It took seven years for the future king and queen to consummate their marriage.
Politics literally made strange bedfellows in the case of Marie Antoinette and Louis-Auguste. Just hours after they first met, the young teenagers were escorted to the bridal chamber on their wedding night by the groom’s grandfather, King Louis XV. After the king blessed their bed, gave both a kiss and left the room to allow them to start work on producing a royal heir, nothing happened between the two relative strangers that night. Apparently, nothing happened for the next seven years either. The dauphin suffered from a painful medical condition that rendered him impotent, and the palace gossip soon circulated around Europe. Finally in 1777, Maria Theresa dispatched one of her sons, Emperor Joseph II, to Versailles to intervene, and the problem was rectified either because the now King Louis XVI underwent surgery to correct the problem or because, in the words of the emperor, the couple had been “two complete blunderers.” Within a year, Marie Antoinette bore the first of the couple’s four children.
Marie Antoinette was sent to the guillotine on October 16, 1793. Several months before, in January 1793, the radical new republic placed King Louis XVI on trial, convicted him of treason and condemned him to death. On January 21, 1793, he was dragged to the guillotine and executed.
By October, a month into the infamous and bloody Reign of Terror that claimed tens of thousands of French lives, Marie Antoinette was put on trial for treason and theft, as well as a false and disturbing charge of sexual abuse against her own son. After the two-day trial, an all-male jury found Marie Antoinette guilty on all charges.