Marie Antoinette leaves Vienna for Versailles

Marie Antoinette leaves Vienna for Versailles

On 21st April 1770, a procession passed by the imperial summer palace of Schönbrunn.

14 year old Marie Antoinette departed Vienna in a gold and glass carriage.
21 state coaches were followed by 36 fine carriages, a total of 450 horses, and a personal entourage of some 257 people.

The exceptionally pretty Marie Antoinette was all big blue eyes and blond curls, as she leaned her long neck out of her carriage window.

This was the beginning of a two and a half week journey from Vienna to Versailles, for the future queen of France.

The procession had its planned route, which had been worked out well in advance, to meet the necessary needs of both the practical and the ceremonial.

Horses had to be ready at their posts to be changed when the procession met them.

Stops meant fireworks, music, receptions, theatrical performances.
In short, it was an apt preparation for the court of Versailles, from where Marie Antoinette would write a mere two months after her arrival,

“I put on my rouge… in front of the whole world.”

Marie Antoinette’s journey would cross much of the Holy Roman Empire, of which her father had been Emperor in his lifetime.

Crucially, she would then be handed over formally to France as its future Dauphine, in order to ‘become’ fully French.

On 7th May, on an island in the Rhine, Marie Antoinette was officially ‘handed over’ and at last became properly ‘French.’

Her Austrian entourage had to be left behind, as did her fine clothes – even her favourite dog, Mops.

Marie Antoinette was immediately undressed, then dressed again in the French fashion.

Having literally left behind her all that remained of Austria, symbolically as well as geographically, from her personal entourage, down to her clothes, Marie Antoinette was now ‘Dauphine’ in France.

On 14th May she met her husband, at the edge of the forest of Compiègne.

Marie Antoinette had arrived……

🌹13 year old Marie Antoinette c.1767-1768
Martin van Meytens.