Marie Antoinette’s Lavish Ways
Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were crowned as teenagers at ages nineteen and eighteen, respectively. It was an economically turbulent time, and neither king nor queen grasped the gravity of the situation. Marie defied convention. The kings of France might be lavish spenders, and so were their mistresses. However, the French expected their queens to be pious and humble, like the wives of Louis XIV and Louis XV. The wife of Louis XVI thought otherwise. From early on, Marie Antoinette accumulated the kind of flamboyant wardrobe more associated with French royal mistresses than with French queens. In one of her costumed balls, she dressed as the mistress of Renaissance-era King Henri IV in a cloud of silver edged gauze, a skirt with golden fringes pinned with diamonds, and diamond-studded corset and girdle.
A lover of art and haute couture, she spent profligately on both. She bought about 300 gowns each year, and was accordingly seen as spoiled and vain. She also splurged on real estate. That included the historic Chateau de Saint-Cloud, a Crown asset that was transferred to her name, and the Petite Trianon, built in Versailles for a former king’s mistress. She continued to splurge even when France was plunged into a financial crisis. For example, she spent more than two million francs to renovate the Petit Trianon. Understandably, such profligacy in a time of widespread hardship did not go over well. By the time the French Revolution finally erupted, Marie Antoinette was perhaps the most reviled person in France.
