Marie Antoinette Trivia
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69 free Marie Antoinette trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Marie Antoinette trivia quiz follows the Habsburg archduchess from the Hofburg in Vienna to the scaffold on the Place de la Révolution. The easy questions cover the basics most people half-remember: which country she came from, whom she married, the nickname the pamphlets gave her, and the cake line she almost certainly never uttered. From there it moves into the detail of her life at Versailles: the little château her husband gave her, the mock village she built, the hairdresser and the poufs, the play she helped get past the censor, and the balloon launch she watched. The harder end goes to the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, the fake Russian baroness of the flight to Varennes, her secret deal with Mirabeau, the number she was given at the Conciergerie, her last words to the executioner, and what happened to her body in 1815. There is also a section on her children, including the four she adopted. Every answer was checked against her encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you want the wider story, our French Revolution and Napoleon quizzes pick up where this one ends.
30 of 69 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Marie Antoinette born?
Vienna
Vienna was the capital of France's old enemy, so her marriage to the French heir was meant to seal the peace, and those who opposed the alliance never warmed to her.
Q 02Marie Antoinette was the youngest daughter of which formidable ruler?
Empress Maria Theresa
Empress Maria Theresa reigned for 40 years and bore 16 children, and used her daughters' marriages to seal alliances, sending the youngest to France.
Q 03Which royal house was Marie Antoinette born into?
Habsburg-Lorraine
Habsburg-Lorraine was barely a generation old: her parents' marriage in 1736 had founded it, joining the last Habsburg heiress to the Duke of Lorraine.
Q 04Marie Antoinette was born the day after Lisbon's great earthquake, on which sombre Catholic feast?
All Souls' Day
All Souls' Day is when Catholics pray for the dead; the earthquake had struck on All Saints' Day, and some later read her birth in its shadow as a bad omen.
Q 05Which composer performed for the young Marie Antoinette at Schönbrunn Palace in 1762?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was six, as was she; the story goes that he slipped and fell, was helped up by the little archduchess and declared he would marry her one day.
Q 06Which composer taught the young Marie Antoinette music and later enjoyed her patronage in Paris?
Christoph Willibald Gluck
Christoph Willibald Gluck had given her music lessons as a child; at the French court his former pupil's backing won him a contract with the Paris Opéra, where he worked on and off until 1779.
Q 07Marie Antoinette's closest sister, Maria Carolina, was married off to the king of which Italian realm?
Naples
Naples got her only because an older sister, first chosen for its king, died of smallpox; as queen she turned on her kingdom's reformers after Marie Antoinette's execution.
Q 08Before Marie Antoinette's wedding, what was a French dentist brought in to do to the future queen?
Straighten her teeth
Straighten her teeth: the French court judged the bride's smile and hair not yet up to its standards, so specialists were sent to remodel both before the wedding.
Q 09What ritual marked Marie Antoinette's handover to France?
New clothes
New clothes: on a Rhine island the 14-year-old changed into French ones, because etiquette held that a bride should 'retain nothing belonging to a foreign court'; she also had to leave behind the attendants who had travelled with her.
Q 10Why did Marie Antoinette go through a wedding with her own brother Ferdinand in 1770?
He stood proxy for the groom
He stood proxy for the groom, as was customary: the dauphin stayed in France, and the bride did not meet her real husband until she arrived there weeks later.
Q 11Whose 1777 visit finally got Marie Antoinette's marriage consummated?
Joseph II
Joseph II, her eldest brother, travelled incognito and questioned the king man to man about his marriage bed; the advice worked, and the couple's first child was born the next year.
Q 12Marie Antoinette was guillotined in the Place de la Révolution, a Paris square known today by which name?
Place de la Concorde
Place de la Concorde was laid out as Place Louis XV to honour her husband's predecessor; the Revolution renamed it and raised the guillotine that killed Louis XVI there, then her, nine months apart.
Q 13Whose death in 1774 made Louis XVI king and Marie Antoinette queen?
His grandfather
Q 21What did Richard Mique build beside a lake for Marie Antoinette at Trianon?
A working hamlet
A working hamlet: its cottages looked humble outside and were richly furnished within, yet the farm was real, a going concern with a dairy, barn and livestock that the queen insisted on.
Q 22Which favourite did Marie Antoinette make governess of the royal children in 1782?
The Duchess of Polignac
The Duchess of Polignac took the post when her predecessor's husband went bankrupt; her family collected pensions, offices and a dukedom, and they were among the first nobles to flee France in 1789.
Q 23What did the Montgolfier balloon carry when it rose over Versailles before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1783?
His grandfather, Louis XV: the old king had outlived his own heir, who died in 1765, so the crown skipped a generation to a nineteen-year-old and his eighteen-year-old queen.
Q 14Which hands-on hobby left Louis XVI's hands so blackened that Marie Antoinette scolded him for it?
Making locks
Making locks: a Versailles locksmith named Gamain worked beside him for years, and in 1792 the same man gave away the hidden iron safe he had installed for the king, whose papers were used at the king's trial.
Q 15Which dressmaker, nicknamed the queen's 'Minister of Fashion', made her gowns and helped launch the towering pouf?
Rose Bertin
Rose Bertin, a commoner received in private against court etiquette, went on dressing the queen until the monarchy fell in 1792, while pamphlets damned her as a corrupting merchant of luxury.
Q 16The 1775 riots over grain and bread prices, weeks before Louis XVI's coronation, are known as what?
The Flour War
The Flour War: after the minister Turgot freed the grain trade, crowds seized flour and bread and paid only what they judged a just price, until troops restored order ahead of the young king's crowning.
Q 17Which close friend did Marie Antoinette appoint superintendent of her household soon after becoming queen?
The Princesse de Lamballe
The Princesse de Lamballe had got safely abroad in 1791 but made her will and returned to the queen's side; a Paris mob killed her in the September Massacres of 1792.
Q 18Which foreign regiment was cut down defending the royal family's Paris palace on 10 August 1792?
The Swiss Guards
The Swiss Guards, some 900 strong, fought on after the king had left for the Assembly; hundreds were killed, many after surrendering, and the Lion of Lucerne was later carved in their memory.
Q 19What was the name of Marie Antoinette's first child, born in December 1778?
Marie-Thérèse Charlotte
Marie-Thérèse Charlotte was born before such a crush of onlookers that the queen fainted and the sealed windows had to be forced open; afterwards the custom of public royal births was dropped.
Q 20Which Swedish count was rumoured to be Marie Antoinette's lover?
Axel von Fersen
Axel von Fersen fought beside the French at Yorktown, later planned the royal family's escape from Paris, and drove their carriage out of the city himself on the first night.
A sheep, a duck and a rooster
A sheep, a duck and a rooster flew for eight minutes and came down unhurt; the king had first proposed sending up condemned criminals, and two months later the first men flew instead.
Q 24Which Beaumarchais comedy did Louis XVI ban after a private reading, before it finally opened in 1784?
The Marriage of Figaro
The Marriage of Figaro: hearing it read with the queen beside him, the king said the Bastille would have to be destroyed before it could be staged; the fortress fell five years after the premiere.
Q 25Which château near Paris did Louis XVI buy from the Duke of Orléans in Marie Antoinette's own name?
The Château de Saint-Cloud
The Château de Saint-Cloud was meant as a home she could leave to her children, but a palace owned outright by a queen shocked Paris: one magistrate called it 'impolitic and immoral'.
Q 26Who played the queen in Sofia Coppola's 2006 film Marie Antoinette?
Kirsten Dunst
Kirsten Dunst starred; Coppola based the film on Antonia Fraser's sympathetic biography and set its pastel court to post-punk songs, while its gowns won the Oscar for costume design.
Q 27Which Italian occultist and self-styled count was jailed, then acquitted, in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace?
Alessandro Cagliostro
Alessandro Cagliostro had played no real part in the swindle and was acquitted after nine months in the Bastille, yet the king banished him from France all the same.
Q 28Which senior churchman was tricked into buying the diamond necklace, believing it would win Marie Antoinette's favour?
Cardinal de Rohan
Cardinal de Rohan had offended the queen's mother while ambassador at her court in the 1770s and was frozen out at Versailles for years; desperate to regain favour, he believed letters forged in the queen's name.
Q 29Which self-styled countess masterminded the diamond necklace swindle?
Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy
Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, jailed for life in the Salpêtrière, escaped dressed as a boy and reached London, where she published her memoirs to a ready audience.
Q 30Which new nickname did Marie Antoinette's critics coin for her in 1787, two years before the Revolution?
Madame Déficit
Madame Déficit: with the treasury empty, Parisians blamed the queen's spending, and when the frame of her new family portrait reached the Salon ahead of the canvas, the jibe was 'That's how the money goes'.