How accurate is this comment about Marie Antoinette being more or less a scapegoat during the French Revolution?

by Fredegar-Bolger
mimicofmodes

It is actually not bad.

Maria Antonia, Archduchess of Austria, was not considered very important as a child. Her brother Joseph was the heir to the Holy Roman Empire and so had quite a lot of attention focused on him, while her older sisters Maria Elisabeth and Maria Christina were her mother's personal favorites among her daughters. Antonia was poorly behaved and not much interested in her lessons, which did not bode well for her future value on the marriage market - kings and dukes looking abroad for wives for their sons would want a girl who was sweet and obedient. At the same time, she was the daughter of one of the most powerful monarchs in Europe, which meant that she was never going to marry obscurely no matter what she was like personally or what her number was in the line of Austrian succession.

There is a little confusion about her sisters' marriages in the comment, probably a mixing of two different situations. Maria Antonia's marriage was to help seal long-term peace with France, and her mother was working to bring it about from 1764 - but then in 1768, Louis XV's wife suddenly died, and Maria Theresa wanted to make it a double wedding: the fourteen-year-old Maria Antonia would marry the dauphin and become the future Queen of France, while her sister, the twenty-seven-year-old Maria Elisabeth, would marry his grandfather Louis XV and become the current Queen of France. (Twenty-seven is somewhat old for an unmarried-but-eligible eighteenth-century princess. Multiple matches had been proposed for her but fell through due to politics.) Unfortunately, while the marriage arrangements were still being worked out, Maria Elisabeth caught smallpox and was scarred by it. Likely due to a combination of that and her cough advanced age, she was removed from the marriage market entirely; like her older sister Maria Anna, who was physically disabled and therefore considered unmarriageable, she was named as abbess of a wealthy nunnery instead. The other situation that I think is being caught up here is that of Maria Josepha and Maria Carolina. Maria Josepha was engaged to Ferdinand of Naples and Sicily but died of smallpox before the wedding, so Maria Carolina was offered instead.

As I wrote in this previous answer about Marie Antoinette's reception in France, it's true that she was forced to leave everything Austrian behind her and become French, something she attempted to go along with on her own as well. It's also true that her lack of pregnancy for the first seven years of her marriage was a problem, and that it was generally perceived as her problem even though the real issue had to do with Louis (XVI) not performing optimally. However, I'd point to that linked answer again to reiterate that the people of France didn't hate her full stop for quite some time - a dauphine and then the young queen, she had a lot of popularity in person.

The paragraph about financial issues is also correct. Marie Antoinette's spending was quite extravagant by the standards of the middle and working classes of the time, but was in no way out of line with the expenses of the many other members of the French royal family, and was dwarfed by the money the government was contributing to the American Revolution and other military endeavors. And as I discuss in my answer on the "let them eat cake" myth, she was quite extravagant when it came to charitable spending as well. "She spends too much of the crown's money" was also something typically said against the king's mistresses in France, playing on misogynist tropes about women extorting money with their sexual wiles and frittering it away on jewels and personal property; the maitresse-en-titre was a helpful shield, since she deflected attention from the royal family's spending and ultimately people slandering her weren't acting against the government. But Louis (XVI) had no mistress, so Marie Antoinette had to fill that role in the public press.

It's also true that the Revolutionary tribunal accused her of molesting her son, which did disgust and infuriate her and cause her to plead directly to the women of the revolution - who were not entirely deaf to her pleas. Olympe des Gouges, a revolutionary and one of the earliest women typically recognized as first-wave feminists, was sympathetic to the queen as a woman and eventually was guillotined herself; while the French Revolution had some female activists and feminist ideals early on, the leaders eventually decided that the best place for a woman was in the home, raising sons to be equal members of society and daughters to be wives to other men, which meant that women involving themselves in politics were extremely suspect.

One thing I would add, which /u/XOSnowWhite did not include, is that a heck of a lot of the negative feeling about Marie Antoinette in the 1780s was stoked by pornographic pamphlets written and illustrated on the basis of rumors that courtiers who didn't like her for passing them over as officials and confidants passed to Paris. She was portrayed as having lesbian affairs with her friends (who then would have too much influence over her and get her to do all kinds of things that were bad for France), as having sex with other men in the bed of state right next to her sleeping/impotent husband, and as a literal harpy. Given that she was a fairly private person, as was Louis, and that they tended to stay in Versailles or in more private palaces like the Petit Trianon, these pamphlets were essentially the only way the average Parisian had any contact with the royal couple, and they believed the libels printed in them.

(I have several other answers about Marie Antoinette in the section on my profile about French royalty.