Im reading The Queen's Necklace by Frances Mossiker at the moment and she states that Marie Antoinette married when she was 15 years old, she even quotes a primary sourse from Baroness d'Oberkirch who praises the fifteen year old dauphine's looks at the time when she arives to France. I always believed she was 14 like its written in Antonia Fraser biography of Marie Antoinette but then i remember when i was reading The lost king of France it also mentioned Marie Antoinette being 15 when she married so now im confused can someone tell me what was her true age when she got married?

Born November 2, 1755 and Married May 1770 so that makes her 14 years old at the time of her wedding. She would turn 15 in Novemver 1770.

Thankyou Its strage how historians who do so much reserch cant get a simple detail like the age right

I know, it's incredible isn't it? Makes you wonder right from the start .......
Another thing I've read is that she was 38 when she died - wrong again - she was 37 - she would have turned thirty eight on her birthday which was a couple of weeks after her death.

In one of my history lessions we were talking about Marie Antoinette and my teacher thought she was 40 i was appalled, he looked a bit embarised and dismisive (like who would know that ) when i corrected him

It seems like every time I do research on a historical person I get a myriad of different dates for one simple event like a wedding, birth or death. You would think these historians would do more research before writing a book!

While I'd agree that published historians make some shocking errors, I think the problem here may be in math, not underlying facts. If you only calculate by year, you would end up with 15. A sloppy way to do it, but as a mathematician pointed out a few years ago most American have an ignorance of mathematics that would be the equivalent of not knowing who Shakespeare is in literature. And really don't worry about it either.

(By the way - did anyone notice the age given in the blurb for this section? )

Exactly, they dont pay attention to the exact date of the event, just the year on most accounts.

*LOL* I think you may have caught me out there Jim. I was working off an older version of the Marie Antoinette Online Biography when I cut and pasted the little blurbs into the new forums, and it would seem that it was wrong in one of its early iterations. I just checked the text for the current biography page again and I find that somewhere along the way it was changed to 14. I shall have to do a swift edit before anyone else notices

All right, she was 14 when she got married and she was but 19 and not 20 when she became a queen) even her contemporaries got it wrong when calling her "little 20 year old queen". But, I mean when it comes to History it is really natural to allow only for the years.

Louis XV died in May of 1774. Marie Antoinette was 18 years old then. She would not have turned 19 until November 2, 1774.
So.....she was 18 when she became Queen of France.

Right ! it's quite ironical to comment on such a topic and make such a mistake oneself !)

No, they were not both 14.

Marie Antoinette was 14. Louis XVI was 15 (born August 23, 1754)

Married in May 1770. (3 months before Louis turned 16)

This thread is making me laugh! You wouldn't believe all the date errors I find in history books as I research the life of the Marquis de La Fayette. When I first started my project, I was naively unaware that ten different authors could come up with ten different ages and dates for various events in his lifetime, and I soon began to feel like I was going to tear my hair out with all the calculations and detailed searches I had to do to come up with the right answers. Even names of his family members are often ridiculously incorrect in a number of books (this is especially irritating when the authors get the name of his wife wrong), and I have often asked, "Why can't authors just take a little extra time to verify what they are writing?"

I have since managed to control the "tearing my hair out" thing as it relates to my study of La Fayette. But now I hear that there is the same problem as I dig into Marie Antoinette's history?