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A review by socraticgadfly
Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser
5.0
Very good book. I've never read a bio of her before, nor an extended history of France at the end of the ancien regime. I knew that she probably had never said "let them eat cake"; I didn't know that it was a "commonplace saying" put on the lips of other royals already nearly a century earlier. Beyond tidbits of learning like that, there's real history and biography alike.
Fraser gives a good profile of Marie as a person, first of all. That includes detailing her personal development as Dauphine, then as Queen, even as street-level libelous pamphlets not only claimed she was a sexual vamp, but, eventually, a lesbian one at that.
Meanwhile, she sets this against a Louis XVI who was, it seems, arguably, the least suited of his three brothers to become king. Meanwhile, the two weren't sexually close ... or, it seems, even consummated for months if not years, primarily due to physical problems of his, but also psychology of both.
And, her mother, then her brotehr after his death, as rulers of Hapsburg Austria, expected her to promote Austria's interests at Versailles. This for a Queen relatively uninterested in politics at that time, and with little power at court.
Fraser devotes m ore than one-third of the book to events after the start of the Revolution where, whatever one things of semi-absolute mo;narchy, rampant materialism of French royalty or the semi-ineptness of Louis, we see Marie continue to grow in dignity.
Fraser gives a good profile of Marie as a person, first of all. That includes detailing her personal development as Dauphine, then as Queen, even as street-level libelous pamphlets not only claimed she was a sexual vamp, but, eventually, a lesbian one at that.
Meanwhile, she sets this against a Louis XVI who was, it seems, arguably, the least suited of his three brothers to become king. Meanwhile, the two weren't sexually close ... or, it seems, even consummated for months if not years, primarily due to physical problems of his, but also psychology of both.
And, her mother, then her brotehr after his death, as rulers of Hapsburg Austria, expected her to promote Austria's interests at Versailles. This for a Queen relatively uninterested in politics at that time, and with little power at court.
Fraser devotes m ore than one-third of the book to events after the start of the Revolution where, whatever one things of semi-absolute mo;narchy, rampant materialism of French royalty or the semi-ineptness of Louis, we see Marie continue to grow in dignity.