Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Joseph, Louis-Charles, and Sophie were the four children of Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI of France — but despite their initial wealth and power, only one of them survived to adulthood.
Palace of VersaillesMarie Antoinette’s children, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Louis-Joseph, and Louis-Charles, as well as an empty cradle to signify the death of her youngest child, Sophie.
The story of Marie Antoinette is well-known. During the French Revolution, the glamorous queen was guillotined alongside her husband, King Louis XVI. But what happened to Marie Antoinette’s children?
During the course of her marriage, Marie Antoinette had four children: Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Joseph, Louis-Charles, and Sophie. The Austrian-born queen, lonely in France and far from in love with her weak-willed husband, found great solace in her children. She often spent time with them at the Petit Trianon, a chateau at Versailles that the king had given her.
But political and personal tragedies soon upended Marie Antoinette’s life. First, she lost two of her children: Louis-Joseph, the heir to Louis’ throne, and baby Sophie, who’d been born prematurely. Then, Marie Antoinette found herself a victim of her times. Though the queen likely never said “let them eat cake,” she was greatly disliked by the French, and she soon found her life in danger as the violence of the French Revolution spread across the country.
Marie Antoinette was under great stress — so great, some say, that her hair turned gray — which was worsened by her family’s imprisonment in 1789. Louis-Charles died in captivity after being beaten and mistreated by his captors; both Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were publicly executed by guillotine. Of all Marie Antoinette’s children, only Marie-Thérèse survived the revolution and reached adulthood — but she lived an unhappy life.
These are the stories of Marie Antoinette’s four children, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Joseph, Louis-Charles, and Sophie.
Marie-Thérèse, The First Of Marie Antoinette’s Children
The first of Marie Antoinette’s children, Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, was born on Dec. 19, 1778, and dubbed “Madame Royale.” Though she was a girl, and thus not an heir to the French throne, her birth came as a great relief to the royal court. Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI had married in 1770, and their lack of children had been a subject of royal gossip for years.
Palace of VersaillesMarie-Thérèse Charlotte and her brother, Louis-Joseph.
For her part, Marie Antoinette was happy to have a girl. As her lady-in-waiting Madame Campon wrote in her memoirs, upon learning the sex of her baby after a difficult birth, Marie purportedly stated: “Poor little girl, you are not what was desired, but you are no less dear to me on that account. A son would have been the property of the State. You shall be mine.”
Though Marie-Thérèse was sentenced to death during the French Revolution, she escaped the fate of her parents. Marie-Thérèse had not been forgotten by her mother’s people, and in 1795, Austrian officials were able to negotiate her release to Vienna.
She later married her cousin, her father’s nephew Louis Antoine d’Artois. Because of the political convulsions that rocked France following the French Revolution, Marie-Thérèse regained her royal status when her father-in-law, Charles X, took power in 1824. She was even briefly the Queen of France — but only because Charles X abdicated his powers during the July Revolution in 1830, making his son king. This only lasted for about 30 minutes, however, since Louis Antoine d’Artois also abdicated the throne.
Museum of the History of FranceMarie-Thérèse Charlotte circa 1816. Of all Marie Antoinette’s children, she’s the only one who survived into adulthood.
Marie-Thérèse, unhappily married to her husband, spent the rest of her life in exile and died in 1851 at the age of 72. Ultimately, however, she lived the longest of all of Marie Antoinette’s children.
Louis Joseph Xavier François, The Dauphin Who Died Young
The next of Marie Antoinette’s children, Louis Joseph Xavier François, was born on Oct. 22, 1781. The first boy born to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Louis-Joseph became his father’s heir, known as the dauphin.
Public DomainA portrait of Louis-Joseph, who died in 1789 at the age of seven.
“Madame, you have fulfilled my wishes and those of France,” the king reportedly told Marie Antoinette after his birth, “you are the mother of a Dauphin.”
But Louis-Joseph would live a short life, dying at the age of just seven.
As a boy, Louis-Joseph seemed like a bright child. But he was also sickly. Frail and prone to fevers, Louis-Joseph also developed such an extreme curvature of his spine that he had to wear corsets.
“My elder son has given me a great deal of anxiety,” Marie Antoinette wrote in 1788. “His body is twisted with one shoulder higher than the other and a back, whose vertebrae are slightly out of line and protruding. For some time, he has had constant fevers and, as a result, is very thin and weak.”
Château de SassenageMarie Antoinette with Louis-Joseph and Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, her two eldest children. 1781.
Her concern was well-placed — Louis-Joseph died on June 4, 1789, at the age of seven, from tuberculosis. Just over a month later, the French Revolution reached new heights with the storming of the Bastille.
Louis-Charles, The Son Who Met The Saddest Fate Of Marie Antoinette’s Children
Louis-Charles, the third of Marie Antoinette’s children, was born on March 27, 1785. At first, he was fashioned as the Duke of Normandy. But upon his brother’s death in 1789, four-year-old Louis-Charles became the dauphin. (There were, however, rumors at the time that he was the son of his mother’s close friend Axel von Fersen, not King Louis XVI.)
Museum Leblanc-DuvernoyLouis-Charles, the third of Marie Antoinette’s children.
At any other time, this may have seemed like a stroke of luck for a second son in a royal family. But Louis-Charles became dauphin at the dawn of the French Revolution, a time of fervent anti-monarchy feeling. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789, he and his family were imprisoned at Tuileries Palace in Paris. In 1792, Louis-Charles was moved to the Temple prison. And in January 1793, his father, Louis XVI, was guillotined.
With this, Louis-Charles became King Louis XVII. And his imprisonment grew even more unbearable.
Separated from his mother and sister, Louis-Charles was locked in a dark cell, abused by his jailers, and pressured to give false testimony about his mother. According to the Palace of Versailles, he was manipulated by a shoemaker-turned-revolutionary named Antoine Simone to claim that he had been sexually abused by both his mother and his aunt. Based on this testimony, Marie Antoinette was accused of incest.
Musée CarnavaletThe Temple prison, where Marie Antoinette’s children were imprisoned alongside their mother.
This accusation helped lead to Marie Antoinette’s death. She was guillotined on Oct. 16, 1793. Louis-Charles, imprisoned and abused for two more years, died in 1795 of tuberculosis at the age of 10. The brutal treatment he received in his final years likely hastened his demise.
However, his story didn’t quite end there. Not everyone accepted that Louis-Charles had died, and multiple people later claimed to be the lost French prince. However, Louis-Charles’ heart had been smuggled out of Paris, and a DNA test in 2000 proved that he had, in fact, died in 1795.
The Short Life Of Marie Sophie Hélène Béatrix
The last of Marie Antoinette’s children, Marie Sophie Hélène Béatrix, or Sophie, was born on July 9, 1786. But she didn’t live very long. Sophie had been born prematurely, and she died 11 months later, in June 1787. Her cause of death was suspected tuberculosis.
For her family, it was the beginning of a series of tragedies. Sophie’s death would be followed by Louis-Joseph’s, which would be followed by the bloodshed of the French Revolution. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed in 1793, and Louis-Charles died in prison in 1795. In the end, only one of Marie Antoinette’s children, her daughter Marie-Thérèse, survived the French Revolution and lived to adulthood.
Ultimately, the story of Marie Antoinette’s children is a tragic one. Marked by the guilt of royalty from birth, Marie-Thérèse, Louis-Joseph, Louis-Charles, and Sophie faced illness, death, exile, and the violence of revolution.
After reading about Marie Antoinette’s children, see how the children of King Henry VIII changed English history. Or, go inside the complicated question of whether or not Adolf Hitler had children.
