Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/568

Rh 540 M A II M A II chapel lavishly adorned with objects of silver and other costly materials. The large church of which the chapel forms part was erected in 1644 as an expansion of a smaller church built in 1363 by Louis I, king of Hungary, after a victory over the Turks. It possesses four lofty towers. In the immediate vicinity of Mariazell there is a very large and important iron foundry, formerly worked by Government, but now leased to a company. MARIE ANTOINETTE, JOSEPHE JEANNE (1755- 1793), queen of France, was the fourth daughter of Maria Theresa and the emperor Francis I., and was born on the 2d November 1755, on the day of the great earthquake at Lisbon, and in the year in which the hereditary policy of enmity between the houses of France and Austria was changed to an alliance between them. From her earliest years she was destined by her mother to sustain this alliance, and was educated, with a view to a marriage with a French prince, by the Abbe de Vermond, who was to have a great influence on her future life. In 1770 Choiseul negotiated her marriage to the young dauphin, which took pl.ice on May 16 with the greatest pomp, but which was soon overshadowed by a terrible accident in Paris at the fete given in honour of the marriage. The dauphine soon fuuud her position very difficult ; she was but fourteen, and was intended by her mother to support the Austrian alliance and Choiseul at the court of France. This use of lier daughters for political purposes has been recently denied by Von Anieth, the able editor of Maria Theresa s letters ; b:it a consideration of the letters themselves confirms the i lea, which was at the bottom of Marie Antoinette s un popularity in France, that she was only an Austrian spy in a high position. She had hardly arrived at Paris, when her friend and the friend of the Austrian alliance, Choiseul, was dismissed from the ministry, and she was left alone to stoer a difficult course by the advice of the Austrian minis ter, the Count de Mercy-Argenteau, whose reports of her d lily doings to Maria Theresa have been published. In May 1774 Louis XV. died, and Marie Antoinette became queen of France. Through the first ye;irs of her reign she played a very important political part, but, except, as in the cases of Poland and the Bavarian succession, when her mother pressed her to maintain the alliance, she chiefly exerted her influence with regard to individuals, not to measures or policies. Thus she effected the dismissal of Turgot, and, by the Abbd de Vermond s advice, the summons of Loinenie de Brienne to the ministry, not from political but from personal motives, and obtained enormous presents for her intimate friends without thinking that they were interested in her for selfish motives of their own. This political role of hers, which was more than suspected, made her intensely unpopular to the French people, and this feeling was increased by her social mistakes. Her extravagance in dress and her passion for the card-table had greatly incensed and disgusted her mother ; and, when her mother s death removed her only frank and bold adviser, she became more extravagant and more frivolous than ever. Her passion for play, her love of amusement, her intimicy with the Polignacs and their wild and dissi pated society, her night visits to masked balls in Paris, and her favours to many officers of her guards and young foreigners at her court were the subject of ribald con versation in every coterie of Paris. The scandal of the diamond necklace, in which the queen was not to blame, spread her name with infamy all over France as if she had been guilty ; and among the people her extravagance was regarded as a potent cause of their poverty and want. Such was her unpopularity when the states-general met in May 1789; she was believed to be debauched and dissipated, when her real faults were that she was frivolous and careless of public opinion, Austrian at heart, though queen of France, and opposed to Necker as she had been to Turgot, and to all the reforms and economies her husband, Bonhomme Louis, was willing to institute. From July 14 onward Marie Antoinette headed the party of reaction and armed opposition to the Pvevolution, and became unwittingly the means of her husband s unpopularity and downfall ; for she always had influence enough to prevent his carrying out the frank, honest policy of reform which he desired, but not enough to make him adopt hers in its stead, and is to blame for his vacillations in decisive moments. Left to himself, Louis would, from the begin ning of his reign, have been a reforming king like Charles III. of Spain, and the great outbreak might have passed over. To trace her policy minutely from 1789 to 1793 is made very difficult by the numerous pretended letters of hers which have been published, and till recently believed in. She inspired the collection of foreign troops round Paris, contrary to the king s opinion, and thus brought on the taking of the Bastille. She was present at the banquet at Versailles which caused the march of the women to Versailles and the transference of the royal family to Paris. When there, she still looked forward to undoing all that had been clone, and would never frankly recognize her position. When brought into negotiation with Mirabeau, she refused to trust him or deal frankly with him. Had she done so, she would probably have established a strong constitutional government, but she would not have been the self-willed Marie Antoinette. He advised her to go with the king and royal family to some provincial capital, declare the royal adherence to all the early acts of the assembly, but declare also that its later acts were passed under constraint, and were null and void ; but she must not do two things she must not fly towards the frontier, else she would be suspected of seeking foreign aid, and she must not depend on the army but the people. She would not act while Mirabeau was alive, she was too independent to act by any one s advice ; but when he was dead she did what he had advised her not to do, fled towards the frontier, and to Bouille s army. The royal family were stopped at Varennes, and brought back to Paris, but from that time were regarded as traitors to France. She had yet two more chances. She might have thrown herself into the hands of Barnave, Duport, and the constitutional party of the constituent assembly, who were ready to rally ruund their constitutional king, but she would not trust them or take their advice. When she was at the end of her power, when the Tuileries had been stormed, and she was in prison, and the republic proclaimed, Dumouriez was ready, after his victory of Valmy, to turn his army on Paris, dissolve the Jacobins, and re-establish the old constitution, but she would not trust him. It was her last chance. When once the republic was proclaimed, it was evident that Louis must die both to cement its foundations arid to remove a dangerous centre of reaction ; and in January 1793 Marie Antoinette became a widow, never to the last recognizing that she had sacrificed her husband to her obstinacy and self-will. Harrowing descriptions have been given of her treatment in prison during the few remaining months of her life, but, though she was separated from her children, she had every material comfort, no less a sum than 1110 livres being spent on her food alone between August and October, at the rate of 15 livres a day. At last her trial came on, a mock trial indeed, as all those of the time, for her execution was determined before she came before the tribunal. Much has been said of the shameful charges made against her; but, shameful as they were, they were based on a confession made by her son, which, though probably forced from him and utterly false, was yet put in evidence. The trial was soon over, and on the same day, October 16, 1793, she was guillotined.