Marie Antoinette Film Synopsis
Marie Antoinette is the most renowned and well-known French queen the world has ever known. The film, Marie Antoinette (2006), reveals this adequately. The film exhibits the life of the young French queen who was formerly Austrian; who became the French queen through a common practice of performing a hand-over that required the marriage of younger members of differing royal families. During the late 1700’s, Austria and France were struggling to achieve peace; the marriage of the Dauphin of France and the young princess of Austria, both equally young in age, seemed to be the solution to the problem. In the film we witness this occurring and we eventually we see that Marie Antoinette becomes the queen of France shortly after King Louis XV’s death in 1774. Following this, we begin to see Marie lead a life of luxury that contains lavish spending, gambling and drinking. Eventually, we see that she comes to symbolize everything that was wrong with the French monarchy at the time. In the movie, one of her most famous, yet not confirmed quotes, is stated, “Let them eat cake.” This quote sparked some of the French Revolution and it caused most of the French nation to view her with hatred because of her apparent ignorance to the French people’s rapidly decreasing quality of life. Even though the queen ignored the rumors and seemed to have it all, she struggled in one very important aspect of any queen’s life, the task of giving birth to an heir. In this time period, if a queen failed to give birth to an heir, she was viewed as unfit for the throne and she was often joked about during commoner/aristocratic dinner. The reason she struggled with this is because she often failed to arouse her husband’s sexual desires. Although this was reoccurring during the first decade of their marriage, Marie Antoinette eventually gave birth to an heir. Of the children she gave birth to, two of the children died causing for her reputation as queen to be weakened. As the French Revolution grew to a climax and the royal family was in an increasing amount of danger because of it, Marie Antoinette began to fear for the lives of her and her family. A few years later, she was executed in Paris and this marked the end of Marie Antoinette. In the beginning of her reign, Marie Antoinette had only a few conflicting loyalties between herself, her heritage and France. When she was handed over by the Austrians to the French, Marie Antoinette struggled to become everything the French desired in a future queen. She often struggled with leaving past practices in
