Theirs For Ever: Marie Antoinette and The Hand Over Ceremony

On 7 May 1770, the fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette, already Dauphine by proxy, approached an island near Kehl on the River Rhine in which she would be formally given to France. It represented the culmination of that part of the bridal journey which had brought her through the Holy Roman Empire and to the end of Germanic soil. Yet it also was a place in which her position as Dauphine would be consummated through ceremonial ritual.[i]

The handover ceremony, brutal in its symbolism, was supposed to illustrate the exile of the royal bride from the land of her birth. She was, literally, in new ownership. Through the allegorical undressing and dressing of old and new identities, the custom-built pavilion became a life-altering ‘changing room’ and one from which Marie Antoinette would emerge, having ‘cast off’ the Archduchess, in a stripping of her former rank. It was more public than anything she would have experienced before, itself an introduction to what she could expect to find at the court of Versailles.[ii]

The choice of an island was no accident. Symbolically, its reasons were obvious: lying opposite. German Kehl and the great imperial French city of Strasbourg, it represented a frontier in geographical and emotional terms, but was in itself a kind of mid-way ground, having been restored to the Holy Roman Empire from French territory under the terms of the Peace of Ryswick. Marie Antoinette’s journey from Vienna to the French border is preserved in a ceremonial protocol in the Austrian court archives, with its own folio for that stage up the place of handover. The number of horses, carriages and stations are carefully enumerated en route to Strasbourg.

 Figuratively, like Marie Antoinette herself, the island was an enclave whose proprietorship had changed hands. This island, the Ile aux Épis, represented the politically neutral ground of something surrounded by water, just as the wooden raft formed the setting for the first Treaty of Tilsit between Napoleon, Emperor of the French and Tsar Alexander I of Russia in the middle of the River Neman. Marie Antoinette, like her elder sisters Maria Carolina and Maria Amalia, was an imperial bride, ‘given away’ in a ritual which demonstrated firmly and painfully, that she had left behind her family and homeland.[iii] It was a universal moment well captured on a tapestry at Versailles showing the Infanta Maria Therese with her bridegroom, Louis XIV on the Isle of Pheasants in the Bidasoa River just over one hundred years earlier. Here the Spanish princess had first met her future husband, at a moment of simultaneous departure from her father, Philip IV of Spain, to accept a new fatherland in turn.

The Infanta Maria Therese had wept bitterly because like all foreign brides, she knew that such royal farewells were final. Thus, the moment of taking leave became like a family bereavement in the presence of the very members themselves. Such a step for royal brides was intended to be irreversible. The carriage into which they climbed was a means of transportation towards new lives and lands of entirely new customs, cultures and languages. Thus, the bridal journey became something of a funeral procession for a former life. Importantly also, being ‘handed over’ meant that these princesses were effectively, relinquishing those lives and being ceded, like newly-acquired territory to the land of their marriage, thereby losing citizenship in the land of their birth. Interestingly, the definition for handover in German (‘Übergabe’) can also be understood as a military term for surrender.

The Archduchess Maria Carolina had tearfully embraced her beloved younger sister Marie Antoinette, as the coach waited to take her to Naples. Small wonder that two years later, Marie Antoinette repeatedly leaned her neck out of the window to get a last glimpse of home.[iv]

Herein lay the point why a handover was so deeply upsetting: it was intended to be an exchange which would and should be, permanent. Louis XIV sternly spelt this out to his adored niece Marie Louise d’Orléans, about to set out for Spain as the bride of King Carlos II: they were taking leave of her forever: were they to see her again, it would be to her disadvantage.[v] The Savoyard Princess Adelaide was given over to France whilst still aged only eleven, prior to her marriage to Louis XIV’s eldest grandson, the Duc de Bourgogne and her handover had been richly symbolic: in her case, the Pont-de-Beauvoisin bridge represented the middle point, with the back carriage-wheels of Adelaide’s coach still being in Savoy. Tellingly, the front wheels were firmly in France and Adelaide simply climbed into the coach. Yet, so minute were those ceremonial details, that even the heads of the horses faced towards France – and the future.[vi]

The pavilion built for Marie Antoinette’s handover contained a series of rooms with two inner apartments, one of which was occupied by the Austrian suite and the other by the French. The young Goethe was in Strasbourg to continue his studies and in his later memoirs, he admitted to having gone to visit it as often as possible, observing that it could have made ‘a charming summer pavilion’ in some princely park. However, Goethe was extremely distressed by the design in the tapestries which adorned the main hall, representing Jason, Medea and Creusa with the unfortunate bride to the right of the throne, in all the ‘agony of a cruel death’. Goethe remonstrated with the dreadful choice: ‘And lo! At the exact moment where the young princess is about to set foot in the country of her future spouse.’[vii]

Marie Antoinette, still fourteen, was now subject to that ritual undressing through which she would symbolically ‘take off’ Austria and ‘put on’ France. According to Madame Campan at least, ‘the Dauphine had been entirely undressed, even to her body-linen and stockings, in order that she might retain nothing belonging to a foreign Court (an etiquette always observed on such an occasion’.[viii] Effectively, this was the exchanging of one outer layer to put on another, denoted by the luxurious French attire that now clothed her body. The point has been already been made that the daily royal functions of being dressed and undressed would have been well known to Marie Antoinette as an imperial Archduchess of Austria and the latter-day notion of privacy was then unknown.[ix]

Yet this was surely different. For a future Queen who would go on to define fashion tastes, the Dauphine was publicly undressed piecemeal in a foreign setting where her clothes were surely all that remained of her homeland and suddenly, her childhood, family and entire former life were symbolised by a pile of discarded clothes, in a ritual ‘plundering’ to make her ‘truly’ French before she crossed the border.[x] In sartorial terms, it was a symbolic shedding of her ‘Austrian’ skin, replicating in dress what was happening in identity displacement. With clinical thoroughness, protocol demanded that even the beloved pug dog which had accompanied her on her bridal journey from Vienna, was pulled away. No doubt physically exhausted by her journey across the Holy Roman Empire, this would be emotionally traumatic for a teenage girl, Archduchess or otherwise.

Although now less formalised than at the court of Louis XIV, this dressing ritual foreshadowed those aspects of the Versailles lever (première entrée), where Saint-Simon tells us that the King put on his stockings and shoes, whilst everybody watched. Two months later at the court of Louis XV, one of Marie Antoinette’s letters from Choisy, importantly describes her toilette: ‘I put on my rouge and wash my hands in front of everyone… then the men withdraw and the ladies remain and I dress myself in front of them’.[xi] It is almost as if Marie Antoinette’s relative ‘nudity’ at the handover was itself an illustration of neutrality to fit the occasion, where the Dauphine was ‘stripped back’ to her own ‘blank’ canvas, from which the new princess-image could emerge. Interestingly, the Cinderella folktale had already appeared in French in 1697 in the translation of author Charles Perrault, in which the fairy coach is means of transportation at the point of transformation.

For the transformation was intended to be total. Figuratively, it also illustrated the fact that Marie Antoinette’s body was no longer her own, but belonged to the state. Undressed, it was in the full glare of the public gaze as it would be now on, under the watchful eyes of Versailles and indeed, the whole of Europe.[xii]Once ‘handed over’, Marie Antoinette became the formal property of France. Marie Antoinette’s being undressed on the border between German and French soil could also be said to prefigure the ceremony known as the ‘bedding’, after which the political alliance was then made manifest in the marriage-bed, thus enacting a queen’s primary function.

Remarkably, a form of the ancient handover process survived even into the nineteenth century. One example of this is when a future Queen of the Two Sicilies, the young Duchess Marie in Bavaria (whose elder sister, Elisabeth became Empress of Austria) was welcomed at the Governor’s Palace in Trieste in 1859. The frontier between Bavaria and Naples was represented by a long silk ribbon and like Adelaide of Savoy’s carriage-wheels in 1669, a table in the hall had one set of legs resting in Bavaria and the other in Naples. The young Duchess Marie was then moved from her ‘Bavarian’ chair towards a ‘Neapolitan’ one. [xiii]

The original handover act survives in the Archives at Strasbourg. It reads: ‘Madame la Dauphine would be taken to the border of the kingdom with the honours due to her birth and her rank to be handed over to the persons authorised by the Most Christian King to receive her… placing Madame la Dauphine in the hands of the one to whom the most Christian August King entrusted the care of receiving this princess’.[xiv] The official handover act does not mention the undressing/dressing ritual and nor does Marie Antoinette’s first (surviving) letter home to Austria from 9 July 1770. Movingly, when royal dressing ceremonies were no longer needed, Marie Antoinette got herself ready for her own execution, wearing white with black stockings; significantly, the escort that accompanied the French queen through the streets called that here came the ‘Austrian woman’.[xv]

Buried deep in the collections of the Austrian National Library are the court bulletins which reported the news back to Vienna. The day before her handover, Marie Antoinette gave her portrait set in bracelets to those ladies whom she would leave behind and distributed presents to the members of her suite.  Sympathetic to its Archduchess, an Austrian bulletin reported: ‘Here was the moment of the handover to the royal French authorities and leave-taking of the old court. One can feel but not describe what kind of impression these tenderest of feelings, thus aroused, must have made’.[xvi]

Now Dauphine and officially given over to France, Marie Antoinette was dressed for her destiny.

Elizabeth Jane Timms

Elizabeth Jane Timms is a royal historian and writer, specialising in Queen Victoria’s family, Russian royalty and the Habsburgs. An independent scholar of royal studies for over twenty years, she appears on both TV and radio.

Since 2012, she contributes to Royalty Digest Quarterly, the academic international journal devoted to the history, genealogy and images of the Royal Families of Europe. She joined History of Royals magazine in 2017. Her work has appeared in journals and magazines including The European Royal History Journal and The Historians Magazine. She is a former contributor to Tudor Life, the monthly of the Tudor Society. She was elected a Member of the Royal Historical Society in 2017. She became History Writer for Royal Central and in 2019, she wrote a blog series on the bridal journey of Marie Antoinette (‘From Vienna to Versailles’) for the world’s leading independent royal news site. Her research interests include royal correspondence and weddings. In 2020, she privately edited the correspondence of the Archduchess Marie Valerie of Austria to Miss Mary Throckmorton, copies of which are held at the Warwickshire County Record Office, Coughton Court (National Trust) and the Austrian National Library.

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[i] Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette, The Journey, London, Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2002, p. 71.

[ii] Hugh Chisholm, (ed.) ‘Kehl’, in Encyclopædia Britannica Vol. 15 (11th ed.), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1911, p. 714; Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Reiseroute fol. 168-169, AT-OeStA/HHStA OMeA ÄZA 82-2; Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Zeremonialprotokoll zur Vermählung der Erzherzogin Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette) mit dem Dauphin Ludwig (XVI.) von Frankreich, Stationsliste der Reise Wien-französische Grenze 21.04.1770-07.05.1770 (gedruckt) fol. 80-81; Reisebeschreibung; Reise zum Übergabeort und Einzug in Strassbourg fol. 83v-85v, AT-OeStA/HHStA OMeA ÄZA 80-7; Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Akten über den Aufenthalt der Erzherzogin Maria Antonia (Marie Antoinette) in Günzburg bei ihrer Reise von Wien nach Straßburg, AT-OeStA/HHStA RK Schwäbische Kreisakten 46-5.

[iii] Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia, Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit, München, C. H Beck, 2018, p. 779.

[iv] Antonia Fraser, Love and Louis XIV, The Women in the Life of the Sun King, London, Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007, p. 206; Nancy Goldstone, The Shadow of the Empress, London, Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021, p. 209; Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 64.

[v] Fraser, Love and Louis XIV, p. 206.

[vi] Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 64, p. 70; Hugh Noel Williams, A rose of Savoy, Marie Adélaïde of Savoy, duchesse de Bourgogne, mother of Louis XV, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1909, p. 97-98; Fraser, Love and Louis XIV, p. 298.

[vii] Aloïse Christine, Baronne de Carlowitz (ed.) Mémoires de Goethe, Paris, Biblioth`eque Charpentier, 1855, p. 208.

[viii] Madame Campan, Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Volume One, London, H. S. Nichols & Co, 1887, p. 32.

[ix] Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 71.

[x] Richard Bassett, Maria Theresa, Empress, The Making of the Austrian Enlightenment, London, Yale University Press, 2025, p. 221; Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia, p. 779.

[xi] Paul Christoph (ed.) Maria Theresia, Geheimer Briefwechsel mit Marie Antoinette, Wien-München, Amalthea, 1980, p. 24.

[xii] Stollberg-Rilinger, Maria Theresia, p. 779.

[xiii] Brigitte Hamann, The Reluctant Empress, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1986, p. 83-84.

[xiv] Archives de la Ville et de l’Eurométropole de Strasbourg, Acte officiel de la remise de la dauphine Marie-Antoinette au royaume de France en 1770, AA 1950.

[xv] Fraser, Marie Antoinette, p. 524-25.

[xvi] ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wienerisches Diarium, oder Nachrichten von Staats, vermischten, und gelehrten Neuigkeiten, Wien, Wiener Zeitung, 26 May 1770, p. 1-2;

ANNO/Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Wienerisches Diarium, oder Nachrichten von Staats, vermischten, und gelehrten Neuigkeiten, Wien, Wiener Zeitung, 19 May 1770, p.4.

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