Reference.com

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Cite This Source

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France (19 December 1778 – 19 October 1851) was the eldest child of King Louis XVI of France and his Queen, Maria Antoina Josepha Johanna Von Habsburg Lothrigen also known as Marie Antoinette of Austria. As the wife of the eldest surviving son of Charles X, she was Duchess of Angoulême, becoming Dauphine of France upon the accession of her father-in-law. She is considered by some to have been Queen of France for the 20 minutes between her father-in-law's signing of the instrument of abdication and her husband's own signing of the document.

Childhood

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte was the first child and eldest daughter born to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette of Austria. Monarchists throughout France prayed for the birth of a male child to the Royal couple, who had been married since 1770. However, the Queen greeted her daughter's birth with delight. "Poor little thing," she said as they placed the baby in her arms, "you are not what they wanted, but we will love you nonetheless. A son would have belonged to the State; you shall be mine, and have all my care; you shall share in my happiness and soften my sorrows." The baby Princess was named after the Queen's mother, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. As the eldest daughter of the Sovereign, she was commonly known as Madame Royale.

Madame Royale's household was headed by her governess, the Princesse de Guémenée, who was later replaced by one of the queen's closest friends, Gabrielle de Polastron, Duchesse de Polignac. King Louis XVI was an affectionate father, who delighted in spoiling his daughter and giving her anything she wanted. Marie-Thérèse appreciated him much more than her mother. Marie Antoinette was stricter and was determined that her daughter should not grow up to be as haughty as her husband's unmarried aunts. She often invited children from working-class districts to come and dine with Marie-Thérèse and encouraged the child to give her toys to the poor.

In contrast to her image as a materialistic queen who ignored the plight of the poor, Marie Antoinette at various times attempted to teach her daughter about the sufferings of others. On New Year's Day in 1784, she had some beautiful toys brought to Marie-Thérèse's nursery. "I should have liked to have given you all these as New Year's gifts," the queen said, "but the winter is very hard, there is a crowd of unhappy people who have no bread to eat, no clothes to wear, no wood to make a fire. I have given them all my money; I have none left to buy you presents, so there will be none this year."

Marie-Thérèse was joined in the nursery by two brothers, Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François in 1781 and Louis-Charles in 1785, and a younger sister, Sophie-Hélène-Béatrix in 1786.

Sophie died a year after her birth and Louis Joseph died 7 years after his birth. This made Louis Charles the new Dauphin.

Ancestry

Life during the Revolution

As Marie-Thérèse grew, the French Revolution was building outside the palace. Social discontent mixed with a crippling budget deficit provoked an outburst of anti-absolutist sentiment. By 1789, France was hurtling towards revolt as the result of bankruptcy due to the supporting of the American Revolution, drought, and famine, among many other problems aided by propagandists. These propagandists wrongly depicted Marie Antoinette as engaging in all sorts of perversions, both fiscal and sexual. Upon the fall of the Monarchy these attacks grew ever more vicious as newfound freedom of the press was not accompanied by commensurate restraint by editors and publishers. The Queen's popularity was at an all-time low, due to her Austrian birth and a hate campaign generated against her by the Parisian gutter press. Tragedy struck closer to home when baby Princess Sophie-Hélène-Béatrix died, to be followed not long after by the eldest son's death. Prince Louis-Joseph died of consumption at the height of the political crisis in early 1789.

On 14 July the Bastille was captured by the mob. The situation was now critical and several members of the Royal Household had to be sent abroad for their own safety. The Prime Minister, Breteuil, had to escape to Germany. Marie-Thérèse's youngest uncle, Charles, comte d'Artois was sent abroad on her father's orders and even her governess, Gabrielle de Polignac, had to escape to Switzerland in case she was targeted by an assassin. The new Royal Governess was the religiously devout Marquise de Tourzel, whose daughter Pauline became the Princess's life-long friend.

In October, Versailles was besieged and the Royal Family was forced to move to Paris. They were placed in the Tuileries Palace, under virtual house arrest. From that point on, Marie-Thérèse's childhood was effectively over. Marie-Thérèse wanted to show her love to her mother, but found it difficult. Unlike Marie Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse was very emotionally reserved and could not express her emotions easily.

The orphan in the Temple

As the political situation deteriorated, the King and Queen came to the decision that their lives were in danger. The Queen was also convinced that France's future best interests lay in the Royal Family escaping Paris and its revolutionary atmosphere. They hoped to make it to the northeastern fortress of Montmédy, which was a royalist stronghold. Their attempted flight away from the city was intercepted in Varennes by a former servant (who felt he had been mistreated by Louis XVI) when Louis insisted on stopping to eat; they were arrested and escorted back to Paris.

In autumn 1792, the entire family was imprisoned in the Temple Fortress after the monarchy was abolished. In January 1793, Marie-Thérèse's father, Louis XVI, was sent to the guillotine. Father and daughter had always been very close, and his death devastated the surviving family.

In July, guards entered the royal family's rooms and took away Marie-Thérèse's little brother, the future Louis XVII. The three women left in the fortress were Marie Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse and Louis XVI's youngest sister, Madame Élisabeth. Of these three, only Marie-Thérèse was able to survive the Reign of Terror.

In October 1793, Marie Antoinette was taken to the Conciergerie Prison and accused of treason, incest with her son and other perversions. There was no evidence to support the charges, but it was a foregone conclusion that she would be declared guilty. She was executed by Sanson, the former Royal Executioner, on 16 October. In May 1794, Marie-Thérèse's Aunt Élisabeth was taken from her in the middle of the night, and executed the following day.

During the remainder of her imprisonment in a tower the Temple, Marie-Thérèse was never told what had happened to her family. All she knew was that her father was dead, and she felt alone in the world. The following words are scratched on the wall of her room in the tower: "Marie-Thérèse is the most unhappy creature in the world. She can obtain no news of her mother; nor be reunited to her, though she has asked it a thousand times." "Live, my good mother! whom I love well, but of whom I can hear no tidings." "O my father! watch over me from heaven above, life was so cruel to her." "O my God! forgive those who have made my family die."

There are rumours that Maximilien Robespierre visited Marie-Thérèse once in prison, but they are not likely true. It was only once the Reign of Terror subsided that Marie-Thérèse was allowed to leave France. She was taken to Vienna, the capital city of her cousin, Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor.

Life as an émigrée

Marie-Thérèse later left Vienna and moved to Mitau, Courland, where her father's eldest surviving brother, Louis-Stanislas, comte de Provence, lived as a guest of Czar Paul I of Russia. He had proclaimed himself King of France as Louis XVIII after the death of Marie-Thérèse's brother. Without children of his own, he wished his niece to marry Louis-Antoine, duc d'Angoulême, his nephew and her cousin, who would be the eventual dynastic heir to the throne of France. Marie-Thérèse agreed unquestioningly, happy only to be part of a family again.

Louis-Antoine was a shy, stammering, diffident young man who was also probably impotent. He was certainly nothing like his handsome and virile father, who viewed his eldest son as a crass embarrassment and tried to talk Louis XVIII out of marrying Marie-Thérèse to him. The wedding, however, went ahead in 1799; the couple had no children.

The royal family moved to Great Britain, where they settled in Buckinghamshire. Marie-Thérèse's uncle and father-in-law, Charles d'Artois, spent most of his time in Edinburgh, where he had been given apartments at Holyrood House. The long years of exile ended upon the abdication of Napoleon I in 1814, when the royal family was restored to the French monarchy.

The Bourbon restoration

Louis XVIII attempted to steer a middle-course between liberals and the Ultra-royalists led by his younger brother, the comte d'Artois. He also attempted to suppress the many gentlemen who claimed to be Marie-Thérèse's long-lost younger brother, Louis XVII. Needless to say, these claimants caused the princess a good deal of emotional distress.

Marie-Thérèse found her return emotionally draining and she was deeply distrustful of the many Frenchmen who had supported either the republic or Napoleon I's rule. She visited the site where her brother had died, and the field where her parents and aunt Madame Élisabeth were buried. The royal remains were later re-buried in the family crypt in Saint-Denis.

In March 1815 Napoleon returned to France and rapidly began to gain supporters and raised an army. Louis XVIII fled France, but Marie-Thérèse, who was in Bordeaux at the time, attempted to rally the local troops. The troops agreed to defend her but not to cause a civil war with Napoleon's troops. Marie Therese stayed in Bordeaux despite Napoleon's orders for her to be arrested when his army arrived. Believing her cause was lost (and to spare Bordeaux senseless destruction) she finally agreed to flee. Her actions caused Napoleon to remark that she was the "only man in her family."

After Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the House of Bourbon was restored for a second time.

Tragedy struck when Charles' youngest (and favourite) son, Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry was assassinated by republican terrorists on 13 February 1820. Charles never recovered from the loss, but the royal family was cheered when Berry's widow, Caroline of the Two Sicilies, was discovered to have become pregnant by her husband prior to his death, the pregnancy resulted in the birth of Henri Dieudonné d'Artois, duc de Bordeaux, the so-called "Miracle Child", who is best known to history as the comte de Chambord.

Louis XVIII died on 16 September 1824 and was succeeded by his younger brother as Charles X. Marie-Thérèse's husband, Louis-Antoine, was now heir to the throne, and she was addressed as Madame la Dauphine. However, anti-monarchist feeling was on the rise again. Charles's ultra-monarchist sympathies alienated many members of the working and middle-class. There was an uprising in 1830 in which the Royal Family was betrayed by their cousin, Louis-Philippe, duc d'Orléans who insinuated that Charles had abdicated absolutely (he had actually nominated his grandson the duc de Bordeaux as king). The abdication of Charles X was followed twenty minutes later by the abdication of Louis-Antoine. This deception worked and Louis-Philippe became king.

Marie-Thérèse chose to go into exile with her uncle and husband, rather than stay in a France ruled by Louis-Philippe. They sailed to Britain in 1830.

Final exile

The Royal Family lived in Edinburgh until 1833 when Charles chose to move to Prague as a guest of Marie-Thérèse's cousin Francis, the Emperor of Austria (and the former Holy Roman Emperor Francis II who had taken custody of Marie-Thérèse upon her release from the Temple in 1795). They moved into the opulent luxury of Schloss-Hradschin. Marie-Thérèse devotedly nursed her uncle Charles through his last illness in 1836, when he died of cholera. By that time they had left Prague and moved to the estate of Count Coronini near Gorica, Slovenia (now Gorizia, Italy). Like her deceased uncle, Marie-Thérèse remained a devout and sincere Roman Catholic.

Marie-Thérèse's husband died in 1844, and he was buried next to his father. Marie-Thérèse then moved to a mansion called Frohsdorf, just outside Vienna. She spent her days walking, reading, praying and sewing. The children of Marie-Thérèse's murdered cousin, Ferdinand, came to live with her – including the Bourbon claimant to the throne, Henri d'Artois, duc de Bordeaux. In 1848 France became a republic, after Louis-Philippe's reign ended in another revolution.

Marie-Thérèse died of pneumonia on 19 October 1851. It was three days after the fifty-eighth anniversary of the execution of her mother, Marie Antoinette of Austria.

"Thank all Frenchmen who have remained attached to my family and to me, for the proofs of devotion that they have given us and for the sufferings they have endured for our sakes. I pray God to shower his blessings upon France that I have always loved, even in the time of my bitterest afflictions."

She is buried in the Franciscan monastery of Kostanjevica, Slovenia, together with King Charles X; her husband, Louis-Antoine; Louise, Duchess of Parma, the daughter of her brother-in-law Charles Ferdinand, duc de Berry; and Henri, comte de Chambord, Berry's son and the last male of the senior line of French Bourbons, as well as his wife, the Archduchess Marie-Thérèse of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy. A court minister to Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X, Pierre Louis Jean Casimir de Blacas, is also buried there.

Marie-Thérèse is titled on her gravestone as Queen Dowager of France: a reference either to her husband's notional twenty-minute rule as Louis XIX of France, or to the refusal of the Bourbon family to accept their deposition.

In fiction

Marie-Thérèse has appeared in several motion picture adaptations, mainly to do with her mother's life.

  • In 1938 she was played by Marilyn Knowlden in Marie-Antoinette, opposite Norma Shearer as the queen.
  • In 1975, in the French television drama Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse was played by Anne-Laura Meury.
  • In 1989 she was played by Katherine Flynn in The French Revolution. Katherine's on-screen mother, Marie Antoinette, was played by her real mother, Jane Seymour.
  • In 2001, Marie-Thérèse's character appeared briefly in the inaccurate costume-drama The Affair of the Necklace opposite Joely Richardson as Queen Marie Antoinette.
  • In 2006, Marie Antoinette, directed by Sofia Coppola was released. Marie-Thérèse was played by two different actresses. At age two, she was played by Lauriane Mascaro, and at age six she was played by Florrie Betts. Kirsten Dunst starred as her mother, Marie Antoinette.

Recently, Marie-Thérèse's character appeared in a Northern Irish play on the mystery of Louis XVII. The characters of Louis XVII, Charles X and the princess's governess Louise-Élisabeth de Tourzel also appeared. The monarchist author of the play, All Those Who Suffered, explains his inspiration at http://www.royaltymonarchy.com/opinion/articles/russell.html

Marie-Thérèse's life provided inspiration for the novel Madame Royale by Elena Maria Vidal. It was a sequel to Vidal's novel Trianon, which looked at Versailles before the Revolution.

More recently, author Sharon Stewart wrote a historical fiction novel based on the writings of Marie-Thérèse, The Journal of Madame Royale. She first titled her book The Dark Tower, since part of it takes place in the Tower where the princess and her family were kept, but after it became part of a series called "Beneath the Crown", the title was changed to The Princess in the Tower.

External links

Primary sources

Other material

|- |- |- |- |- |-



Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia © 2001-2006 Wikipedia contributors (Disclaimer)
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Monday March 10, 2008 at 16:49:37 PDT (GMT -0700)
View this article at Wikipedia.org - Edit this article at Wikipedia.org - Donate to the Wikimedia Foundation