Rating: 
Summary: Leave Her to Heaven
Review: Was there ever a life more fraught with both privilege and ignominy? Born a Hapsburg archduchess, Marie Antoinette had the blood of the Orleans Bourbons and of Lorraine on her father's side. On her mother's side were a multitude of kings, queens, emperors and emperors. Even Mary Queen of Scots was a remote ancestor. To paraphrase Conrad, you might say all Europe's royalty made Marie Antoinette.But it was essentially a handful of brilliantly vindictive bourgeois pamphleteers, operating out of that hotbed of anti-royalism, the Hotel de la Frugalite, who eventually brought her to the scaffold. Most, if not all, of their accusations were outrageous, licentious lies. Ah, but they wrote with such style and wit! And her husband, the dweebish Louis XVI, did nothing to stop them. His grandfather, old "apres moi le deluge" Louis XV, was absolutely right. They, their entourages, along with their severed heads, were swept away in a ferocious flood of blood and gore. Some, like Lady-in-Waiting to the Queen, Madame de Gomballe, were literally torn apart by the mob and their body parts displayed triumphantly throughout Paris. And all of this horror in the name of liberty, egalite, fraternite. As someone once said of the French Revolution, it's real motto was "love me or I'll kill you!" Interestingly enough, far more peasants--sometimes entire villages--were martyred than aristocrats. Whatever your thoughts on royalty and all that divine right of kings business, Marie Antoinette's grace under fire will win you over in the end. Her courage, dignity and compassion even for her jailers during the years of her imprisonment (read the eloquent and inspiring letters she wrote to her children just hours before her execution) make you wonder if maybe there once was something to the royalty mystique. Even the final indignity--being driven in tatters through the streets of Paris in an open dilapidated junkman's cart for all the world to see and jeer--failed to accomplish what the mean-spirited architect's of this attempted humiliation in the immediate presence of a painful public death wanted. She died like a Queen.
Rating:
Summary: Daughter, Wife, Mother; Queen, Pawn...Scapegoat
Review: With "Marie Antoinette", Lady Antonia Fraser has written one of the more memorable biographies of recent years. She has taken a woman who had been turned into a caricature, a "poster-child" for a "typical" example of reactionary, frivolous royalty, and turned her into a real, and sympathetic, human being. And, if Lady Antonia has perhaps stacked the deck a bit too much in favor of her subject- playing up her positive qualities and playing down her negative ones- by the time you reach the end of the book your gut feeling is that you really can't blame her. For this was a woman who, before she was physically destroyed by the forces of revolution, had been emotionally worn down by years of abuse at the hands of her political enemies. This was a woman who had very high moral standards, yet was constantly being accused in the pamphlets of the time of being heterosexually and homosexually promiscuous; a generous, sensitive and intelligent woman accused of being selfish, heartless and stupid; a woman who wasn't a political animal- who wanted to do "good works" and to be a good wife and mother- but was subjected to pressure right after her marriage (by her mother Maria Teresa) to do what was best for Austria rather than what was best for France. Even if Antoinette had been politically inclined, her influence was never very great- Louis XVI, despite what the pamphlets said about him, was far from being a fool. His main interest may have been hunting, but he was intelligent, well-read, and he had a mind of his own. (And he had been warned in his youth to be wary of wily Austrian women!) But after years of anti-Antoinette and "fool Louis" propaganda, the people were primed to mistrust and hate "The Austrian Woman". As the saying goes, if you say something loudly enough and often enough people will start to believe it. When conditions in France got bad enough, the people knew who to blame. Louis and Antoinette could easily have been exiled. But the intellectuals in charge of the revolution had the precedent of the execution of Charles I of England. And, as intellectuals sometimes do, they gave more weight to abstract ideas and ideals than to acting in a humane manner. (They thought that Antoinette's death would "unite them in blood"- whatever that was supposed to mean.) In an eerie precursor to the Stalinist show trials of the 20th century, Marie was put on trial. The outcome was decided ahead of time, and so was never in doubt. She was not allowed to prepare a proper defense. Unsubstantiated accusations were made and hearsay was accepted as evidence. Just to be sure, the 8 year old Dauphin, one of whose testicles had been damaged while playing, was brainwashed by his jailers into making allegations of sexual abuse against his own mother. The allegations weren't true but, due to the corrosive influence of the pamphleteers over the course of many years, the people were ready to believe anything. Despite being ill and suffering from sleep deprivation, Antoinette defended herself with intelligence and dignity. Once the inevitable verdict was reached, she met her death with undiminished courage. (Indeed, at this point, after 4 years of her and her family being terrorized and abused, and after the execution of her husband, she welcomed death.) This book should be required reading, not only because it gives Marie Antoinette "the day in court" that she never really had in her lifetime but because it never lets us forget her humanity. It also shows us the disturbing power of propaganda, which is something just as relevant today as it was 200 years ago. For, despite the best efforts of Lady Antonia Fraser, I'm afraid that Marie Antoinette will always be known for something she never said and, considering her concern for the French people, something she never would have said...."Let them eat cake!"
Rating:
Summary: A masterpiece
Review: You don't have to like biographies to like this book. It is fun of interesting facts and tid bits that are just fascinating. When I bought this book, all I had to do was read the first page and I was caught in the turbulant waters of life of Marie Antoinette. It is a book that ever history class should have to read, because it gives the read a true feeling for what the time period and sitation was really like.
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