the combination of these two places. 

But Marie Antoinette had five older sisters who were marriageable, by which I mean she had one older sister whose name was Maria Anna, who they called Mary Ann, and she was not considered marriageable because she had physical differences. If you go all the way back, if you’re a history girlie, to like Henry VIII being like, “Show me a picture of Anne of Cleves. Is she hot?” Like, to convince somebody from another kingdom to marry your child, you had to prove that that daughter was beautiful. And if that daughter was not what was considered beautiful by the other country, then maybe they wouldn’t want to marry her. So, the sister, Mary Ann, not only had physical differences, but also, she had health problems too. So, the role of these duchesses is to be beautiful enough that another country would be like, “Yes, she can marry into our family,” but also, is she healthy enough that she can have children? Because the whole purpose of these alliances is to have these children. And Mary Ann seemed like she probably wouldn’t be healthy or hearty enough to have children. So, honestly, she dodged all of the bullets, Mary Ann. Her mother made her be the abbess of a nunnery, but she didn’t have to go live in the nunnery. So, she just stayed at home and chilled, and, for her, compared to what happens to all of her sisters who were sent off to these horrible marriages, like, she did okay. 

Anyway, so Marie Antoinette is the youngest of all these sisters, and there’s different countries that her mother wants to cement alliances with. But there’s enough sisters lined up for those marriages, so Marie Antoinette’s not even being thought about in that context yet. She’s, like, 12 and whatever. And then, smallpox. 

So,1767. Smallpox is a main recurring character in this story. Sometimes, for this podcast, for some of the seasons or, like, miniseries, I make a bingo sheet, sort of like a drinking game for the podcast. But smallpox is going to come up a lot in this story, and this is its first appearance. So, 1767. So, what happened is that one of her older sisters, Maria Josepha, died of smallpox. A whole bunch of people got smallpox at this point. Even Maria Theresa, the mom, got smallpox. It seemed like she was so close to dying that they gave her the last rites, which is what you do in a Catholic family before someone dies. I should mention, I hadn’t, this family is Catholic, and that’s pretty important because the only nations that they could marry the daughters to had to be other Catholic nations, like France. So, because Maria Josepha, the older sister, died of smallpox, that meant all the other girls were, like, scooched up in the order of who’s going to be married to who. 

And then I’m just double-checking— Oh yeah, and then she had another sister, Elisabeth, Maria Elisabeth, Elisabetta, who was the prettiest of the older siblings. Like, remember, there’s the two sibling groups; Marie Antoinette is the prettiest of the younger batch, and Maria Elisabeth was the prettiest of the older batch. So, she was like, “Okay, we’re going to get actually a really good alliance for her because she’s so pretty.” She got smallpox, survived, but her face… She just had smallpox scars on her face. So, suddenly, now, the whole like, is she beautiful enough to commit somebody to marry her? That’s not true anymore, so then she was forced to become an abbess of a nunnery as well, but she could also stay at home. So again, she kind of got out of this okay, although it was really devastating for her to have gone from thinking of all these opportunities or options in life to just being like, “No, you had a smallpox, you’re an uggo. The end.” 

So, again, Marie Antoinette was scooched up twice in this list of, like, which sister is going to marry where. This is again, like to whoever out there is, thank you for this, I hope that there’s somebody doing this, keeping a list of all the things that had to happen for Marie Antoinette’s life to turn out the way it was. One thing is, I don’t know, you could put this as one thing or two things; Maria Josepha dying of smallpox is one thing. Elisabeth being, having these, like, aftereffects of smallpox, where she couldn’t be married, is a second thing. But this wasn’t even supposed to be Marie Antoinette’s fate, to marry the French heir to the throne; one of the other sisters probably would have done that, but instead, she is the one who’s left. And you know, there’s letters back and forth with Maria Theresa and the French king, Louis XV, being like, “Hey, I have all these daughters. Do you want one of them to marry the Dauphin?” 

I should say, we’re going to explain a lot about his character in a bit, but Louis XV is the King of France. He had a son also called Louis. Everyone there is called Louis, we’ll figure out some nicknames as we get going. Louis XV’s son got married, had children, and then died. So, it’s the son of the son. So, Louis XV is the king, and his grandson is the heir to the throne, his oldest surviving grandson. So, that is who they’re arranging the marriage of. Louis XV, we’ve talked about on this podcast before, because at this point, he had a lover and he had taken a new mistress who was Madame du Barry, who used to work at this hat shop that was kind of like the Hooters of Paris at the time, where it was just all the shop girls were just, like, hot young girls. That’s where she was, and she was spotted, and then she became a courtesan, and then she was interesting to the king, and now she had this official job as mistress of the king. 

At this point, Louis XV is, I don’t know, probably 50 years old or so, and he is entirely checked out from being a king. He’s just over I; he’s been the king since he was a little kid, and he’s just like, “You know what I want to do?” Like, if he was a guy today, he’d be like, “You know what I want to do? Play golf constantly.” But back then, golf wasn’t the vibe; the vibe was hunting. And so, he just didn’t care about ruling, he kind of like let the ministers do all of that. This is part of like— Put this on your 13 reasons why list, the fact that Louis XV just didn’t give a shit anymore about improving things in France. Anyway, so he’s just, like, he’s considering, “Yeah, this might be good to solidify this alliance between Austria and France. Maybe we can do this marriage between his grandson,” who, spoiler, he didn’t care about at all, “and one of the daughters of Maria Theresa.” 

And then, Louis XV’s wife, described Nancy Goldstone as his “long suffering wife,” because this guy, like, he’s in his lame duck king era, where he’s just truly not doing anything. He loves being around his mistress, Madame du Barry; he also has other whooores, as we like to say on this show, pronouncing it like that, I don’t know why I do that, but we do. Anyway, he had lots of mistresses. He had Madame du Barry as his official mistress. Before that, it had been Madame de Pompadour. He had this place called the Deer Park where he just invited young women to, like, fuck them. This is the thing, if he was a guy today, he would be going golfing all the time, but he was a guy back then, and what he did was go hunting and also just fucking young women, including his mistress. This is why his wife is long-suffering, because this guy sounds like a really shitty husband. Anyway, she died. In terms of the people who die in the story, I like to note what they die of. Her cause of death is unknown, but she was age 65. I don’t think it was smallpox because there would have been a bunch of smallpox-related deaths, and it would have said that. 

Anyway, she died so suddenly, Louis XV is also single. So, Maria Theresa is like, “Ooh, what if I marry one of my daughters to the king, not just to the Dauphin?” So, this is our first introduction to some scheming people at Versailles. Everyone at Versailles is just— Every royal court is always like this in every story we’ve ever done on this podcast. But in Versailles, the flavour of the schemieness is specific to the fact that the King had fucked off mentally, emotionally, often physically, and didn’t give a shit. So, Versailles was sort of designed around, like, a king who was a cult leader, as we talked about in the Gabrielle de Polignac episode. So, now it’s kind of like, there’s a cult, but there’s not really a leader of the cult, so everyone is just jockeying for power because there’s sort of a vacuum in the middle, because no one’s actually kind of in charge. 

Some of the people who are jockeying for power are the King’s adult spinster daughters, who I’m going to call the Aunties. So, they are four adult women who chose to not get married because they liked being princesses of France so much, and they knew if they married, it would have to be to somebody either a lower rank in France, and then they wouldn’t be princesses of France anymore, or it would be to somebody from another country and they would have to not be French anymore, they’d have to adopt whatever their new culture was. So, they’re like, “We’re just going to stay here and just be the most heinous bitches,” and that’s what they did. They hated their father’s mistress, Madame du Barry. They would have hated whoever their father’s mistress was, because that was a person who had the father’s ear, who maybe was influencing their father instead of them. The leader of the Aunties was Adélaïde, and we talked about her in the Adélaïde Labille-Guiard episode a while ago, if you want to scroll back and hear about her in a more favourable way. But Madame Adélaïde was sort of the leader of the Aunties who were just, like, bitches (derogatory). 

So, they were like, “Okay, we hate Madame du Barry because she’s a slut. She’s, like, a fugly slut, she worked in Hooters. Our beloved mother just died, and we don’t want this, like, Hooters girl to have all the power at Versailles anymore. We want us to sort of represent our mother’s interests and be his advisors.” And so, they’re like, okay, what we need to do is find some sort of Princess Diana-like person— And by Princess Diana, I mean when Princess Diana first married Charles. Some sort of like young, naive person who’s not going to be schemey or malicious to marry our father so that… I don’t know, the aunts were just like, “We want more power. So, we want to marry our father to some innocent young woman.” So, they’re like, “Ooh, what about if we marry one of Maria Theresa’s daughters to our father?” And they were like, “Oh, we heard that Elisabeth is really beautiful, and she’s 25 or something, that’s an okay age.” But the king was like, “Okay, sure. Let’s see what’s up with Madame Elisabeth.” And he found out like, “Oh no, she has smallpox scars.” So, this did not happen. And then, the other available sisters were all, like, 14, and Louis was like, “No thanks.” 

So, again, this is another thing on our list of reasons; Marie Antoinette maybe wouldn’t have gone to France if one of her sisters had been married to the king, but that didn’t happen. Actually, I like— So, Louis was suspicious about Elisabeth. It’s not just like, he heard word that she had smallpox scars, he sent a portrait painter to Vienna, which, you know, it’s sort of like sending a paparazzi to just be like… So, I just picture the portrait painter showing up and just, like, really quickly sketching a courtroom sketch to be like, “Oh, here’s what she looks like,” and then sending that back. 

Anyway. So, the king decided like, “You know what? I’m just not going to remarry at all. I don’t need to remarry, I’ve got Madame du Barry. To cement this French-Austrian alliance, let’s just marry my grandson, the heir to the throne,” which in France is called the Dauphin, “to Marie Antoinette, this person who’s a similar age.” So, Marie Antoinette at this point is like, 13, 14, and the grandson is, like, 14, 15. So, they’re similar age at least, but Louis was just like, “We need to make sure Marie Antoinette will fit in at Versailles, by which I mean, is she beautiful and graceful, and are her teeth straight?” This was very important to him. And so again, I think the portrait painter came down to Vienna and was like, “Oh no! Oh, mon dieu! Herman, mon pills!” because Marie Antoinette had crooked teeth. She had crooked teeth, she had a high hairline, she had, like, a five head, which if you’re watching this on video on Patreon, I also do so I relate to her in that way. But in Versailles, they’re like, “No, we don’t like a high forehead, we don’t like crooked teeth, don’t like red hair, especially not curly red hair.” So, Marie Antoinette just, like, the portrait painter, I just pictured him poised and ready to paint the portrait, and Maria Theresa is like, “No! Not yet,” and just like, rushing Marie Antoinette out of the room. 

So, they gave her this, over three months, makeover. They got this dentist, which again, this is 1769. They got a 1769 European dentist who came in and he had just invented braces, but it wasn’t braces like how I had, it’s not Invisalign, it’s not even like the little metal things you put on. It’s like a giant headgear thing, but then I also read descriptions that there was some oral surgery was done, so maybe some teeth were pulled. Anesthetic, not invented yet, so she’s going through this like dental trauma. 

And then Louis also sent down from Versailles, his mistress’s hairdresser, who’s also his late wife’s hairdresser, who came down to figure out a new style for Marie Antoinette that would be, like… It’s not bangs because if you see portraits of her, she doesn’t have bangs, but they just figured out a way to kind of hide the five head. And part of the issue with Marie Antoinette where she had, like, traction alopecia because she liked to pull her hair back in a hairband, and I don’t know, it just got pulled so tight that there were bald spots along her hairline. So, they’re like, “Let’s just like do like a protective style so that your hair can regrow.” They didn’t like that she had red hair; that was not the vibe in Versailles, they’re not fans of Anne of Green Gables. So, you know, just various powders and stuff to like… She had curly red hair, and they’re like, “What we want you to have is, like, not curly, not red hair.” So, the hairstylist figured some stuff out anyway. 

So, she was having this makeover done and then at the end of that, they let the portrait painter do the portrait, and he drew her, and the king was like, “Oh yeah, she’s pretty.” It’s funny because her mouth is closed in the portrait, but he knew her teeth were straight somehow. 

I do want to mention too, because… So, Maria Theresa was a Habsburg, which is a famous royal dynasty you might have heard of in the context of inbreeding. We talked about this in the Maria Theresa episode, there’s two kinds of Habsburgs; there’s the Austrian ones and there’s the Spanish ones. The Spanish ones are the ones where it’s like, “Oh, let’s marry a father to his daughter or whatever,” and then you get to like Habsburg jaw, where we see the portraits of the people where you’re like, I don’t think that person could chew food. The Habsburg jaw became such an inbred trait because the family was so inbred that this trait just kept getting kind of more and more detrimental to people’s health. The Austrian Habsburgs were, I’m going to say, much less inbred, still kind of inbred like any kind of Western European royal family, but not as much so. So, the trait that Marie Antoinette had from her Habsburg genes was called the Habsburg lip. So, she had kind of like a permanently pouting lower lip, which I think, these days, in the days of lip filler and whatever, would be very cute. You know, people apply lip gloss in a way to look like you’re always kind of pouting. 

But at that point, the pouting lip, like, first of all, it was evidence of her Habsburg lineage, but also it gave her a resting bitch face. And I’ve described this like, sweet, kind, emotionally empathetic person, which is what she was like, so it is unfortunate that she had a resting bitch face. It’s almost like a resting snob face. Like, when she wasn’t smiling or talking to somebody, her face would just kind of look like she’s being like, “Mmm. Mmm,” like she’s disapproving of you, which is not her vibe, which is why when you see portraits of her—and she knew this and her mother knew this—the portraits are always face on. She’s never painted in profile. The only time you can really see her profile is, like, there are some busts, which is a statue of just her head and shoulders, and when you look at that from the side, you can see this sort of like, resting snob face that she had. Anyway. I don’t know if the dentist tried to fix that, but whatever he did, she looked good. 

But then, this is where Maria Theresa is like, “Oh great. Well, she’s a daughter of mine, so she must be well educated. You know, I saw all these essays she wrote.” So, then they sent a tutor to, you know, just make sure she knew what they wanted her to know about, like French history and French language. And the tutor showed up, and it was like, oh, she’s illiterate, illiterate. Like, it’s not just like she doesn’t know French as a second language. Like, she doesn’t know how to read or write in German, which is her first language. So, this is a surprise to Maria Theresa and to everybody because she’s being sent to Versailles, and at this point, they thought that she needed to be very… She needed to know French history, and she needed to know the French language, obviously. 

This reminds me of, you know, I’m a fan of the K-pop group, Blackpink, and there’s a documentary about them on Netflix from a few years ago, which is where I first learned that Lisa, who’s one of the members from Blackpink, is from Thailand, and she was discovered because, you know, she’s such a good dancer and stuff, and then she went to Korea to do her training, but she didn’t speak a word of Korean. She spoke some English, so luckily, she met Rosé, who’s also in the band, who speaks English, and they really hit it off. But like, to show up in another country and it’s not just like “Oh, I know kind of a…” Like if I went to, I don’t know, France or Spain, it’s like, yeah, I’m not fluent in those languages, but I know some basic nouns. I know how to say hi or thank you. Marie Antoinette, like Lisa in Blackpink, just does not know this language of this country where she’s being sent. 

So, they’re like, “Okay, well, these tutors are going to teach her French.” But I mentioned before, like that she’s an ADHD-coded person who really has trouble focusing, especially if she’s not personally interested in the topic. So, she was sequestered, she’s kind of quarantined for this sort of… It reminds me of the movie The Princess Diaries, just like, sort of princess school, where it’s like, “Let’s just teach her everything.” So, she had some classes that I think she probably enjoyed, like ballet, which I think had just been recently invented or something, and this guy came down who maybe was the inventor of ballet. She’s already gifted. She had been taught ballet, and she was so graceful, like I said before. But he taught her the Versailles glide, which is like, Versailles is this extremely insular, fucked up cult that has more rules than I could ever describe to you, and expectations and etiquette. One of the things that everybody has to do at Versailles, if you’re a woman, is walk extremely elegantly in such a way that it doesn’t even look like your feet are moving, which you’re like, “How would you do that?” Well, just picture like a big hoop skirt that covers your feet. You see sort of people in the Nutcracker Ballet sometimes, Mother Ginger sort of moves like this. Anyway, so she got a dance instructor to show her how to do the Versailles glide, the special walk, but also how to stand with a certain posture. Again, this is like Lisa in Blackpink, like, Marie Antoinette does really well with physical movement-based tasks because she has this gracefulness in herself. But then also she had to learn, I don’t know, there’s all these, I want to say, 17 different kinds of curtsies that she had to master and do extremely perfectly. 

Also, when she’s at Versailles, she’s going to have to dress in a different way, which involves this corset called the grand cour, which is a much more intense undergarment than what she was wearing in Vienna. In Vienna, they did have a corset, which I want to just shout out to the cosplayers and all the historians of undergarments from whom I’ve learned this stuff, but corsets are not inherently uncomfortable garments. It’s a support garment; it helps kind of hold up your bust in a pre-bra era. You know, depending on how tightly you lace it, like, it can be more or less restrictive on your breathing and your digestion, but the sort of corsets that she wore in Vienna were flexible, more comfortable type things. The grand cour, this undergarment she’s going to have to wear in Versailles, was so restrictive that it would change your posture, so I think she had to be trained in how to hold yourself when you’re wearing that as well. 

So, remember the little girl holding the doll in the painting? She likes dress up, you know? But it’s kind of like, you want to… I was trying to think of how to describe this, but you know, in terms of fashion stuff, it’s not even just every day getting dressed, like, the paparazzi are going to get you in your casual outfit. It’s not even like every day you’re going to a red-carpet movie premiere. It’s like every day is like the Met Gala, like, hours worth of preparation for an incredibly uncomfortable garment. And there’s not just like, “You know what? Today, I just want to watch Netflix and, like, wear my sweats.” Like, she’s never going to be able to do that again in her life. So, they’re just getting her physically prepared for that as well. 

She was also taught French— Well, they attempted to teach her French history and literature. So, the guy who was sent was called Abbé Vermond, and he showed up to teach her French language, literature, history. And he realized, like, “Oh, she’s so charming, she’s so sweet, she’s so kind, and that is how she has been able to manipulate her instructors to not actually teach her things.” But he was like, “I have to teach her these things.” And so, to his credit, he found a way of pedagogy that worked with her specific needs, where he’s like, “If you tell her things…” Like, the way you’re listening to this podcast right now, I find history so much more engaging and interesting in a podcast format, or in a really gossipy book, or in a documentary where they’re just talking to you like you’re a regular person, versus reading a really academic textbook or listening to a lecture in a classroom. That’s me. Marie Antoinette, similar. So, he figured out like, “If I tell her stuff in the form of conversation instead of…” Because we already mentioned reading, like, as much as they’re trying to get her up to where they expected her reading capabilities to be at this point, they’re not. And reading is hard for her, reading something she’s not interested in is even more hard. So, he’s like, “Well, if I just tell her things, if I can explain it to her like a podcast, then she seems to learn things better.” This is what he starts doing. And he is working hard at it. It’s a real like, My Fair Lady, Henry Higgins vibe. He was writing reports back about her, and he’s just like, “She means so well. She wants to learn this. She just functionally is not… It’s so much more challenging for her. She just cannot focus.” And Ritalin has not been invented, so he’s doing the best he can. 

Eventually… The whole thing was, I think he was there for six weeks, after which she had learned what I would say is arguably the most important skill, speaking French, like, to go to another country. It’s like, yeah, she might not have the minutia of the history of the country or the literature, but can she speak the language? That’s going to be… If you know that and you know the curtsies, I feel like those are the top skills for her to know at this point. And she was just like, at this point, people pleasing. She’s just like, “I want to learn these things. I want to get this right. I want to do a good job. I want to make my mother proud.” And the portrait, like I said, was sent to the king to be like, “Look, we fixed her teeth. We got her a new hairstyle. Got rid of the five head.” 

Oh, I should mention. So, the hairstylist had invented this new hairstyle for her, which is kind of like a chignon in the back, but sort of like swept across the front to maybe hide the forehead a little bit. And it looked so cute on her, because everything looks so cute on her, because she’s a cute girl, that people in Vienna saw her with this hairstyle and they’re like, “Oh my god, I want to do my hair like that.” And they called it like, hairdo à la Dauphine, because Dauphine was her title to be because her husband is a Dauphin, the heir to the throne of France, and she’ll be his wife. So, she’s 13 years old and an influencer already. This is also a hint of what’s to come. Like with today’s influencers, if somebody is just, like, a cute, gregarious person, and you see them wearing a certain whatever Labubu-themed lipstick or whatever, you’re like, “Oh, if I get that lipstick, I will look like her,” and it’s like, “No, you’ll still look like you. She looks cute because she’s just a cute person.” But Marie Antoinette has this ability, she’s the original influencer. Honestly, if I was to write a book, the title of my book would be Marie Antoinette: The Original Influencer, because she just has this uncanny ability both to look cute in new and interesting hairstyles and outfits, but also to make people want to dress like her. She’s also sort of… Like at this point, the hairstyle was given to her, but she also, we will see, ends up being able to sort of feel the vibe of what’s going on in society and know just what trend is about to pop and, like, be on top of that trend. She is like Zendaya in that way. 

Anyway, so the king saw the portrait, he’s like, “Yes, she’s cute enough. Let’s do this.” So, she got married by proxy, which is this thing where there was a marriage where her husband, the heir to the throne was not there, but someone stood for him, and so they had the ceremony. She was married to him just long distance, basically. One of her brothers stood in for the bridegroom, and just like that, she was married. She was 14 years old, if you’re keeping track. So, she’s this cute little girl and she is she’s being sent off to never see her family again, to, you know, there was a whole ceremony where she’s just like, “I am no longer Austrian. I am now French. My loyalty is to France. Everything about me is French.” This is where she changes her name from Maria Antonia to Marie Antoinette. And it’s terrifying! It’s so intense to be… You know, every year is such a huge change when you’re a teenager, like going from 14 to 15 is huge. But the difference between like a 14-year-old, I don’t know, this is starting high school, and an 18-year-old, like, leaving home maybe for the first time, going to university or college. To be leaving home forever at age 14 is intense, and she, as you might understand, as her carriage entourage was leaving Vienna, she cried. People wrote down that they saw her crying. 

She had all new outfits; her mother had paid an exorbitant amount of money to get her new clothes in the French style, which is more formal than what they had been doing in Vienna, using French fabrics to show like, “Look, we’re supporting your garment industry.” So, the only sort of souvenir she was able to keep from Vienna was her mother had given her a gold watch, and we will see the gold watch is an important supporting character in the story. The gold watch makes some later appearances, she keeps it with her for the rest of her life. Her mother also sent her a letter of instructions. So, if you listened to the Maria Theresa episode, you know, Maria Theresa likes to write letters and tell her children what to do. She wrote a letter, and the letter is called something like “Important letter: Read this every month for the rest of your life,” and it was just a list of things that Marie Antoinette should and should not do, which were just things like “Do what people tell you. Don’t make a scene.” It was just sort of vague yet specific advice, yet unhelpful advice that Maria Theresa just thought would be, I don’t know, she’s like, “Read this every month.” And Marie Antoinette like bless her heart did cause she’s like, “Okay, this is what my mother says. I’ll do what she says.” 

Let’s do some backstory about what she was gliding into in her Versailles glide. So, France at this time: poor in this kind of great depression/recession era. France is in its flop era because France had been involved in numerous wars, and being in wars costs a lot of money because you have to deploy troops, and pay those troops, and pay for muskets, and ammunition, and boats, and everything. So, the Seven Years War is, I don’t know, put that on your, not that you have a bingo card, but I feel like it’s come up numerous times in the past couple of seasons. It was a war during which it was like, part of it was France versus England and there was effects in North America. And so, as a result of this, as a result of France losing some stuff, they had to give up its colonies in Canada and its colonies in India to England. A lot of people in France blamed Austria for the fact that France had lost this war. I don’t know if that was because— I’m not a war historian, but I would presume it’s because France and Austria were allies, and maybe France felt like Austria didn’t show up enough for them in this war. Anyway, French people hated Austrian people. 

The Aunties, these bitches, they referred to Marie Antoinette as “the Austrian,” but in French, it’s l’autrichienne. And the thing about that is in French, it’s sort of a pun. L’autrichienne, it’s a pun because that’s so much the French word for an emu, which is a bird that is thought of as being sort of dumb looking, and a bitch. So, like they call her, “Oh, the Austrian,” which is like, they’re just being like, “Oh, really the emu bitch,” or maybe it’s ostrich. I’m sorry, it’s totally ostrich. It’s not emu, because it sounds like ostrich. So, they’re just like calling her an ostrich bitch, but they’re like, “Oh, we’re just saying she’s Austrian.” The Aunties are my enemies. 

So anyway, people in Austria, sorry, people in France were primed and ready to hate this little girl coming there because they sort of thought, “We don’t trust Austria. We’re suspicious of them. It’s shady that they have a woman in charge,” in the form of Maria Theresa. So, they were just kind of like, Marie Antoinette is coming, this ostrich bitch, and she is probably a secret sleeper agent. She’s probably here to maybe make Austria take over France, or she’s a spy, or she’s going to infiltrate herself in court and, like, run, she’ll suddenly be in charge. It’s this 14-year-old basic bitch whose largest joy in life is, like, ballet and fashion dolls, and they’re like, “She’s coming here to ruin our country!” It’s xenophobia is what it is, it is hating people because of where they’re from. But it’s also because she’s coming from a country that, for a very long time, France was at war against. She didn’t know this. She didn’t know that all these people would hate her because she’s just this sweet little baby angel. 

So, the anti-Austrian faction at Versailles had kind of two groups. One of the groups was Madame du Barry, the mistress, and the people who supported her because she was the mistress, and she could get them good jobs and stuff because the king trusted her, et cetera. One of the people in this faction was, as it would so happen, the man who was responsible for the education of Marie Antoinette’s husband. So, Marie Antoinette’s husband, I just want to say he’s the… So, Madame du Barry is the mistress. Du Barry, it’s B-A-R-R-Y. Marie Antoinette’s husband’s name is Louis-Auguste, and he’s the Duke of Berry, B-E-R-R-Y. And because everybody in that family is called Louis, they called each other by their title. So, his younger brothers are the Count of Artois and the Count of Provence, and every book I read calls the brothers Artois and Provence and, like, thank you, because now I can tell them apart. So, what I’m going to do is what, how he was referred to at the time, he was often called the Dauphin because that’s his role, but he’s the Duke of Berry, and honestly, I just think of him as Berry, and that is what I’m going to call him, Marie Antoinette’s husband, Berry. 

So, Berry’s tutor hated Austria and was on Madame du Barry’s payroll. So, he had been training Berry to be like, “Don’t trust Austria. Everyone there sucks. They’re all jerks, especially the women. The women are manipulative. Never trust an Austrian woman. They’re ostrich bitches.” So, Berry—we’ll talk about him, we will talk about Berry—was very susceptible to this sort of rhetoric because he’s a person who, like, when someone told him something, he believed it. He was not someone who was a fan of nuance. So, he had been raised or educated to mistrust his wife. So, the reason why Madame du Barry and her gang all didn’t like the concept of Marie Antoinette was not because she was Austrian, it was because they thought that she might come in and the king might like her, and so then that might take power away from Madame du Barry, and if power was taken away from Madame du Barry, then all these other people, like the tutor, would also have less power. So, they were just like, “We need to make sure the king hates her.” That’s one branch of the Hateration Nation. 

The other group is led by the Aunties, this is Adélaïde, Victoire, and Sophie. So, they all hated, like they hated Madame du Barry, yes, but they also hated Austria, and they also hated women. So, they hated Marie Antoinette because also they thought she was going to come in and the king was going to like her, and that would give them, the Aunties, less power as well. So, all of these groups, like both branches of Hateration Nation, wanted this marriage to fail, by which they meant they wanted Marie Antoinette to be such a mess, to make so many gaffes and etiquette mistakes and ideally not get pregnant, that she could be sent back to Vienna and they could just get rid of her. So, they were primed and ready to just, like, not help her succeed, to make her be so hated that she could never succeed, so that all of them could have more power because they were all assholes. 

So, just a reminder as well, the reason why Hateration Nation was able to reach this point of extreme hatred was because, again, remember the king, golf king—and again, by golf, he wasn’t playing golf, he was hunting, and he was banging whooores—he was like the lame duck king. He was not doing anything, and he never went out in public because he knew everybody hated him, and everybody hated him because he was a do-nothing king who was just playing golf all day. He also had done some unpopular reforms, like, when he decided to give a shit, he was just like, “Do this!” and then stuff just happened, but no one really… So, he was kind of a tyrant who just pushed through what he wanted, and then the rest of the time he was just playing golf, and that doesn’t remind me at all of any 2025 political figures, but that’s what he was like. The monarchy was so unpopular in the rest of France. Like, in Versailles, everybody was always trying to get his attention and for him to give them favours, which he didn’t really, because he didn’t give a shit, but everyone in the rest of France hated him because he was directly responsible for the country being in a state of great depression/recession, and he clearly didn’t give a shit. So, that made people hate him. People also hated Madame du Barry. 

Historically, the people of Paris. Paris is its own ecosystem; it’s near Versailles, but it’s separate. And then there’s kind of like, in the countryside, people are just kind of like, “We’re just farmers, whatever.” So, Paris is like the ecocentre (is that the word?) of, like, anti-king hatred. So, whoever the real mistress was, people usually hated. It’s usually the way that things worked, the way that things were currently working is that there’s a king and he has a wife, and the wife is just kind of like this boring, nothing person, is how she would seem. She would just dress kind of plain, she would host parties, she would have children, and that is her role. She was not ever expected or suspected of having any sort of political motivations at all. Her whole job was just to be a womb, which is what Marie Antoinette was being sent to France to do, which is what all of her sisters were sent to other countries to do, to just be a womb and deliver babies. So, the royal wife, that’s her role, really. Just kind of sit around, do some embroidery and mind your own business. 

The royal mistress was a powerful political role. So, the real mistress would have her household, there would be a whole… All kinds of jobs would be created to support the mistress and her household, and she was seen as having the political influence because she was the one that the king chose to be around. The wife was just there for, like, baby-making, but the mistress was someone who the king liked to be around. So, the royal mistress would have this political power. People saw the king playing golf all day, and they’re like, “Well, that’s Madame du Barry’s fault.” There’s always got to be a scapegoat, and it’s almost always the royal mistress. 

So, people hated him, people hated her, but they knew that the Dauphin was going to marry Marie—by they, I mean, the people of Paris—they knew the Dauphin was going to marry this Austrian princess, and so the people of Paris weren’t necessarily being like, “Oh, ostrich bitch. We hate her.” They’re just like, “Oh, the young future of the monarchy. They represent the fact that Louis XV will die one day, and we’ll all be so happy.” So, they were just happy to have young, hot royals because there hadn’t been a coronation in living memory for a lot of people, because Louis XV had been the king since he was a little boy, there hadn’t been a royal marriage for a long time. They’re just excited. They’re just excited to have young people. So, at this point, Versailles, everybody at Versailles, mostly, was distrustful of Marie Antoinette and was wanting her to fail. The people of Paris were just excited to have a young person. So, she’s being supported by Paris, the city where she’s not, and everybody at Versailles, the place where she’s going, were actively trying to make her fail. And she’s just this little 14-year-old girl who was just kind of like heading off away from everything she’s ever known, this like wholesome life of, you know, building snowmen and drinking hot chocolate with her sisters. 

So, she headed off to France in this French-made carriage, and there was a whole negotiation about, like, what route will she take? And at what point will she switch from having her Austrian entourage with her to having French people with her? Ultimately, they decided that they made kind of a pop-up cottage on the border between Austria and France on this kind of sandbar/island. There had been a cottage there before, from, I think it was when Louis XV’s wife had come over, like, decades before, and they just kind of like zhuzhed it up a little bit. So, because it was a sort of abandoned cottage on a sandbar, they had to quickly make it look nice, and the way that he made things look nice in this era was by hanging tapestries, which are just sort of, which are embroidered murals, really. It seems like they just kind of were like, “We need tapestries right now. I don’t care what they’re of. Bring us tapestries to decorate this pop-up cottage.” And so, these included, because these were the ones they got, some potentially inappropriate imagery, specifically of the story of Jason and Medea from Greek mythology. 

Super quickly, the story of Jason and Medea from Greek mythology, not Madea from Tyler Perry, Medea from Greek mythology. So, they were a couple in Greek mythology, Jason and Medea got married, and they had children, then he left her, and she was so mad that he left her that she killed her children because she’s like, “I don’t even want him to have the joy of these children.” And then he was so mad that she killed the children that he then killed Medea. So, one of the tapestries in this pop-up cottage was an image of Jason killing Medea. So, it’s like, “Hey, Marie Antoinette, welcome to this pop-up cottage where you’re 14 years old and…” You know, happy marriage! Jason and Medea. But what’s interesting is that Marie Antoinette, we do know later in her life, she did have imagery of Medea with her, like a pendant or something. So, this story stuck with her or resonated with her in some way, seemingly. 

Anyway, so she arrived. Interested locals were all there, like, watching her arrive, which it’s like, I don’t think she’s going to have a private moment for the rest of her life from this point. Everything she does is always watched by people. Anyway, so she walked into the cottage into a changing room, and she had to remove every piece of clothing she was wearing, even though it was French style and the French fabric, it was still clothes from her old life. So, those clothes were removed very slowly, and then she was very slowly dressed in new French clothes by her new French entourage. And just standing there naked in front of all these people, she apparently burst into tears because lots of people would, especially a 14-year-old who had just been removed from the only home and family she ever knew. And it was, remember, it was this warm, supportive family (asterisk, as much as possible in this context), and suddenly, this is a terrifying thing happening to her. 

So, she was introduced to her new French ladies-in-waiting, and the head lady-in-waiting was this woman called Madame de Noailles, who Marie Antoinette would quickly secretly refer to as Madame Etiquette, because Madame Etiquette was obsessed with, you know… So, Versailles is this cult with 750 rules you have to remember all the time, and if anyone breaks any of the rules, they’re like, mocked mercilessly and not allowed to return. Madame Etiquette was just like, “Here are the rules and you need to know all of them, and if you fuck it up…” It is the apocalypse to her. If it’s like, I don’t know, like me today, it’s like, “Oh my god, you tucked your hair behind your right ear in front of the Duke of whatever. Well, your reputation is ruined.” There’s so many things to know. Marie Antoinette had left this family where she had these governesses who supported her, she had these loving relationships with her sisters and her friends. She saw Madame Etiquette, and she just ran towards her and hugged her crying, like, wanting to be reassured, I guess. And Madame Etiquette was just like, “This is not appropriate for the Dauphine of France to show emotions and touch people.” So, Marie Antoinette was just like, “Oh, right. Okay.” So, she said, “Pardon me. These tears are for the family and the fatherland I am leaving. For the future, I shall not forget that I am French.” 

And so, it took about a week to travel from the sandbar to just outside of Versailles, and along the route, like, it was exhausting for her. Honestly, it’s like, you know, actors doing a press tour for a movie. All along the route, they stopped in every village, and there was parties and fireworks, and people had tied gold and silver ribbon around the trees to welcome her, there’s candles, little children presented her with bouquets, she watched plays. Everyone was just really excited to see her, this new celebrity. And she was so cute and so pretty. People were yelling as she processed, like, “Long live Madame the Dauphine.” So, like, this is the sort of thing that the haters, Hater Nation, knew would happen. They knew that she would be cute and pretty and people would like her, and this is what they were terrified of, that she would be popular. And she was. 

So, eventually, after a week, she’s exhausted. I think she gets a cold at some point along this way. She finally shows up at the outskirts of Versailles to meet her actual husband. So, the king is there and her actual husband, and so she met them, and she floated into a curtsy, so graceful that even Madame Etiquette could not criticize her. Like, Marie Antoinette, if there’s one thing she can do, it’s curtsy and it’s glide walk, and it’s dance ballet. This is her skill. So, they were like, “Oh no, she didn’t learn French history,” but it’s like, that’s not as important as the curtsy and the speaking French. So, I think she learned the two most important skills. The king was like, “Oh, you’re cute as a button.” And he was just like, “I like you.” And then she also met her husband, Berry. So, let’s talk about what he’s like. 

So, he was 15 years old. At this point, Marie Antoinette is 14, like, the marriage negotiations went on for a while. She’s 14, he’s 15. So, his father, remember his father died when he was a boy. His father was known as Louis the Fat; he had a fat physique, and Berry inherited this physique as well, which was exacerbated by he had some binge eating tendencies. So, he was actually the second son of Louis the Fat and his wife, who was called Maria Josepha of Saxony, not any of the Maria Josephas we’ve talked about previously in the story; it’s just a popular name. So, again, he had an older brother who was the Duke of Burgundy. The older brother, we’ll call him Burgundy, then we’ve got Berry, son number two, two younger brothers, Provence and Artois. And there’s also two sisters called Élisabeth and also Clotilde. Clotilde also had the fat appearance, people called her Fat Clotilde. So, Versailles is just full of bitches. 

As a child, Berry was sickly and actually surprised everyone by not dying in childhood. Now, two of the biographies that I read, the one by Melanie Burrows and the one by Nancy Goldstone, both specifically hypothesize that Berry was on the autism spectrum. So, I will just describe to you some of his behaviour, because that seems to me like that is how he would probably be understood today. Back then, god knows they didn’t understand anything other than, “Oh, he’s fat and acts differently. That must mean he’s a monster.” People were not cool to this guy, but we’ll talk about it. As a child, he didn’t speak, he didn’t make contact with anyone, he didn’t show emotion. Brothers, older and younger, all bullied him. So, can you blame him for preferring to avoid them and instead, “Go on the roof of Versailles to chase after feral cats”? Which I will just mention, actually, everyone in his family liked dogs, Marie Antoinette liked dogs. Louis XV liked cats. So, there are both cats and dogs running around Versailles, like, shitting everywhere and then courtiers just throw straw on top of it, just so you can imagine the smell. 

Like Marie Antoinette, and like a lot of people on the spectrum, Berry struggled in school. Like Marie Antoinette, really wanted to do well, he wanted to improve himself. Like, when people bullied him or were mean to him, he’s like, “Oh, that’s the thing I should correct. Thank you for this note.” He wrote in a journal regularly, semi-regularly, and some of what he wrote was just like, “I’m aware of my faults, they’ve been pointed out to me often, and I’m working to improve them. And I hope one day I can.” So, like, he’s just a little guy, and I’m rooting for him. He was also, it’s kind of like, oh, these are not the personality traits that you might look for in the heir to the throne, but he was not the heir to the throne. Remember, his father was the heir to the throne, and he has an older brother who would be next in line. He’s just the second son. But when Berry was 7, his brother Burgundy died of tuberculosis, making Berry next in line to the throne. Four years later, when he is 11, his father died of tuberculosis. So, the two strong supporting characters in the saga are smallpox and tuberculosis. So, suddenly, Berry is 11 years old, and he is suddenly the Dauphin of France. And everyone is just like, “Oh no!” because, like, of his of these siblings, of this sibling set, his youngest brother, Artois, is maybe the one who has the traits that people would most prefer in a king; he is charming and affable and intellectual and, like, handsome; he’s the youngest brother, though. Berry is now heir to the throne. 

So, his mother, to her great credit, is just like, “Let’s crash course. Let’s get this kid ready for this job.” And she, like that one tutor Marie Antoinette got, she figured out how best to approach educating this kid. He was intelligent, he just needed a different sort of schooling. He was especially good at, like, memorization. So, she’s like, “Okay, let’s try to find ways we can teach you and let your skill at memorization help you.” He was really skilled in sciences, he loved geography, he loved history, especially English history, which is interesting, and that will come up later as well. So, he learned in a really, like, fact memorization sort of way, not with nuance, and in his life as well, he didn’t see nuance in situations. He’s just like, “You either do this, or you do this. This is the right way to do it, and this is the wrong way to do it,” And that’s kind of how he approached everything, which is not how you’re going to thrive in Versailles. 

His mother encouraged him to keep a private diary so he could write down things that happened, and he could look back at his experiences and maybe learn from his experiences, which is not really how he used the diary, but he did keep it for the rest of his life. He wrote not every day, but really just, like, one sentence every now and then. Usually, what he would write were just the results of he went hunting, and how did he do? Hunting was a hyperfixation of his, an interest of his, which, you know what? In this era and time and place, hunting was seen as a thing that kings should do. So, this is a kingly thing that he actually was interested in. But his diary is mostly just kind of, like, “I shot two deer today,” or nothing. Like, famously, on some days where a lot of stuff happened, but he didn’t shoot anything while hunting, he just writes “Rien,” which means ‘nothing.’ 

So, his mother, who was trying to help him, she died of tuberculosis when he was 12 years old. So, this is like, she helped him out for one year and then she died. His diary entry on the day she died was “Death of my mother at 8:00 in the evening.” And then he got a new tutor who didn’t understand the ways to teach him. The new tutor just made him, like, copy out church or Bible passages. And remember the tutor from the Hateration Nation, Madame du Barry branch, was just kind of being like “Austrians are evil. They are our enemies. You should hate the Austrians. Don’t trust any Austrian woman, especially not your wife.” And he’s a guy without nuance, and he’s like, “Got it. Hate Austrians? I’ll do that. That is how life works.” He also was handy. So, the way that Marie Antoinette liked music and dancing, Berry really liked carpentry and locksmithing, he liked building locks and keys and woodworking. So, he’d just go in his room and just do his woodworking when he wasn’t outside riding and shooting. 

So, this is the guy. So, when Maria Theresa was working so hard to be like, “Let’s marry Marie Antoinette to the Dauphin of France,” the people in Versailles were like, “Oh, thank god, because if this guy gets a wife, then we won’t have to be in charge of him anymore. The wife can take over and be in charge of him and teach him manners, and maybe this will help him mature,” in some vague way. It’s not like… Marie Antoinette didn’t know that she was being brought on to be his, like, governess. But everyone in Versailles was like, “Great. If she comes and he doesn’t have to have a tutor anymore, none of us have to hang out with him. She can just be in charge of him now. Fantastic. He would now be her problem, not ours. Great.”

So, there’s not a lot of succession planning in French royal court. Like, the king is off playing golf. Nobody wants to train Berry. One of the reasons why people don’t want to train Berry to be a good king is because they thought, if he just seems like a bad king, “Maybe he can be supplanted, and we can put Artois, the guy who we all think should be the king, in his place. So, let’s just not teach him how to be the king. Great.” So, this is who Marie Antoinette met. She and he were both just little sweet babies who all the bitches at court were secretly already plotting against. He didn’t say anything to her as they rode in the carriage together into Versailles, having met for the first time. In his diary that day, he wrote, “I met Marie Antoinette today,” basically. 

En route, they stopped to have dinner with different people, so Marie Antoinette met members of her new family, including the Aunties. Duh-duh! Who were like, “Oh my god, Marie Antoinette, so nice to meet you. You should trust us, and we can be your new mentors and honorary mother figures.” And she had never been tricked by anyone in her life. And she’s like, “Fantastic. That’s great, thank you.” So, it’s really like Cady Heron showing up at the beginning of Mean Girls and just doesn’t understand that people can be bitches. She also met this guy who is Berry’s cousin, Philippe, the Duke d’Orléans, who is going to be he’s going to be doing a lot in this story, so just remember that name. And I will just let you know that this guy, the cousin, Philippe, also thinks maybe he should be king instead of Berry, so he’s also actively working against Marie Antoinette. 

She had dinner with a bunch of family members, and Madame du Barry was there as well. Marie Antoinette had not been told who that is. So, like, whoever she’s sitting next to, probably the Aunties, I don’t know, were just being like “Oh, that’s that guy. And that’s that guy, and that’s Philippe d’Orléans.” And then Marie Antoinette was like, “Oh, but her over there, that beautiful person. What is her role here at court?” Madame du Barry. And what her companion said was, “Her role is to amuse the king,” which is like, innuendo. Marie Antoinette doesn’t know about innuendo yet, she’s just like, “Well, I shall be her rival because I too want to amuse the king.” So, a little embarrassing for her, but she didn’t know it was embarrassing. But again, what all the haters were worried about, like she’s beautiful, she’s charming, she’s so graceful, and everybody is just like, people not from Hateration Nation are just like, “Oh, she’s great, actually.” 

There was an ambassador on the scene called the Comte de Mercy, we’re just going to call him Mercy, Mercy is what we’re going to call him. He was her mother’s ambassador, and his job was to watch Marie Antoinette and report back to her mother what she was up to, but he also became sort of a surrogate father figure because he saw that she was in over her head and kind of wanted to help. So, he wrote to Maria Theresa, “No young woman could have made a better impression than Marie Antoinette.” Like, she killed it. She did all the right curtsies and everything. She had a wedding, an in-person wedding, the next day at Versailles. She wore a diamond-studded silver gown and glided perfectly down the aisle. She remembered who to nod to and who to smile at, and whatever, and it’s just like, she may not know French history, but she knows, like, etiquette. Good, good job. Then, you know, there’s a ballet and opera performed, a huge dinner. Marie Antoinette and Berry both were just kind of picking up their dishes; they were both nervous about what came next, which was the bedding ceremony, and nobody had told either of them how to have sex or what it was. 

So, everything that they did, everything Marie Antoinette did for the rest of her life, a whole bunch of people were watching. So, she was brought into this room where there’s, like, a bunch of people they had dinner with, watched her get changed into her nightgown. Berry was changed into his nightgown, and then they were put into a bed, and everybody was standing around, and then a priest blessed the bed, and then they closed curtains around the bed, and then finally, all these people left. And then these two little neurodivergent teen nerds fell asleep and did not consummate their marriage. The next morning, Berry woke up and was like, “Great.” Versailles has a real schedule; every day is the same as every other day, and that really was how Berry could thrive. He liked doing the same thing every day. So, the next morning, he’s like, “Oh, it’s Tuesday. I guess I’m going to go out hunting.” So, he just left, and then he went to his room, and he was working on his woodworking. He did not go to join Marie Antoinette in bed that night or the next night. He didn’t come to see her or talk to her at all, and everyone is just kind of like, “What’s happening?” His advisors pressured him to finally go to speak to Marie Antoinette. 

So, a few days after their marriage, he went to see her in her room, and he’s like, “Did you sleep well?” And she’s like, “Yes,” and then he left, and that was their conversation. Marie Antoinette, her whole household is just like, “What is happening?” Mercy was like, “She’s killing it. She’s great. Like, it’s impossible to be any more charming or pretty than she is, but what is up? We need to talk about Berry. What is up with Berry?” And so, this got all the way to the king, and the king was like, “Hmm. I don’t care. [laughs] Let him do what he wants.” But Hateration Nation is like, “This is great, actually. If these two don’t consummate their marriage, that’ll make it even easier to just have it annulled and have Marie Antoinette, the ostrich bitch, sent back to Vienna and out of our lives forever.” But they did not plan on Marie Antoinette’s emotional intelligence. 

She was determined to win her husband over, and she’s just genuinely a sweet person. So, she just gently set about befriending him. She saw that his daily schedule was important, so she just kind of started ingratiating herself into that schedule. So, when he was doing his woodworking in his room, she would just go by and be like, “Oh hey, how does this work? Why are you making that lock that way? Tell me about your lathe.” Or just like, she came to meet him where he was; she wasn’t trying to pressure him to change or to talk to her about topics he didn’t want to talk about. So, she was just kind and gentle and genuine, and he was indifferent to her and, like, not responsive. But she just kind of stuck with it until, very slowly, he got used to having her around and she became part of his regular schedule. In so doing, like, so he started… Even though he’d been, like, indoctrinated to like, “Don’t trust her.” She convinced him to go to a ball, which shocked everybody because Berry never went to balls. And not only did he walk in arm and arm with her, but he even gave a short statement thanking the host for inviting them. Everyone was just like, “This is zero to a hundred in terms of Berry.” And then they’re like, “We were right. Like, marrying him off has improved him or whatever.” 

Eventually, though, the months go by, and her mother, Maria Theresa, is just like, “Why aren’t you pregnant yet?” Because Maria Theresa also, like, to all of her daughters for the rest of their lives, she was always just like, “Tell me when you have your period. Is it regular? Is it irregular? Tell me about your period.” And Marie Antoinette, her mother was just like, “You need to you need to get pregnant to solidify this marriage,” because people want— There are so many haters, and once you have a baby, the haters will come down. So, Marie Antoinette did what she was told. She went to actually confront Berry about their lack of sex life, and just to be like, “We need to have a child. Like, what’s going on? Why are we not having sex, even though neither of us knows what that is and no one will tell us.” And he’s 15, right? And he’s like, “When I turn 16, everything will change.” And Marie Antoinette’s like, “Oh, thank god.” And she told her mother, and everybody heard because there’s no secrets in Versailles, so everyone’s just like, excitedly waiting for him to turn 16. But he turned 16 and nothing changed. He did sometimes visit her in her rooms, I think, because people were like, “Why don’t you go to see her?” So, he would go to her room, climb into bed next to her without speaking to her or touching her, and then sneak out the next morning, so she was not getting pregnant any time soon. 

For moral support, where else would Marie Antoinette turn but to the Aunties who pretended to be supporting her, but were really just excited that she wasn’t consummating her marriage and just wanted to trash her reputation so she would be sent in disgrace back to Vienna. And they got a chance to fuck up her life when she mentioned how she found the grand cour, that corset, so much less comfortable than the ones that she had worn when she was back in Vienna. They also had to wear the grand cour, like, all royal French women had to wear it all the time. Other women only wore it if there was a special event, but France’s greatest princess had to wear it on a regular basis. 

So, this is like, if you picture a corset or just picture a tube top, but it’s got like whalebone stays, so it’s really stiff, and you lace up the front and also up the back. The design of it severely restricted your movements, especially around the arms, made it hard to digest food and to breathe. Even Maria Theresa, who is a stickler for following rules, was like, “I appreciate that this is uncomfortable, and I will send you better ones from Vienna.” But the Aunties were like, “Girl, we hate it, too. What if we all just stop wearing the grand cour? Yeah? Let’s just do it.” So, they stopped wearing it. But the thing is that the Aunties wore giant, like, muumuu-type gowns, so you couldn’t really see their figure anyway, so you wouldn’t know if they were wearing it or not. The thing about this, too, is Marie Antoinette was like, “I fit in these dresses without the corset on. Can I just not wear the corset?” And so, the Aunties were like, “Yes. Stop wearing the corset.” Because they knew that this would be seen— 

What I’m thinking of is, if you will recall, if you were paying attention at this time to when Meghan Markle first joined the royal family, it’s like, “Oh my god, she wore this colour nail polish. Oh my god, her hair is in a bun,” like, all these things. If somebody wants you to hate somebody, like the British tabloids wanted people to hate Meghan Markle, Meghan Sussex, then anything that she does, you can twist around to be like, “Look, she doesn’t deserve to be here. She’s all wrong.” This is similar to what the Aunties were doing with Marie Antoinette. They were setting her up to fail, they were getting her to do etiquette breaches, and then, because she was already Austrian, people were predisposed to hate her because they didn’t trust her because she’s from a different country, and the Aunties were also spreading rumours of Marie Antoinette’s etiquette fails to Paris, where pamphlets were picking this up. So, Marie Antoinette’s reputation was— So, it’s not just like, “Oh, she’s not wearing a corset.” It’s like, “Oh, she’s not bathing. She’s slovenly and lazy.” And so, this is kind of wrecking her reputation, which is what the Aunties wanted. But when people like Madame Etiquette was like, “Oh, Herman, my pills! You’re not wearing your corset, this is the end of the world!” The Aunties were like, “Stay strong, Marie Antoinette. We’re all in this together. No more corsets for us.” And so, Marie Antoinette was like, “Yeah!” because the Aunties were setting her up. 

Mercy wrote to Maria Theresa saying, “There’s no way of convincing her to wear a corset.” So, Madame Etiquette was so mad about this because Marie Antoinette wasn’t following the rules, so then she spread a rumour that Marie Antoinette, because of not wearing the corset, was deformed, like, had made herself deformed by not wearing the corset. There’s a rumour that her shoulders were misshapen and, like, her waistline was growing disfigured. And then this hit the pamphlet circuit in Paris, so people were just like, “Oh, my god, this monstrous girl!” Mercy is just like, “What is happening? Marie Antoinette is usually such a people pleaser. Why would she not be doing what she’s told?” And it didn’t take him much investigating to figure out that the Aunties were setting her up. So, he was just like “These bitches!” So, he wrote to Maria Theresa, like, “This is what’s happening. These dangerous people are ruining her reputation on purpose.” And then Maria Theresa told him, like, they couldn’t put this in letters because everybody read all the letters to Marie Antoinette, so Maria Theresa was like, “Mercy, get Marie Antoinette alone and tell her to do the opposite of what the Aunties tell her. Tell her that they’re trashing her on purpose. They’re members of a Hateration Nation.” 

And so, Mercy, it took forever to be able to get Marie Antoinette in private because she was always with the Aunties, but eventually, he was like, “This is a mean trick. People can be mean sometimes. Now, you know that.” So, Marie Antoinette started the corset again, but the damage had been done. Her reputation was now this unwashed, sloppy, disrespectful foreigner. This was endangering the Austrian-French alliance, like, it became like an international incident because the Aunties. They are also simultaneously doing another mean trick that they hope would, like, hopefully get her sent back to Vienna, but also, they wanted to like damage Madame du Barry’s reputation. They wanted to give Madame du Barry having less power, they wanted Marie Antoinette having less power, although she had no power. The Aunties just wanted to be the only women that their father listened to. Meanwhile, he’s just playing golf. 

So, they knew that their dad loved Madame du Barry, and so they knew that if Marie Antoinette was mean to Madame du Barry, that would make the king not like Marie Antoinette. So, they were taking advantage of the fact that Marie Antoinette was 14 and had been raised in a very Catholic, pious religious household. So, even the concept that the king had a mistress was shocking to her. So, they’re like, “Do you know Madame du Barry used to work at Hooters? Do you know all the trashy things about her?” And like, Madame du Barry (we did an episode about her last year, you can find it), like people who were not born into wealth, she was really excited by really flashy stuff. Like, she loved to wear lots of diamonds and really excessive, like, not in a bad way, but just sort of like over the top, like, maximalist. Her decor was really trashy, and I say that in the most appreciative way, I love trashy décor. But it wasn’t hard to make Marie Antoinette turn against Madame du Barry because she was this 14-year-old sheltered little girl who’d grown up in this place where everyone kind of dressed plain, which is like, “Oh my god, yeah. Madame du Barry is like a trashy, fugly slut. She is the worst.” So, she just refused to acknowledge Madame du Barry, which became a huge incident at Versailles because there’s so many rules, and if the Dauphin didn’t… Like, Madame du Barry couldn’t talk unless she was talked to first, until Marie Antoinette acknowledged her. It was a whole thing. 

Her mother was like writing her letters, like “Marie Antoinette, just say hi. Say hi to Madame du Barry. The king is not going to support you if you don’t like his mistress.” And Marie Antoinette is like, “No, no, the Aunties told me not to.” But eventually she’s like, “Oh, they’re bitches? Okay, then whatever.” So, eventually, what she did, and this is a famous sequence if you watched the Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette movie. There’s just like a hallway full of people, and Marie Antoinette kind of turns kind of towards Madame du Barry, but not necessarily looking at her, but just the group of people she’s in, and Marie Antoinette says, “There are a lot of people at Versailles here today,” and that counted. She had now acknowledged Madame du Barry, like, this crisis had ended. 

She was just like, you know, she got there at first, she’s like, “My mother told me, I’m the luckiest of all my sisters. This is the most luxurious, like, every princess in all of Europe wishes she was me. But this place sucks.” Every second of every day, Versailles was open, kind of like a museum. Anybody could go there as long as you wore a tie, sort of thing. People were constantly walking around Versailles in a way that sounds bananas to us these days. But it’s like, imagine if you could go to where, like, Prince William and Kate Middleton live, and just go into their house and just watch them having tea, and then watch them doing a crossword puzzle, and then watch them checking their emails, and then watch them changing their clothes. Like, anyone could go to Versailles and just watch the royal family do anything. That was the vibe. 

So, Marie Antoinette just gets up, and there’s a crowd of people there, and she gets dressed. She had to dress in the Versailles way, and part of that was, like, she had to put on her makeup, sort of like how Chappell Roan sometimes is, like, white covering her face, even though her skin was fresh and, like, peaches and cream complexion, and she’s 14, glowing, like great skincare regime. She had to put blush on her cheeks in like, two circles, to make herself look almost like a marionette doll. And then put on these outfits, and then it’s just kind of like, now you’re going here, and now you’re going here, and now you have lunch, and there’s an audience of people watching you, and now you go to church, and there’s an audience of people watching you. And she’s just like, if you remember, she was like a kid growing up, just having fun with her sisters, like tobogganing, snowball fights, like, tricking her governesses, having picnics. She just likes a simple life, and she’s living this extremely restrictive thing, and everybody’s bitches as she’s realizing. No one is a friend, and she’s doing her best to try to win the Dauphin to her side. He’s gotten used to her, but he’s still not kind to her, he’s still not there for her. Like, nobody is there supporting her. 

By now, two years have passed, and she’s getting frustrated, understandably, with Berry because they still have not had sex. She still was sort of, like, not officially his wife. She knew by now, like, he wasn’t going to take a mistress because he doesn’t know what sex is. She knew that she probably can stay there because he’s used to her, and like, how could any other woman come between them? But she felt like “I’m not the true Dauphine.” She had been, like, lovingly, gently, kindly, soft parenting her husband to try and get him to sort of, like, just obey the Versailles rules and kind of do what people expected of him. But he just couldn’t or wouldn’t. And eventually, she started yelling, like, they got into arguments and he would run away from her and then she would cry, and it’s just like, things are shitty and she’s just like, “You know what I’m going to do is just get the king on my side, because then these bitches can’t mess with me.” 

So, he liked to hunt, which I call playing golf, but he liked to hunt, so she’s like, great. I’m going to learn how to ride a horse because her mother hadn’t let her learn how to ride a horse because Maria Theresa was always like, “No, that’s dangerous for reproduction reasons.” And Marie Antoinette is like, “Well, I’m not pregnant and can’t be, so I’m going to learn how to ride a horse.” So first, she learned how to ride a donkey, and then she graduates riding a horse, and she became passionate about it. Turns out there’s a little horse girl inside of her all along. And honestly, this is like the only exercise she can get. At least when she’s riding a horse, there’s not bitches trying to ruin her life. So, she would join him for the hunt, but she also would just ride horses around, like, the paddock for fun. She was just like, “I have found a new hyperfixation and this is fantastic.” 

This is interesting. So, this is from the Caroline Weber biography, Queen of Fashion, who hypothesizes. So, Marie Antoinette, she’s riding, and so you need to wear riding clothes. What riding clothes were like at this time— Remember, she likes a costume, we know that from when she was a little girl. So, it’s kind of a red jacket and it’s a masculine jacket, but cut like a woman. So, if you think about when you see a Hollywood star wearing a tuxedo, but it’s a form-fitting tuxedo, so she would get this jacket that’s sort of masculine-adjacent, and what women would often do is they would wear their big, like, these jackets with a big skirt, but then they wear trousers or pants inside the skirt, silk or woolen breeches for modesty reasons, because they would be riding side saddle, where you sit sideways on a horse. But if they fell off, they’d have the pants on, so, like, for their modesty.

Marie Antoinette was like, “What if I ride astride,” like legs spread “and what if I wear the pants and not a skirt on top?” So, she started wearing pants. And for long-time listeners of this podcast, I’m always excited about a pants-on moment. Marie Antoinette is just like, “Here’s what I’m going to do. Wear pants.” And this is a time and a place where how you dress meant who you are. So, not just like, as the Dauphine, she had to wear these dresses that no one else could wear, she had to wear this corset. But also, like, if you wear a dress, you’re a woman. If you wear pants, you’re a man. That’s just how society functions. Like we’ll get later into people like the Chevalier d’Éon, who challenged gender norms. So, Marie Antoinette is challenging gender norms. Actually, the first French royal woman to wear the trousers inside the skirt was actually Catherine de’ Medici, a few hundred years earlier. So, Marie Antoinette is effectively, in this time and place, cross-dressing. Her mother was just like, “Whaaaat?” Madame Etiquette is just like, “Ahhh! Oh my god, the apocalypse is coming.” Her mother, Maria Theresa, demanded like, “Stop wearing pants. This is fucking weird.” And Marie Antoinette is like, “Well, you know who doesn’t mind? The king and my husband, so let’s do it.” And in fact, she sent a portrait of herself to her mother wearing this riding outfit, and her mother was like, “Wow, that really looks like you,” and hung it up in her room and loved it. 

So, Marie Antoinette is just doing what she can. Remember when I said like, Berry’s mother was just kind of like a boring person, seemingly, who just kind of dressed plainly and had children, and that was her whole job. Marie Antoinette’s whole job is supposed to be having children and raising them, but she wasn’t having children, so she was just bored all the time. So, she’s horseback riding, she’s just trying to figure things to do because, and no one knows what she should do because they’re not having sex, she doesn’t have children. It’s all really confusing. But Berry is a guy who likes routine, he likes things to stay the same, and he’s like, “Well, this is the new normal, I guess,” and he’s not going to change anything. 

Eventually, what is this? Three years into the marriage, she was permitted to go into Paris for the first time. So, traditionally, usually the Dauphine would enter Paris formally at the time of her marriage. Like, so this would have happened three years ago, but nobody… It’s a cult with no leader, like, no one got around to that. It was herself who went to the king to be like, “Can I do this Paris thing, please?” And he’s like, “Fine.” So, Marie Antoinette and Berry went to Paris for an official state reception. 

So, remember the people in Paris hate the golf king, they hate Madame du Barry, but they’re psyched to see these hot, young teens. They’re just like, “Oh my god, the existence of these two people means that Louis XV will die one day, and that makes us happy.” So, it wasn’t about Marie Antoinette and Berry themselves; it was just the fact that they represented that Louis would die one day. So, she was given, it was a whole thing, something like 50,000 people turned out, they were so excited to see her. She was given keys to the city, and recurring characters in our French Revolution episodes, the Market Ladies, were there. Market Ladies, I want to say, often came up to Versailles just to watch. Versailles was a little day trip that the Market Ladies liked to do. So, these are the women in the market who sell produce and bread and whatever. They presented them with bouquets of flowers and also of produce. Imagine that, a bouquet of produce. Like, the Market Ladies are just like, “We ride for you.” That’s the origin story of the Market Ladies. Everyone was cheering for them, people were so happy. People were just, like, loving it, and Marie Antoinette was just like, “Oh my god, the people love me!” Because she didn’t realize that they just loved the concept of someone who is not Louis XV. But she’s like, “Wow, I barely even did anything, and they love me. I’m killing it at my job of Dauphine.” 

But also, she loved Paris. This was the biggest city she’d ever seen. Like, she’d never seen this many people before, and she was like, “Wow, and the people love me. I’m so happy.” And like, even she got Berry to wave a little bit, and she’s just like, “Augh, this is great.” It’s like, how many young women go to Paris and they’re like, “This is the greatest place I’ve ever been.” But the thing is, everybody was so excited for them because they had so much expectations. They were like, “When these two take over, when they become king and queen, everything’s going to be better.” Which is like, you don’t know that. But that was the really high expectation they had of them, and the thing about expectations is when they’re not met, then people might get angry. But that’s a little foreshadowing for you. 

Ten months later, ten months after this Paris trip, Louis XV came down with a fever, and then spots appeared. And yes, friends… Smallpox. Smallpox spread through Versailles, so everybody kind of fled to not get smallpox, except for the Aunties, to their credit, stayed by his side to nurse him. And they all caught smallpox, but like, a milder version of it, and they survived, unfortunately. Marie Antoinette and Berry were just like, “If he dies, we’re fucked. We are not ready to be king and queen. No one’s taught us how to do anything. Please let him not die.” So, when it seemed like he was going to die, Louis was just repeating, “I feel as though the universe will fall on me,” and the two of them just spent all their time, like, 24 hours a day, in the chapel praying that the king would get better because they did not want to be king and queen yet. 

They were praying so much that they had to sleep because they had to rest because they were tired from praying all the time. So, they were just napping when they suddenly heard a sound that was like a huge, loud clap of thunder. What the sound was, was the sound of all the courtiers running from the king’s room to their room to bow to Berry, who was now king because Louis XV had died. Berry was now Louis XVI. Marie Antoinette and Louis dropped down to their knees, like they fell to the ground crying and praying, “Oh God, guide and protect us. We are too young to govern.” 

She was 18 at this point, he was 19. Neither of them had been taught how to rule the country. Like, Berry had never attended a council meeting, or read an official dispatch, or seen a treasury report. Marie Antoinette knew even less. They were both terrified because they knew enough to know they didn’t know what they were doing. And so began the reign of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Next week, we’ll get into her Queen era. 

So, I just have a few post-episode things to say. Firstly, I want to say that I have a Patreon. On the Patreon, about once a month, we post—and by we, I mean myself and my two friends, Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson—we post movie discussions. So, we have coming up at the end of September, this month, we’re going to be having a discussion of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette movie. You can listen to that if you join the Patreon at the $6/month level, or you could get a free trial, listen to the episode, and then cancel the free trial. Like, do what you need to do. You can join my Patreon by going to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. 

I also want to mention that I wrote a book, it is connected to what I just said. My book is called Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen. It comes out next February, but you can pre-order it from basically any bookstore in Canada or the United States. If and when you do pre-order it, if you send me a picture of your receipt, then I will send you some gifts. One of those gifts is a year’s membership to my Patreon. So, you could buy the book, like, pre-order the book, send me the receipt, and then you can listen to the Vulgarpiece Theatre movie discussion, Marie Antoinette, as well. You can get the links to buy the book, as well as the form to fill out to get the free stuff at RebelOfTheRegency.com. You can also add my book, Rebel of the Regency, by Ann Foster, on Goodreads, on Storygraph. If you’re on NetGalley, you can request it from there as well. 

I also want to mention, we have a brand partner who is Common Era Jewelry, which is a women-owned company based out of the United States and makes beautiful jewelry inspired by ancient cultures of Rome and Greece and Egypt. Actually, I’m wearing Common Era Jewelry right now, what a coincidence! This is my Hatshepsut pendant. So, they make pendants and rings with images on them of women like Hatshepsut, Cleopatra, Agrippina, as well as some other pieces inspired by actual jewelry that’s been found during archaeological digs in places like Pompeii. If you’re looking to propose to someone or to get proposed to buy someone, they also have a collection of engagement rings called Ceremonia, which are inspired by rings of classical antiquity. Anyway, it’s a beautiful company, their pieces are beautiful, and the pieces are available in gold vermeil as well as solid gold. They have a Zodiac collection that recently just came out. At first, just the gold was available, but now the gold vermeil is also available for the Zodiac collection. And you, Vulgar History listeners, can always get 15% off all items from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or by using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. And if you’re dropping hints about the engagement rings, tell that person to use code ‘VULGAR’  at checkout to get the 15% off as well. 

Next week, we’re going to be getting into Marie Antoinette, Queen Era. So yeah, get ready. It’s a wild and interesting saga, and I can’t wait to share it with you. So, until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster, that’s me! Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon for as low as one dollar a month at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWwriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod and get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com. 

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