WI: Marie Antoinette Pregnant Early

FWIG part of Antoinette's unpopularity stemmed from the fact that it took forever before she and her husband consummated their marriage. And then some more time before she did her duty to France and gave birth to a dauphin.

Say she'd gotten pregnant in the first 18months of her marriage. Obviously this means that her husband doesn't just say "Good night" and go off to dreamland on their wedding night. Which means this might be near-ASB, but IIRC there were cartoons of Louis XVI showing him as a drunkard OTL. So maybe one night he gets the beer goggles on and goes in?

The baby doesn't need to survive (one only needs to look at her Bourbon-married sisters: Marie Amalie (4 of her 9 kids survived infancy, 2 were stillborn, and 2 didn't make the age of 5) and Marie Karoline had 11 of her 18 kids die before reaching adulthood. So even if these kids born before 1778 (Marie Thérèse's birthyear) don't live past a few years of life (her mother-in-law had likewise had a problem with miscarriages/stillbirths (12 pregnancies, of which the ones in 1748, '49, '52 and '56 all ended in miscarriages/stillbirths, while a further 3 kids born alive died young (5months, 5years and 9years old respectively)), would this impact Antoinette any? Especially if she gets a son first time around?
 

Kaze

Banned
An optimist would say that giving the King a son would give her a better opinion among the French people. A pessimist would say that the bump in popularity would be short lived - the French Revolution was enviable. The only way to butterfly away the Revolution is the King decides to go the constitutional monarchy route as per the British model.
 
the Revolution was contingent, not enviable :). This probably won't, but could, butterfly it. Her unpopularity made a real difference.
 
An optimist would say that giving the King a son would give her a better opinion among the French people. A pessimist would say that the bump in popularity would be short lived - the French Revolution was enviable. The only way to butterfly away the Revolution is the King decides to go the constitutional monarchy route as per the British model.

What Marie Antoinette needed was a good political head, not more grown-up children. Anything but "let us try to flee the country we are suppose to rule, but with a plan so lame we are sure to botch it. It is not like the French people would think we are traitors or runaways" or "let us push for a war against my brother we will lose on purpose and wait for austrian guns to put us back into Versailles. It is no like angry armed mobs did pop up recently or politicos openly talked about our removal"
 
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