Letters of Marie-Antoinette - digitisation

The Centre de Recherche at Versailles has launched a new project to find, digitise and publish the complete correspondence of Marie-Antoinette.

Centre de recherche du château de Versailles - Letters de Marie-Antoinette (LMA) (2023...) (chateauversailles-recherche.fr)

Last letter of Marie-Antoinette, addressed to Madame Elisabeth, 16th October 1793 - [Paris, Archives nationales].

"Letters are an invaluable source of information about activities at Court (both habitual and exceptional) and they often constitute the only way of accessing the thoughts and feelings of those who lived there, whatever their status. Ancien Régime Court life led to multiple exchanges, sometimes through clandestine networks. The letters could be official, for instance when they accompanied the negotiation of a treaty or were a way of sending diplomatic wishes to a powerful individual like a sovereign or a high-ranking Church dignitary. They could also be more personal. When Marie Antoinette (1755-1793), Dauphine and then Queen of France, wrote to Empress Maria Theresa (1717-1780), in Vienna, she sought to tell her Mother about French Court life and not only to exchange news about family members. To discover what princes or princesses actually thought about matters like education, how they envisaged their responsibilities or what their engagement was with cultural and intellectual trends, their surviving letters constitute an important and often underused resource. More mundane letters between members of the administration or suppliers let us into aspects of daily life, both upstairs and downstairs, like when artists write to arrange for the payment of portraits they have painted, craftsmen send invoices for repairs to furniture or the fabric of buildings, or enterprising inventors and tradesmen and women seek to promote their wares. These are just some examples of the types of letters written at or sent to the court at Versailles in the years preceding the French Revolution."