Editing Louis XVI (section)

==Marriage and family life==
[[File:Marie Antoinette and her Children by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.jpg|thumb|[[Marie Antoinette]], [[queen of France]] and wife of Louis XVI, with their three eldest children, [[Marie Thérèse of France|Marie Thérèse]], [[Louis XVII|Louis-Charles]] and [[Louis-Joseph, Dauphin of France|Louis-Joseph]] (by [[Marie Louise Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun|Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun]], 1787)]]

On 19 April 1770, at the age of fifteen, Louis XVI married the fourteen-year-old [[Marie Antoinette|Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria]], his [[second cousin once removed]] and the youngest daughter of [[Holy Roman Emperor Francis I]] and [[Empress Maria Theresa]].<ref name="Hardman1994">{{cite book|author=John Hardman|title=Louis XVI: The Silent King and the Estates|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nkJqSmHcd5oC&pg=PA24 |year=1994|publisher=Yale University Press|isbn=978-0-300-06077-5|page=24}}</ref>

This marriage was met with hostility from the French public. [[Franco-Austrian alliance|France's alliance]] with its traditional enemy [[Habsburg monarchy|Austria]] had pulled the country into the disastrous [[Seven Years' War]], in which it was defeated by the [[Kingdom of Great Britain|British]] and the [[Kingdom of Prussia|Prussians]], both in [[Europe]] and in [[North America]]. By the time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were married, the French people generally disliked the Austrian alliance, and Marie Antoinette was seen as an unwelcome foreigner.<ref>Andress, David. ''The Terror'', p. 12.</ref> For the young couple, the marriage was initially amiable but distant. Louis XVI's shyness and, among other factors, the young age and inexperience of the newlyweds (who were near total strangers to each other: they had met only two days before their wedding) meant that the fifteen-year-old bridegroom failed to consummate the union with his fourteen-year-old bride. His fear of being manipulated by her for Austrian purposes caused him to behave coldly towards her in public.<ref>Fraser, Antonia, ''Marie Antoinette: The Journey'', pp. 100–102.</ref> Correspondence between Marie Antoinette's mother and Austria's French ambassador [[Florimond Claude, Comte de Mercy-Argenteau]] suggest that the Austrian court did hope for the princess to exert influence over her husband. Letters sent between the Empress and the Ambassador express a desire for Marie Antoinette to exercise authority in the French court and to encourage Louis XVI to dedicate more attention to his role as prince. To their disappointment, however, the princess did not seem overly interested in "serious affairs".<ref name=":0" /> Over time, the couple became closer, though while their marriage was reportedly consummated in July 1773, it did not actually happen until 1777.<ref name="fraser127">Fraser, Antonia, ''Marie Antoinette: The Journey'', p. 127.</ref>

[[File:Louis16-1775.jpg|thumb|Louis XVI in early adulthood|left]]The couple's failure to produce any children for several years placed a strain upon their marriage,<ref>Fraser, Antonia, ''Marie Antoinette: The Journey'', pp.166–167.</ref> exacerbated by the publication of obscene pamphlets ([[libelle (literary genre)|''libelles'']]) mocking their infertility. One such pamphlet questioned, "Can the King do it? Can't the King do it?".<ref>Fraser, Antonia, ''Marie Antoinette'', p.164.</ref>

The reasons for the couple's initial failure to have children were debated at that time, and they have continued to be debated since. One suggestion is that Louis XVI suffered from a physiological dysfunction,<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.newyorker.com/printables/archive/021007fr_archive01| title = The New Yorker From the Archive Books| access-date =17 October 2006| author=Francine du Plessix Gray| date = 7 August 2000| website=The Child Queen}}</ref> most often thought to be [[phimosis]], a suggestion first made in late 1772 by the royal doctors.<ref name="fraser122">Fraser, Antonia, ''Marie Antoinette: The Journey'', p.122.</ref> Historians adhering to this view suggest that he was [[circumcision|circumcised]]<ref>{{cite web|last=Androutsos|first=George|title=The Truth About Louis XVI's Marital Difficulties|url=http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=78|website=Translated from French|access-date=4 April 2011|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110518123742/http://www.historyofcircumcision.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=78|archive-date=18 May 2011|url-status=dead}}</ref> (a common treatment for phimosis) to relieve the condition seven years after their marriage. Louis XVI's doctors were not in favour of the surgery – the operation was delicate and traumatic, and capable of doing "as much harm as good" to an adult male. The argument for phimosis and a resulting operation is mostly seen to originate from [[Stefan Zweig]]'s 1932 biography of Marie Antoinette.

Most modern historians agree that Louis XVI had no surgery<ref>{{cite book|last=Fraser|first=Antonia|title=Marie Antoinette: The Journey|url=https://archive.org/details/marieantoinette00anto_0|url-access=registration|year=2001|publisher=Knopf Doubleday Publishing |isbn=9780385489492}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Lever|first=Evelyne|title=Marie Antoinette: Last Queen of France|url=https://archive.org/details/marieantoinette00evel|url-access=registration|year=2001|publisher=Macmillan |isbn=9780312283339}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last=Cronin|first=Vincent|title=Louis and Antoinette|url=https://archive.org/details/louisantoinette00cron|url-access=registration|year=1974|publisher=Morrow |isbn=9780688003319}}</ref> – for instance, as late as 1777, the Prussian envoy, Baron Goltz, reported that Louis XVI had definitely declined the operation.<ref>"Dictionary of World Biography". Author: Barry Jones. Published in 1994.</ref> Louis XVI was frequently declared to be perfectly capable of sexual intercourse, as confirmed by [[Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor|Joseph II]], and during the time he was supposed to have had the operation, he went out hunting almost every day, according to his journal. This would not have been possible if he had undergone a circumcision; at the very least, he would have been unable to ride to the hunt for a few weeks afterwards. The couple's sexual problems are now attributed to other factors. [[Antonia Fraser]]'s biography of Marie Antoinette discusses Joseph II's letter on the matter to one of his brothers after he visited Versailles in 1777. In the letter, Joseph describes in astonishingly frank detail Louis XVI's inadequate performance in the marriage bed and Marie Antoinette's lack of interest in conjugal activity. Joseph described the couple as "complete fumblers"; however, with his advice, Louis XVI began to apply himself more effectively to his marital duties, and in the third week of March 1778 Marie Antoinette became pregnant.

Eventually, the royal couple became the parents of four children. According to [[Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan]], Marie Antoinette's lady-in-waiting, the queen also suffered two miscarriages. The first one, in 1779, a few months after the birth of her first child, is mentioned in a letter to her daughter, written in July by Empress Maria Theresa. Madame Campan states that Louis XVI spent an entire morning consoling his wife at her bedside, and swore to secrecy everyone who knew of the occurrence. Marie Antoinette suffered a second miscarriage on the night of 2–3 November 1783.

[[File:Louis Charles of France5.jpg|thumb|The 7 year-old Louis XVII (1792)]]

Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were the parents of four live-born children:
* [[Marie Thérèse of France|Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte]] (19 December 1778 – 19 October 1851)
* [[Louis-Joseph, Dauphin of France]] (22 October 1781 – 4 June 1789)
* [[Louis XVII|Louis-Charles]], ''[[Dauphin of France|Dauphin]]'' after the death of his elder brother, future titular King Louis XVII of France (27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795)
* [[Sophie Hélène Beatrix of France|Sophie-Hélène-Béatrix]], died in infancy (9 July 1786 – 19 June 1787)
In addition to his biological children, Louis XVI also adopted six children: "Armand" [[Francois-Michel Gagné]] ({{circa|1771}}–1792), a poor orphan adopted in 1776; [[Jean Amilcar]] ({{circa|1781}}–1796), a [[Senegal]]ese [[slave]] boy given to the queen as a present by [[Stanislas de Boufflers]] in 1787, but whom she instead had freed, baptized, adopted and placed in a [[pension (lodging)|pension]]; [[Ernestine Lambriquet]] (1778–1813), daughter of two servants at the palace, who was raised as the playmate of his daughter and whom he adopted after the death of her mother in 1788; and finally [["Zoe" Jeanne Louise Victoire]] (born in 1787), who was adopted in 1790 along with her two older sisters when her parents, an usher and his wife in service of the king, had died.<ref name="ReferenceA">Philippe Huisman, Marguerite Jallut: ''Marie Antoinette'', Stephens, 1971</ref>

Of these, only Armand, Ernestine and Zoe actually lived with the royal family: Jean Amilcar, along with the elder siblings of Zoe and Armand who were also formally foster children of the royal couple, simply lived on the queen's expense until her imprisonment, which proved fatal for at least Amilcar, as he was evicted from the boarding school when the fee was no longer paid, and reportedly starved to death on the street.<ref name="ReferenceA"/> Armand and Zoe had a position which was more similar to that of Ernestine: Armand lived at court with the king and queen until he left them at the outbreak of the revolution because of his republican sympathies, and Zoe was chosen to be the playmate of the Dauphin, just as Ernestine had once been selected as the playmate of Marie Thérèse, and sent away to her sisters in a convent boarding school before the [[Flight to Varennes]] in 1791.<ref name="ReferenceA"/>