Rating: 
Summary: History as a soap opera
Review: A biography which hides, behind an overwhelming amount of details, a disarming lack of substance. Nothing more than a historical soap opera. From Antonia Fraser, author of an exemplary "Mary Stuart", it is legit to demand much more.
It is singular that two of the best queen's biographies of the post Zweig and Castelot era were never translated into English: the moving "Chère Marie-Antoinette" (1988) by Jean Chalon and the unreachable "Marie-Antoinette l'insoumise" (2002) by Simone Bertière, maybe the best work on Marie Antoinette I've ever read. Whoever knows French should not miss these books. I also signal the recent French DVD release of the movie "L'Autrichienne" (1989), written by the specialist Castelot, based entirely on the proceedings' minutes of the trial of the queen: a stunning piece of work with an absolutely superb Ute Lemper as Marie Antoinette.
Rating: 
Summary: Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette
Review: A fascinating biography of Marie Antoinette - never was there a woman more unjustly mistreated by the popular culture of her day. This recent installment by the great Antonia Fraser, goes a long way to help correct the misconceptions surrounding this woman that unfortunately still remain.
Rating: 
Summary: Marie Antoinette, the film
Review: Another biography of Marie Antoinette and this one, like Evelyn Lever's recent 'The Last Queen of France, taking us, again, to all the recognizable places. Leading us like penitents, weeping, dragging and genuflecting along the stations of the cross, in yet another Marie Antoinette Good Friday. I know! What the legend of Marie Antoinette needs now is a screenplay, a 6-hour mini-series that will bring the gorgeous but weepy thing alive. Not the standard powdered-wig hollow ponderous old movie thing. But a new 18c truly inspired and awesome film. Someone should write Marie Antoinette for the screen. Antonia Fraser never does for Marie Antoinette, here, what she did so brilliantly and memorably for Mary, Queen of Scots (a favorite), also once a French Dauphine. Fraser's (1969) depiction of the tragic Guise, Stuart Queen, had the same vitality and roundnes that Stefan Sweig gave us so memorably in his suffering Bourbon Queen. Raw emotions and determined minds luminously portrayed in a winning biography. Yet Fraser's new 'Marie Antoinette The Journey' reads more like a catalogue of events. There are new morsels. And, what else can be put down on paper about this threadbare story? A new film! It was not Leonard who really dressed the Queen's hair daily. His shop in Paris being too busy for that. It was 'le beau Julian who sallied to Versailles or Trianon to arrange Marie Antoinette during the week. Leonard available for the Queen's hair only on Sundays. Once Marie Antoinette was alarmed her hair was falling out (too much primpimg, powdering and pomading) and Leonard was summond during the week to cut her hair short, that special matin. You get your money's worth. And Antonia Fraser writes good sentences and great paragraphs. The Queen of France's daring liaison (the source of an apocalyptic scandal)with the seemingly languid duchess of Polignac, passes Fraser, alas,unexploited. The twisted emotional foursome between Marie, the count de Vaudreuil, and Jules, and Yolande de Polignac, never passes Fraser's mind (this being Antoinette's emotional piece de resistance) Axel de Fersen strides trough pages like a model in search of an author. Campan, Lamballe, Artois, and all the rest are here, and they're all excellent. Antonia Fraser's book is clear and good and brings many new notions never before published. I enjoy this book. It's a great book and I wish it will be read by many young people. It's educational, you can always tell the young "....read, see, you'd better do it right, or your head might someday be grinning yards away from your shoulders!' You know what I mean. See you at the movies. (...)Hope the next one be the version we can watch on the screen.
Rating:
Summary: The real Marie Antoinette
Review: Antonia Fraser does a wonderful job of describing what Marie Antoinette was like as a person. She shows how the young girl, who was only fifteen when she married, became the Queen of France and grew into a mature woman while in the strange environment of the Court of Versailles where privacy was unknown for the Royal family, even to the point of reports being made of her sex life with the King and when her menstrual periods occurred. It seems everyone in the court knew everything, in embarrassing detail, about the young Queen.
The book explains well, however, how the Queen coped with this life on display, especially during the early years of her marriage when many ridiculed her for not producing an heir, and gives one a sense of knowing her personally. That makes the book a captivating read.
Rating:
Summary: Marie Antoinette's day in court...209 years after her death
Review: Antonia Fraser does an excellent job with her detailed biography of one of history's most maligned figures, and offers a view of a different, more human Marie Antoinette. I liked very much that she took the time to provide the background of court life and politics in both France and Austria, what drove these two countries (not traditional enemies like France and Britain, but uneasy, distrustful, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies) to make the kind of political pact represented by the marriage of Marie Antoinette to Louis XVI, and the not-so-surprising results of the doomed-from-the-start union. She goes into great detail about how ill-prepared Marie Antoinette was to cope with being the Queen of France. She was poorly educated, not given enough instruction about political intrigue, nor given good advice about how to go about fulfilling her primary duties (to provide an heir to the Bourbon throne) when she had a husband who had no interest in her and plenty of his own issues to address! She was asked to serve far too many masters--her husband, France and the French people, her mother, Austria, her family, etc. The French people (and the French court) accused her of serving Austria. Her mother (Empress of Austria) accused her of forgetting her duties (she was married off to Louis in order to influence France and to bring France into a closer relationship with Austria) because she was not advancing Austria's cause! She was married to the heir to the throne who did not consumate the marriage for 7 years, yet she was blamed for not providing an heir! Granted, both she and Louis were very young when they married in 1770--she was only 14 years old, and Louis was only 15 years old. Fraser provides descriptions of a child-like (physically and emotionally) Marie Antoinette, and Louis as an overweight teenager who had issues of his own in addition to having been taught not to trust Austrians. Marie Antoinette was not perfect. She was extravagant, spent huge sums of money on clothes, parties, and a residence called (Le Petit Trianon) at a time when France was facing internal and external hardships. Should she have been wiser about the political storm brewing in her adopted country? Perhaps, but since she had so little influence with her husband, I have many doubts that she could have saved the monarchy by behaving differently. She was a convenient scapegoat for many different factions in France because she was considered an outsider, even after she had children. She became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the monarchy, and at that point, nothing could save her or her family.
I enjoyed this book because Fraser shows a side of Marie Antoinette that is often conveniently forgotten in standard history classes, and gives her her day in court (a chance to state her side of the story, a chance to defend herself, a chance to be heard). I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Worthy of Her Most Christian Majesty!!
Review: Antonia Fraser has written the definitive biography of one of history's most maligned figures. Finally, an insight into Marie Antoinette the woman and the queen. One of the first victims of the violent and bloody French Revolution, Marie Antoinette showed her breeding and class, something many of the French never understood. Long live Queen Marie Antoinette and thank you Ms. Fraser for a work well done!
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!!
Review: Antonia Fraser is one of my favorite authors and she's done a great job with this new book.There are many details about Marie Antoinette I hadn't known before. Antonia gives sources and footnotes that are so interesting. Telling us the condition now of places mentioned and objects once owned by Marie Antoinette and where we might see them are a welcome addition to a biography. I've been lucky enough to visit Versailles twice. Once spent a day there touring all of the sites on the grounds including the Petit Trianon and the little farm. Also saw her cell at the Conciergerie which remains still a dreadful place as the author has described it. I'd recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history and having a fresh look at a sad story. As with Mary, Queen of Scots, you keep hoping it will have a happy ending, but it can't.
Rating:
Summary: Whet's the Appetite for More Things French
Review: Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette was a deeply affecting entre into French history. I somehow managed to elude reading works of this bloody overthrow- the rule of the mob and its atrocities, were avoided unless they were somehow part of literature and the occassional film. The characters also were repellent, vile Robbespierre, Marquis de Sade, and the unfathomable treatment of innocents. Napoleon too, seemed like a man's study, too much war, tactics, battles, generals- demanded some kind of interest that was well beyond me. However, Marie Antoinette, A Journey, reversed all previous prejudices and ignited a wave of further reading, not unlike a hunger. Alas, no other books had the seductive charm of this, but even that did not diminish my drive to know more. The incestuous rulers of Europe were, as everyone knows, breeding themselves into obsolescense. They assumed their various family lines fortified through marriage and sustained by vast wealth would ensure monarchical government across the continent and the span of the world. Their largely compromised viewpoint and egregious lack of training elicited fear and subordination in their subjects, as indeed it inspired contempt. Entering into a foreign land as the princess and queen to be, Marie Antoinette, was illequipped and destined to be the source of vicious gossip and the foreign scapegoat for tyranny and exploitation suffered by the as they say, common man. She was a pampered and overly protected child when she arrived in her new country, and was both ignorant and reckless in her spending and arrogance. As any young bride, she retained a childish preoccupation for objects and people who might satisfy her own regal hungers and somehow qualify her as the fascinating object that would stimulate her husband into a sexual performance that was denied to the would-be lovers. This failed consumation was naturally blamed on the queen already humiliated and She was simply dropped into a very dangerous court when no more than a teenager. The language and customs were so unlike her Austrian childhood memories that she was an easy target for the ruthless in and about her palace.
What fraser does quite well with regard to a popular biography is scrupulous discipline with regard to research and organization. One needn't memorize facts or personalities because they are so integrated into her subject that they are simply a part of the story and thereby easily absorbed. Her perspective of Marie is similar, to the sympathetic and equally tragic biography of Mary Queen of Scots, another absorbing and thorough study. As a woman of her time, Marie had no real power other than to bestow favoritism and spend freely. Her fate was to be marginalized by her sex as well as her foreign birth. She had limited resources of her own, her brothers who rose to the throne in Austria were essentially unreliable for purposes of soldifying her position. Her last tragic months and the terrifying death were managed without the frivolous, histrionic manner by which she's been reviled, but as a mature and royal personage who even in the midst of this bloody period, was utterly dignified. The book is full of the kind of details of dress, furniture and adulterous deceits that are of interest to certain readers. It allows a fair amount of historical detail that enhances the story's progress and, for me at least, long for more.
Rating:
Summary: Not a journey; a defense
Review: Antonia Fraser's tome should be entitled MA, a defense. Ms. Fraser examines the Austrian B****'s life and finds her "not guilty." She didn't say anything about cake, actually thought she had enough diamonds when she was 14 that she certainly didn't need the diamond necklace; she loved poor people, and on and on. Louis XVI never had surgery but gained his sexual power from two chats with the emperor. Ms. Fraser is clear about one thing, however. The AB conspired with her mother and her mother's successors to try to get France to act against the interests of Frenchmen.
Rating:
Summary: Unfortunate
Review: Antonia Fraser's work on Marie Antoinette will not be listed as one of her better works. Ms. Fraser is so obviously an Antoinette devotee. There is little to no historical objectivity in this book and there are factual errors. I am deeply disappointed in this book and in Ms. Fraser. I have come to expect better from her.
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