Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France

Infobox French Royalty|majesty|consort
name =Marie-Thérèse of France
title =Queen consort of France and of Navarre


caption =Marie-Thérèse in 1827
reign =August 2 1830 for 20 minutes
spouse =Louis XIX
royal house =House of Bourbon
titles ="HM" Queen Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte
"HM" The Queen
"HRH" The Dauphine of France
HRH The Duchess of Angoulême
HRH Madame Royale
father =Louis XVI of France
mother =Marie Antoinette
date of birth =birth date|1778|12|19|mf=y
place of birth =Château de Versailles, France
date of death =death date and age|1851|10|19|1778|12|19|mf=y
place of death =Frohsdorf, Austria|

Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France (19 December 1778 – 19 October 1851) was the eldest child of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette. As the daughter of the king, she was a Fille de France. Until her marriage to the eldest son of Charles X, the court referred to her by the traditional honorific of "Madame Royale".

Once married, she assumed her husband's title and was known as the duchesse d'Angoulême. She became the Dauphine of France upon the accession of her father-in-law to the throne of France in 1824. She was Queen of France for twenty minutes, in 1830, between the time her father-in-law signed the instrument of abdication and the time her husband, reluctantly, signed the same document, twenty minutes later.

Childhood

Birth

Marie-Thérèse was the first child and eldest daughter of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette. Although people throughout France had been praying for the birth of a male child since the marriage of the royal couple in 1770, the queen greeted her daughter's birth with delight:

"Poor little thing; 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"

she said as they placed the baby in her arms. The baby princess was named after the queen's mother, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa. As the eldest daughter of the French king, she was officially known as "Madame Royale".

Life at Versailles

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, the 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.

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 toward revolt as the result of bankruptcy brought on by the country's support of the American Revolution and high food prices due to drought, all of which was exacerbated by propagandists whose central object of scorn and ridicule was Queen Marie Antoinette.

As the attacks upon the Queen grew ever more vicious, the popularity of the monarchy plummeted. Inside Versailles, court jealousies and xenophobia were the principle causes of resentment and anger towards the Queen. Her unpopularity with certain powerful members of the court, including the Duke of Orléans, led to the printing and distribution of scurrilous pamphlets which accused the Queen of a range of sexual depravities as well as of spending the country into financial ruin. While it is now generally agreed that the Queen's actions did little to provoke such animosity, the damage these papers inflicted upon the monarchy proved to be a catalyst for the upheaval to come.

The worsening political situation however had little effect on Marie-Thérèse. A more immediate tragedy struck when her younger sister, Sophie, died in 1787. This was to be followed not long after by the Dauphin, Louis-Joseph's death from consumption at the height of the political crisis in early 1789.

The Revolution and move to the Tuileries

With the Bastille was stormed by an angry mob on July 14, 1789 the situation became more critical. The young Madame Royale's life began to be personally affected as several members of the royal household were sent abroad for their own safety. Marie-Thérèse's uncle, the Comte d'Artois, was sent abroad on the orders of Louis XVI. Due to her mother's particularly low esteem, those associated with her were also deemed in danger. This included Marie-Thérèse's governess, the Duchess de Polignac, who fled to Switzerland to escape possible assassination.

The Duchess de Polignac was replaced by the stern marquise de Tourzel. The marquise's daughter, Pauline, would become a life-long friend of the Princess.

In October of 1789, the palace was besieged by a hungry mob who were intent on acquiring food they falsely believed to be stored at Versailles and possibly murdering the Queen. While the Royal Family was not harmed, the mob assaulted the palace and demanded the King return to Paris. Outnumbered, unsure of the army's loyalty and aware of the potentially violent results of refusal, Louis XVI capitulated. Marie-Thérèse and her family were taken to the Tuileries Palace where they were placed under virtual house arrest.

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 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 where they were arrested and escorted back to Paris.

The Temple

In August 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.

The following July, guards entered the royal family's rooms and took away Marie-Thérèse's young 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 survived the Reign of Terror.

Marie Antoinette's death

In October 1793, Marie Antoinette was taken to the Conciergerie Prison and accused of treason, incest with her son and other perversions. While there was no evidence to support the latter charges, it was well known that the former queen engaged in extensive covert correspondence with foreign powers during the Revolution. Regardless, it was a foregone conclusion that she would be declared guilty. She was executed by Charles Henri 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 the tower of 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."

On the 11th of May Maximilien Robespierre visited Marie-Thérèse in prison, but there is no record of the conversation. 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, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II.

Life as an "émigrée"

Marie-Thérèse later left Vienna and moved to Mitau, Courland (now Jelgava, Latvia), where her father's eldest surviving brother, the comte de Provence, lived as a guest of Tsar Paul I of Russia. He had proclaimed himself King of France as Louis XVIII after the death of Marie-Thérèse's brother. With no 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. His father, the comte d'Artois, who viewed his eldest son as a crass embarrassment, tried to persuade Louis XVIII against the marriage. The wedding, however, went ahead in 1799. The couple had no children.

In England

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

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 of France's rule. She visited the site where her brother had died, and the cemetery where her parents and aunt Madame Élisabeth were buried. The royal remains were re-buried in Saint-Denis Basilica, the "royal necropolis of France", in January 1815.

1815

In March 1815 Napoléon returned to France and rapidly began to gain supporters and raised an army, in the period known as the One Hundred Days. 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 Napoléon's troops. Marie Thérèse stayed in Bordeaux despite Napoléon'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 Napoléon to remark that she was the "only man in her family."

After Napoléon was defeated at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, the House of Bourbon was restored for a second time.

Tragedy struck when the comte d'Artois' younger son, the duc de Berry, was assassinated by the anti-Bourbon Pierre Louvel, a saddler, on 13 February 1820. Although his father never recovered from the loss, the royal family was cheered when the duchesse de Berry was discovered to have become pregnant by her husband prior to his death. The pregnancy resulted in the birth of Henri, duc de Bordeaux, the so-called "Miracle Child", who later as the Bourbon pretender to the French throne assumed the title of "comte de Chambord".

Madame la Dauphine

Louis XVIII died on 16 September 1824 and was succeeded by his younger brother, the comte d'Artois, 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-royalist 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 implied to the Chambre des Députés that Charles had abdicated absolutely when he had in fact nominated his grandson, the duc de Bordeaux, to be the new 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 the former king chose to move to Prague as a guest of Marie-Thérèse's cousin, the Emperor Francis II of Austria. They moved into the opulent luxury of Schloss-Hradschin. Later, the royal family left Prague and moved to the estate of Count Coronini near Gorizia, Italy. Marie-Thérèse devotedly nursed her uncle through his last illness there in 1836, when he died of cholera.

Marie-Thérèse's husband died in 1844, and he was buried next to his father. Marie-Thérèse then moved to the castle of Frohsdorf, just outside of Vienna. She spent her days there walking, reading, praying and sewing. Her nephew, who now styled himself as the comte de Chambord, and his sister joined her there. In 1848 France became a republic, after Louis-Philippe's reign ended in another revolution.

Death

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.

"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"

After death

Like her deceased uncle, Marie-Thérèse had remained a devout and sincere Roman Catholic. She was buried in the Bourbon family crypt in the Franciscan monastery of Castagnavizza in Gorizia, Italy (now on the Slovenian side of the border in Nova Gorica), with her father-in-law, King Charles X and her husband, Louis-Antoine.

Later, her nephew, the comte de Chambord, the last male of the senior line of French Bourbons; his wife, the comtesse de Chambord (formerly the Archduchess Marie-Thérèse of Austria-Este, daughter of Duke Francis IV of Modena and his wife, Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy); and the comte's only sister, Louise, Duchess of Parma were also buried there. Another occupant of the crypt is the famous antiquarian, the duc de Blacas, who was allowed to be buried there in honor of his dutiful years of service as a minister to Kings Louis XVIII and Charles X.

Marie-Thérèse is described on her gravestone as the Queen Dowager of France, a reference to her husband's twenty-minute rule as King Louis XIX of France.

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 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".

Ancestry

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1= 1. Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte of France
2= 2. Louis XVI of France
3= 3. Maria Antonia of Austria
(Marie Antoinette)
4= 4. Louis, Dauphin of France (1729–65)
5= 5. Duchess Marie-Josèphe of Saxony
6= 6. Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor
7= 7. Maria Theresa of Austria
Queen of Hungary & Bohemia
8= 8. Louis XV of France
9= 9. Maria Leszczynska
10= 10. Augustus III of Poland
11= 11. Maria Josepha of Austria
12= 12. Leopold, Duke of Lorraine
13= 13. Princess Élisabeth Charlotte of Orléans
14= 14. Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor
15= 15. Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
16= 16. Louis, Dauphin of France (1682–1712)
17= 17. Princess Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy
18= 18. Stanislaus I Leszczynski of Poland
19= 19. Katarzyna Opalinska
20= 20. Augustus II of Poland
21= 21. Christiane Eberhardine of Brandenburg-Bayreuth
22= 22. Joseph I, Holy Roman Emperor
23= 23. Wilhelmina Amalia of Brunswick
24= 24. Charles V, Duke of Lorraine
25= 25. Eleonora Maria Josefa of Austria
Queen Dowager of Poland-Lithuania
26= 26. Philippe I, Duke of Orléans
27= 27. Countess Palatine Elizabeth Charlotte of Simmern
28= 28. Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor
29= 29. Eleonore-Magdalena of Neuburg
30= 30. Louis Rudolph, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel
31= 31. Princess Christine Louise of Oettingen-Oettingen

External links

Primary sources

* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/angouleme/index.html Duchess of Angoulême's Memoirs on the Captivity in the Temple] (from the autograph manuscript)
* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/France/_Texts/CROROY/Fuite_de_Varennes*.html Duchess of Angoulême's Memoir on the Flight to Varennes] , (1823 English translation, by John Wilson Croker, of a slightly redacted French edition)
* [http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/France/_Texts/CROROY/Memoires_du_Temple/1*.html Duchess of Angoulême's Memoirs on the Captivity in the Temple] , (same 1823 English translation)

Further reading

* Desmond, Alice Curtis. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/0396056415 " Marie Antoinette's Daughter "] . NY: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1967. ISBN 10: 0396056415.

* Nagel, Susan. [http://www.amazon.com/dp/1596910577 " Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter "] . NY: Bloomsbury, 2008. ISBN-10: 1-59691-057-7

Other material

* [http://www.samostan-kostanjevica.si/ English language site of the franciscan Monastery in Kostanjevica Slovenia, where Marie Thérèse Charlotte is buried, together with the last French kings]
* [http://www.madame-royale.de/ English and German language site about the substitution theory of Madame Royale and the "Dark Countess of Hildburghausen"]
* [http://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/wormeley/princess/princess.html] The Ruin of a Princess, which contains the life and letters of Madame Élisabeth, Journal of the Tower of the Temple by Cléry and Narrative of Madame Royale.

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