What Happened to Marie Antoinette’s 10 Sisters – The Tragic Daughters of Empress Maria Theresa

What Happened to Marie Antoinette’s 10 Sisters – The Tragic Daughters of Empress Maria Theresa In October 1767, sixteen-year-old Archduchess Maria Josepha went down into the imperial crypt in Vienna with her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, and fell ill with smallpox that same day. Eleven days later she was dead. Within days her sister Maria Elisabeth, the acknowledged beauty of the family, was fighting the same disease, and within six months another sister had been married by proxy to the king Josepha was meant to wed. This documentary follows the ten sisters of Marie Antoinette, daughters of one of the most powerful rulers of eighteenth-century Europe, and asks what became of each of them. The film draws on Maria Theresa’s own published letters, her secret correspondence with her ambassador Count Mercy, and modern scholarship. It traces three daughters who died in infancy, two brides for Naples lost to smallpox, and the scholarly Maria Anna, who never married and built a remarkable natural history collection. It also follows Maria Christina, the favourite, who alone was allowed to marry for love; Maria Amalia, cut off by her mother after a turbulent marriage in Parma; and Maria Carolina, sent to Naples at fifteen as a substitute bride, who became one of the most powerful queens of her age. From the Habsburg nursery, the story moves through the marriage politics of the 1760s and into the French Revolution, which reached several sisters at once. Christina was twice driven out of Brussels. Marie Antoinette went to the guillotine in 1793. Carolina fled Naples and was later blamed for the reprisals of 1799. Where the evidence is disputed, including the famous crypt story and the nature of Christina’s friendship with Isabella of Parma, the competing accounts are set out so that you can weigh them yourself. The principal sources are listed below for anyone who wishes to read further. Sources: Alfred von Arneth (ed.), Briefe der Kaiserin Maria Theresia an ihre Kinder und Freunde, 4 vols., Vienna, 1881 Alfred von Arneth, Geschichte Maria Theresia's, vol. 7, Vienna, 1876 Alfred von Arneth and Auguste Geffroy (eds.), Correspondance secrète entre Marie-Thérèse et le comte de Mercy-Argenteau Alfred von Arneth (ed.), Maria Theresia und Joseph II. Ihre Correspondenz Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit, 2017 Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, 2001 Nancy Goldstone, In the Shadow of the Empress, 2021 Derek Beales, Joseph II, vol. 1: In the Shadow of Maria Theresa, 1987 Élisabeth Badinter (ed.), Je meurs d'amour pour toi: Lettres d'Isabelle de Bourbon-Parme à l'archiduchesse Marie-Christine, 1760-1763, 2008 Joseph Alexander von Helfert, Königin Karolina von Neapel und Sicilien, 1878 C. M. Bearne, A Sister of Marie Antoinette, 1907 Madame Campan, Mémoires sur la vie privée de Marie-Antoinette, 1823 Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 16, 1990, entries on Maria Anna, Maria Christina, Maria Amalia and Maria Karolina Friedrich Weissensteiner, Die Töchter Maria Theresias