Marie Antoinette was the last Queen of France prior to the French Revolution.

She and her husband Louis XVI were executed by guillotine during the reign of terror which soon followed.

Over the years she has been vilified as a woman who was out of touch with the common folk and was famously

reported to have said that if the French people couldn't eat bread, then let them eat cake.

But was she really that bad and did she really tell her subjects to eat cake?

Learn more about Marie Antoinette,

and if in fact she recommended cake eating

on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. The I don't think Marie Antoinette can really be neatly put into the box of either

victim or villain. There were things she did that certainly cannot be justified, but at the same time she was almost certainly treated unjustly.

Originally named Maria Antonia, she was born into a life of extreme privilege as the youngest daughter of the Empress Maria Theresa

and Emperor Francis I of Austria in 1755. She was raised in the Hoffberg

and Schoenberg Palaces along with her older sister of three years Carolina. She was tutored in

all of the subjects expected of a young Duchess. Reportedly she was not very good

at writing and couldn't converse well in Italian or French. However, she excelled at music. She could play the harpsichord and flute and

was also considered an excellent singer and dancer. She had a very strange relationship with her

mother who never showed her any affection.

She always claimed that she feared her mother more than loved her.

As far as Empress Maria Theresa was concerned,

her daughters were there to be married off and used as political pawns with other royal houses of Europe.

And that is exactly what happened to young Marie in 1779, when at the age of 14 she was placed

into an arranged marriage with the French Dauphin Louis Auguste.

And FYI, Dauphin is just the French term for the crown prince or next in line to the French throne.

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