The following day, as was customary, was baptized in the Church of the Augustinians with the names Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna. The name Mary was imposed on all imperial princesses of the house since the time of his great-grandfather, Leopold I, which demonstrates the Holy Virgin veneration of the Habsburgs. Therefore, considering the number of women in the family named Mary, was always known as Madame Antoine. Her parents had instituted several innovations in court life which made Austria one of the more progressive courts in Europe. The Hofburg, the official palace  in Vienna, did not allow a simple life and carefree unlike the beautiful Schoenbrunn Palace, the summer residence of the court. In the garden and greenhouse of the palace was given a lot of importance to botany, passion that passed the emperor's young daughter. In winter was occupied the campaign residence of Laxenburg, where archduchesses, jeweled and dressed in suits of velvet trimmed with fur, played on sledges golden-shaped swan, towed by the brothers. Marie Antoinette sought later to recreate this idyllic atmosphere  restructuring the Petit Trianon. Initially, in a family so full of girls, the political role of small-Antoine was almost null and void as it was the interest in her education. The relationship with her mother, always engaged in the affairs of state and forget the child, was not particularly deep. The thing that most sorrowed the young Archduchess in the difficult relationship with her mother, was the preference of the empress for the Archduchess Maria Cristina, which shared with her mother the day of birth and that she was considered by many the most intelligent among the sisters. For this reason adulthood Marie Antoinette tried always a feeling of intolerance against older and educated women, while always had friendly relations with young women, such as with the beloved sister Carlotta. The education of Antoine was low, at 12 years old did not know or write properly in French nor in English, spoke instead an elegant and good Italian thanks to her master Pietro Metastasio. She was instead started the arts as embroidery, music and dance. Her teacher was the music composer Christoph Willibald Gluck, and she played very well the harp, but no doubt what she could better do was the dance, moving the body with grace and sophistication that would go down in history.

The initial reaction to the marriage between Marie Antoinette and Louis Auguste was decidedly mixed. On the one hand, the Dauphine herself was popular among the people at large; her first official appearance in Paris on June 8, 1773 at the Tuileries was considered by many royal watchers a resounding success, with a reported 50,000 people crying out to see her. A visit to the opera for a court performance was also reported a success, with the Dauphine herself leading the applause. She was also widely commemorated for her acts of charity; in one incident, she personally attended to a dying man and arranged for his family to receive an income in his wake. At Court, however, the match was not so popular, due to the long-standing tensions between Austria and France, which had only so recently been mollified; many courtiers had been active at promoting a match with various Saxon princesses. Behind her back, Mesdames Tantes called Marie Antoinette l'Autrichienne, the "Austrian woman", from Autriche, French for "Austria". Many other courtiers, such as the comtesse du Barry, had a more or less tenuous relationship with the Dauphine. However, Marie Antoinette's relationship with du Barry was one which was important to rectify, at least on the surface, as du Barry was the mistress of Louis XV, and thus not without considerable political influence over the king. Louis XV's daughters, Mesdames Tantes, hated du Barry due to her unsavory relationship with their father. With manipulative coaching, the aunts encouraged the Dauphine to refuse to acknowledge the favorite, which was considered by some to be political blunder. After months of continued pressure from her mother and the Austrian minister, the comte de Mercy-Argenteau, Marie Antoinette grudgingly agreed to speak to du Barry on New Year's Day 1772. Although the limit of their conversation was Marie Antoinette's banal comment to the royal mistress that, "there are a lot of people at Versailles today," du Barry was satisfied and the crisis dissipated.