Product Description

Marie Antoinette's dramatic life-story continues to arouse mixed emotions. To many people, she is still 'la reine mechante', whose extravagance and frivolity helped to bring down the French monarchy; her indifference to popular suffering epitomised by the (apocryphal) words: 'let them eat cake'. Others are equally passionate in her defence: to them, she is a victim of misogyny. In this biography Antonia Fraser examines her influence over the king, Louis XVI, the accusations and sexual slurs made against her, her patronage of the arts which enhanced French cultural life, her imprisonment, the death threats made against her, rumours of lesbian affairs, her trial (during which her young son was forced to testify to sexual abuse by his mother) and her eventual execution by guillotine in 1793.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22175 in Books
• Published on: 2002-05-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's first book in five years, heralds the welcome return of her wonderfully lucid, engaging style as she disentangles myth from fact regarding the life of the still controversial, and misunderstood, wife of Louis XVI of France. It is also perhaps her most assured work to date. The daughter of Empress Maria Teresa of Austria, the 14-year-old Marie Antoinette, or l'Autrichienne, was sent to France to marry the Dauphin in 1770 in an act of political union between the two countries. Despite her husband's preference for the hunting field over the bedroom, and a somewhat inexpressive personality--his final terse diary entry was to be, appropriately, "Rien"--a decade of French courtly exuberance entailed. Her disappointment in marriage gave way to an enjoyment of her position, especially on turning 30, yet an increasing number of libelles and scandalous rumours about the new Queen and her sexual proclivities grew from Versailles' whispers to the shouts of what was to be the revolution of 1789. This was followed by her own awful demise and beheading four wretched years later, after the appalling torture of her own young son falsely testifying that he had been sexually abused by her.

Those are the skeletal facts of her life, but Fraser fleshes out the story with her customary composed authority. Her stated ambition is twofold. The book's subtitle, "The Journey", refers to Marie Antoinette's political significance in a union over which she had no control, but also her own personal story, from the ill-educated, overwhelmed teenage bride to the despised monarch who bore the brunt of all the ills of the ancien régime. Fraser, arch debunker, necessarily removes the apocryphal--Mozart the child prodigy saying that he would marry her, the infamous "let them eat cake" comment that preceded her by several hundred years, dressing as a milkmaid at her model village in the grounds of Versailles--to reveal a woman whose misfortunes, she concludes, outweighed her failures. Like the Jemima Shore detective novels she also pens, Fraser displays an unerring ability to ask the right questions. Most of all, though, she writes with an understated, unadorned clarity that imparts her learning with an ease to be both envied and savoured. In 1789, Marie Antoinette famously said to a deputation from the Commune of Paris, "I've seen everything, known everything, and forgotten everything". There could be no wiser, compassionate and judicious reclaimer of her besmirched reputation than Antonia Fraser.--David Vincent

Review
Great news, we're reprinting already. Antonia's events have been going brilliantly with Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Sheffield Festivals still to come. Antonia is being interviewed for the GUARDIAN profile by Nick Wroe which will runon either the 24 or 31 August. She has also done an excellent interview withthe SUNDAY HERALD to publicise her event at the Edinburgh Festival in Augusttogether with one in the September issue of GOOD HOUSEKEEPING. Reviews have been wonderful and the has had numerous selections in the newspapers's summerreading round-ups: 'Fraser's book not only rescues the queen's battered reputation, it also offers a spellbinding portrait of life in the stultifying atmosphere of Versailles and goes a long way towards explaining the inevitability of the French Revolution.'THE MAIL ON SUNDAY 'This excellent biography'Ian Pindar, THE GUARDIAN 'this impeccably well-informed biography does justice tothe maligned Marie Antoinette.'Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, THE FINANCIAL TIMES ''it is in the weird detail of her (Marie Antoinette) life at court that many of its pleasures are to be found.'THE INDEPENDENT 'Antonia Fraser's credentials and experience as a biographer are undeniable.'THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE 'Antonia Fraser has written an absorbing, richly detailed and pleasingly illustrated new study of the French queen.'THE GOOD BOOK GUIDE 'The whole story, rivettingl

About the Author
Antonia Fraser is the author of many widely acclaimed historical works including the biographies, CROMWELL: OUR CHIEF OF MEN, KING CHARLES II and THE GUNPOWDER PLOT (CWA Non-Fiction Gold Dagger; St Louis Literary Award). She has written five highly praised books which focus on women in history, THE WEAKER VESSEL: WOMEN'S LOT IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND (Wolfson Award for History, 1984), THE WARRIOR QUEENS: BOADICEAS CHARIOT, THE SIX WIVES OF HENRY VIII, MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE JOURNEY (Franco-British Literary Prize 2001), which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola in 2006 and now most recently LOVE AND LOUIS XIV: THE WOMEN IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN KING. Antonia Fraser was made CBE in 1999, and awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000. She lives in London and is currently working on a biography of Queen Elizabeth I. She was married to Harold Pinter who died on Christmas Eve 2008 and has eighteen grandchildren.

Customer Reviews

Marie Antoinette removed from the shadow of the guillotine.
I have read every single book published in England about Marie Antoinette, and I think Antonia Fraser has done the impossible. Every other book is written 'in the shadow of the guillotine'. Ms Fraser removes this. The young Arch-Duchess Antonia had no idea of her fate until the last few years of her life, and as a result of the way this book is written, we see the young Dauphine Marie Antoinette as a warmand loving princess, who longed to serve her adopted country and cared greatly about the poverty and suffering she saw around her. None of this impressed the frivolous French courtiers who were only too happy to criticize the Austrian Princess. Antonia Fraser also consigns to the wastepaper basket of history the comment, 'Let them eat cake'. Antoinette never said it: it has long been known that this remark was made by Marie Therese, the dim-witted wife of Louis XIV, and was resurrected by those who wished to weaken the monarchy still further. Antoinette's marital difficulties are not smoothed over, but again, Antonia Fraser removes the myth of the 'petit operation' which was said to have been performed before Louis XVI could make his queen a mother. Yes, Marie Antoinette was frivolous as a young woman, but aren't most young women of 14-20? As soon as she became a mother, as she had long wanted to be, her concerns changed and she became a mature and much more sensible woman. She supported her husband and family throughout the terrible traumas of the Revolution, and her courage and dignity in the face of the guillotine make her worthy to be the daughter of Empress Maria Theresa. This is, without doubt,the best biography of Marie Antoinette I have read.

Perhaps not quite the definitive biography
I don't think it's particularly fair to label this book (as one Amazon reviewer has done) as "a royalist's view" of French history - although, interestingly, in terms of Marie-Antoinette's life, royalists have traditionally gotten it more right than others. I'd also completely reject the notion that this is "definitive" and/or "overly preferential to its subject."

This book's plus points are the wealth of detail Antonia Fraser presents about court etiquette at Versailles; the way in which minor characters, like the Queen's maid Rosalie Lamorliere, are brought to life, and its excellent epilogue which explores Marie-Antoinette's place in history and the tragedy behind this most public of royal lives.

However, at times Antonia Fraser seems to be almost tripping over herself to be PC and unbiased. We're so used to hearing detrimental things about Marie-Antoinette that any biographer who goes complete the grain will inevitably be accused of "whitewashing." But the truth is that the real Marie-Antoinette bears almost no resemblance to the Marie-Antoinette of popular imagination, so why did Antonia Fraser's "defence" of this queen seem convoluted and riddled with qualifiers? More accurate portraits of Marie-Antoinette's character and her role as queen have been presented in two modern studies - "The Lost King of France" by Deborah Cadbury and "The Fall of the French Monarchy" by Dr. Munro Price.

Antonia Fraser also fails to fully explain Marie-Antoinette's enormous political influence after 1789, something properly highlighted in Price's book. It's also true that the book at times fails to convey the full gritty reality of 18th-century life, which perhaps would have been useful in explaining why Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were determined to uphold such high moral standards (thus partially alienating them from certain circles of the aristocracy) after the debauched decadence of Louis XV's reign.

And as for Marie-Antoinette's "affair" with Count Fersen, Antonia Fraser's assertion that the two enjoyed a couvert affair is based more upon wishful thinking than a balanced assessment of the facts. Marie-Antoinette's position made adultery impossible, it could never have been kept a secret, and her up-bringing and personality both conspired to make it fundamentally unlikely that she would commit adultery with anyone. Their relationship was one of the many Marie-Antoinette found safety in - romantic, artificial, non-sexual gallantry.

This biography is an enjoyable one, and Antonia Fraser has done a good job in partially resurrecting Marie-Antoinette from the "rubbish bin of history" but there's still a long way to go before this unlucky queen's "definitive biography" is written.

Excellent Book - Unfair Criticism
I mainly write this review in order to save the book from the bashing that 'Reader from France' (above) has given it.

Yes he/she quite rightly says that this book is not the place to look if you want to know why the last Queen of France lost her head - but that is not what this book is about or even purports to be about! So if that is what you are interested in finding out then perhaps take a look at Simon Schama's 'Citizens' - I wouldn't know because I got everything, and more, that I wanted to know from Antonia Fraser's book.

This is not a historical study into the reasons surrounding the French Revolution, nor is it a study into the reasons why Marie Anoinette lost her head. It is an extremely well researched and excellently written book on Marie Antoinette - her life, her passage through that life, and everywhere it took her. The detail is excellent and really makes you able to envisage it all as if you were there - having been to the Palace of Versailles it makes the reading even better because the feeling that you have been in the very rooms where all this took place is fantastic!

I think that Antonia Fraser has done an excellent job in piecing together a work which is quite evidently authoritative and helps put Marie Antoinette in a better light than history seems to have done. The criticism it seems to have attracted is totally unwarranted given that the criticism is directed at an angle which this book doesn't attempt to tackle.

A fantastic read - definitely recommended.