As a follow up to a recent post about Louis XVI and the French Revolution, u/MySkinsRedditAcct's earlier post was cited and I ran across this passage in the response:
Honestly I started typing and realized that would be a long post of its own, so if anyone is interested feel free to ask a question like "What happened to Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette's surviving daughter?"
What can be offered to this topic which builds upon previous answers such as:
Oh hi! Haha I would LOVE to answer this question! It's actually an insanely fascinating story.
So Louis & Marie had three children total: Marie-Thérèse, who would survive the Revolution; the dauphin (heir to the throne) who died as a child at the peak of the drama over the Estates General in June 1789; and then finally another boy who would die during the Revolution, in the custody of the Revolutionaries under hazy circumstances—likely due to sickness and general ill treatment.
Marie-Therese was born in 1778, so she was 11 when the Revolution broke out. Her early life was action packed: she was in Versailles when it was stormed during the October Day's; she moved to Paris with her family and was in the royal carriage when it was surrounded and prevented from leaving to go to Saint-Cloud; she fled in the middle of the night a month later during the ill-fated Flight to Varennes, where she and her father, mother, brother, aunt (Louis's sister, Madame Elisabeth) and governess were 'escorted' back to Paris by an often hostile mob; and, finally, she was in the Tuilleries during the Insurrection of August 10th, managing to get out of the palace and to hide in a small room protected by the Legislative Assembly.
From August 10, 1792 until December 1795 she was imprisoned in the Temple, initially along with her mother, father, brother, and aunt. Eventually the family was broken up: her father was executed in January 1793, her brother was given to a sans-culottes tradesmen to raise as a 'revolutionary,' and her mother was separately imprisoned (guillotined October 1793). Madame Elisabeth, her paternal aunt, stayed with her until May 1794, when she in turn was taken to be executed. Marie-Therese was kept in the dark about the fate of her family members, only learning of their deaths in 1795. She was 17.
Marie-Therese's freedom came from a prisoner exchange with the Austrians. She was traded for a group of French citizens, among who (for a good trivia quesiton!) was Jean-Baptiste Drouet, the man who had recognized the royal family during the Flight to Varennes and had ridden ahead to demand their way be blocked. After this exchange, Marie-Therese was turned over to the royal court in exile, headed by the (nominal) Louis XVIII, aka Louis XVI's brother the comte de Provence. (Louis XVII was technically the King's son who had died in revolutionary custody). In the grand tradition of royal families, Marie-Therese was married off to her cousin, the son of the comte d'Artois, arch villain of the Revolution and the most belligerent of the emigrés. Marie-Therese's husband was Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, who was the eldest son of the comte d'Artois, himself the deceased Louis XVI's former brother. He was next in line for the (nonexistant) throne after his brother, the 'technical' Louis XVIII.
Marie-Therese bounced around with this court in exile as they annoyed the crowned heads of Europe, until they finally took shelter in that exile's paradise, England. There were several attempts by the emigrés, led by her father-in-law, to retake France, but no serious movement came until 1814, when Napoleon abdicated and went into his first exile. Marie-Therese was 36.
With Napoleon ousted, the allies invited the Bourbon's to retake their throne, whereupon the comte de Provence officially became Louis XVIII. He begrudgingly adopted a Constitution, but made sure the people knew it was handed down 'by God,' and in the old adage generally acted like the royal family had "learned nothing, and forgotten nothing." For Marie-Therese this meant coming back to the place where her childhood horrors still haunted. When she first reentered the Tuilleries, it is said that she had a fainting spell, overcome by the memories of the Insurrection of August 10th.
Louis's rule was widely unpopular, and it was therefore possible for Napoleon to waltz back to Paris in 1815 for the 100 days. The Bourbon's—including Marie-Therese—had to high-tail it out of Paris and back to Englad. I have heard it claimed that Marie-Therese either tried to, or encouraged the rallying of troops for a defense, but I've never seen these claims substantiated anywhere credible.
When Napoleon was finally defeated for good at Waterloo, the Bourbon's returned again. This time things stuck for a bit longer, with Louis XVIII reigning until his death in 1824. Next up was Marie-Therese's father-in-law the comte d'Artois, newly minted as Charles X. Her husband was now the heir to the throne; she was 46.
Unfortunately for stability, Charles X was just as belligerent and conservative as the day he fled the Revolution in 1789. Charles made everyone furious trying to turn the clock back to 1788 (more likely he'd have rather have cranked it back to 1685) and unsurprisingly, he managed to poke the hornets nest enough to provoke ANOTHER French Revolution—this time the Revolution of 1830. This is also known as the July Revolution, and the "Three Glorious Days," since that's as long as the fighting lasted.
When the barricades started to go up in Paris, and it was clear that this would not be a trivial matter, Charles attempted to advocate in favor of his son, who was therefore briefly—unofficially—the King of France, with Marie-Therese as his wife. By all accounts Marie-Therese was staunchly supportive of her husband maintaining his claim to standing up to the crowds, using military force if necessary. She was deeply upset when, under increasing pressure, her husband abdicated in turn in favor of his nephew, Charles's grandson the duc de Bordeaux. This shuffling was an attempt to find a suitable candidate within the family to hopefully staunch the bleeding. Charles clearly had to go, and while there was initial hope his abdication in favor of his son would be enough, the duc (Marie-Therese's husband) had a bad reputation for being just as conservative as his father. The pressure to pass the crown to Charles's grandson was a last-ditch effort, as the child's mother was known for her dislike of the royal family and a rather more liberal attitude; however this was all too little, too late. Instead, in an ironic twist of fate, the crown was offered to Louis-Phillipe, Marie-Therese's second cousin, son of the duc d'Orleans (aka Philippe Egalité). The Orlean branch had always been the 'liberal' cousins to the Bourbons, and Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had always though the elder duc d'Orleans was behind the Revolution in an attempt at the crown. Marie-Therese was furious that Louis-Philippe accepted the crown, now not as "King of France" but "King of the French."
For a third time, then, Marie-Therese left France and went into exile. She was 52. Staying together as a family, Marie-Therese moved with her husband and father-in-law, first to Scotland and then onto Prauge, where the Bourbon's had familial ties. The former Charles X would die in 1836, and her husband passed away in 1844, whereafter Marie-Therese moved to Vienna. Amazingly, Marie-Therese would live through one more massive regime shift: she had the shaudenfreude to watch as her second-cousin was in turn topped in the Revolution of 1848 and replaced by the Second Republic, 56 years after the first was declared. If she had lived one year longer, she would have had the pleasure of seeing another Republic fall, although her pleasure would likely have been dampened to find out that it was to Napoleon's nephew Louis-Napoleon, who would take over as Emperor in 1852. Marie-Therese died of sickness in old age at 73.
It's crazy to think of all that Marie-Therese lived through. She was alive through her father's 'absolute' monarchy, the Constitution of 1791, the declaration of the First Republic, the Empirate, the Bourbon comback (x2), the Orleans monarchy, and the Second Republic, narrowly missing the second empire. She witnessed the Revolutions of 1848, when the rest of Europe awoke & attempted to follow France into constitutional government.
From what we know about her views on the Revolution she was incredibly distraught and traumatized by the events of her childhood: in a journal entry while in prison she referred to herself as the 'unhappiest girl alive.' Growing up the only surviving member of her household, she witnessed an enormous amount of change around her, yet seemingly she remained quite similar in view to her conservative uncle/father-in-law. She remained a devout Catholic, believed whole-heartedly in the divine rule of the monarchy, and was seemingly ready to defend that right by force. She never had children, but was living with her nieces and nephews when she passed. I wish we could have known a lot more about Europe through her eyes.