Marie Antoinette

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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.

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Summary: You Know the End, but Getting There Is So Interesting
Review: Everyone knows the story of this much maligned, doomed Queen of France, but with this book you can't help but want to find out what's going to happen next anyway. If you read it at face value, life at Versailles and then the tumult and effects of the Revolution for her is made vivid for you. A sympathetic portrait of Marie Antoinette as caring and compassionate is presented by Fraser and I enjoyed this book, but at the end I couldn't help but wonder if she really did have glaring faults at all?

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Summary: Even Marie Antoinette would be delighted...
Review: Excellent detailed biography, superbly researched and written with elegant and "diplomatic" style.The section of the photographs of portraits (and objects) to better illustrate M.A.'s world is a nice touch from the publisher. This is one of the very few biographies which doesn't perpetuate the ever present myths and misjudgments about Marie Antoinette.

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Summary: More Sinned Against Than Sinning
Review: It is difficult to know where to begin to describe what an incredible experience it was to read this biography of Marie Antoinette. The author obviously has spent an immense amount of time and effort doing her research, and her way of telling the story of a life lived over 200 years ago is nothing less than remarkable. For a week, I almost felt as though I were living a second life, one that I returned to every chance I could. Ms. Fraser's work is a labor of love, and her way of drawing the reader into the totality of the milieu of 18th century France is magical. I have not yet read the celebrated biography of John Adams, but I can hardly think that it surpasses this, by far the best biography I have read in thirty years. Marie Antionette - The Journey deserves much wider recognition, and Ms. Fraser should be proud of her magnificent accomplishment. It is truly an unforgettable book, and the French Queen and her story will remain with me always.

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Summary: A First-Rate Historical Biography!
Review: This is only the second book that I've read by Antonia Fraser, the other one being her last, Faith and Treason. Although I enjoyed that book well enough (for Fraser is a very capable writer, able to both capture and hold the reader's attention), I was more than a little uncomfortable with the obvious bias that shone through an otherwise excellent treatment of England's Gunpowder Plot. I was hesitant, therefore, about purchasing this one; but as it turned out, I thoroughly enjoyed this 488-page hardcover (with 429 pages of actual text). I found it to be enthralling, captivating, eye-opening, informative, and insightful, making it a joy to read and a book that I could not wait to get back to. Additionally, it is amply illustrated (48 pages, mostly colour), and I found Fraser's treatment to be fairly thorough (though perhaps not quite so thorough as I've come to expect with Alison Weir's books). Most importantly, I came away from the book with not only a greater knowledge and understanding of (not to mention sympathy for) one of the most famous women in history, but a much deeper understanding of the French Revolution and of the various factors leading up to it.

Fraser does write in a manner that is sympathetic to Antoinette. I do feel authors of historical subjects ought to be as objective as possible; perhaps, though, it is as Fraser says: "[I]s [looking without passion] really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette?" (p. 422). This was a woman who, in her lifetime, was either greatly admired or vehemently loathed (sentiments which don't seem to have softened much with the passage of time). More significantly, however, this was a woman who was clearly maligned. Like the rest of us, she had her faults (which are certainly not glossed over by Fraser), but surely no one who has even an ounce of compassion (whether he or she be detractor or admirer) could think that this woman deserved the callous treatment she received and the abject humiliations to which she was subjected.

Antoinette appears, in spite of her faults, to have been primarily a compassionate and kind-hearted (if not overly intelligent) woman. Nevertheless, she had the misfortune of being by accident of birth of royal blood (and Austrian blood at that) and, by the machinations of a domineering mother, queen consort to the king of France at a time when the French court was, in essence, an opulent fish bowl. As a result, Antoinette had the additional misfortune of being at the mercy of libelists intent on her destruction (at a time when there were obviously no libel laws). With reference to Louis XVI, Fraser makes a comment equally applicable to Antoinette: She was hated, not for what she did, but for who she was (ie. a foreigner and a representative of the old order). Any legitimate faults she may have had were, it would seem, merely surplus to requirement for a woman who already had more than enough black marks against her.

Those who think that horror and tragedy are the domain of novelists would be well advised to think again. Just as fiction can scarcely approach the horror of recent world events, there is nothing in the realm of fiction that can even come close to the attitudes, injustices, abominations, and humiliations that occurred during the French Revolution to humankind in general and French royalty in particular. If you've steered clear of history books before for fear that they must, by necessity, be dry and boring, I can't recommend this book highly enough. And if you've enjoyed it, I strongly recommend Stephen Coote's highly-readable Royal Survivor (on the life of England's Charles II) or anything by Alison Weir. For me, this book has awakened a hunger to learn more about late 18th century Europe and some of Antoinette's more colourful contemporaries (such as England's George III and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire).

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Summary: Excellent!
Review: I have read most of her books & this was by far the best one so far! I couldn't put it down!

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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.

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Summary: Tedious
Review: I heard so many wonderful things about this book, so was disappointed to find it so tedious. Fraser obviously did exhaustive research on her subject and I'm dying to learn more. But I'm finding the book very dry. I keep putting it down and have read several books (including David McCullough's "Mornings On Horseback" and Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans") while trying to get through Fraser's Marie Antoinette. I'm not sure if I'll make it.

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Summary: They Love Her Or Hate Her
Review: I read many reviews of this book and other works on this Queen, certainly one of history's more controversial Monarchs. This was the first major biography I had read and I was surprised by the intensity of feeling this woman arouses, she either has enthusiastic admirers or others whose feelings are just as intense but negative. I think this book is reasonably evenhanded, if it does favor one view of the subject I would say the author is more favorably disposed toward Marie Antoinette. This work in no manner is a fawning biography of a person who was without faults. Her failings are identified, but they are not sensationalized.

One matter that struck me was the outrageous pamphlets that were printed and circulated about her. Compared to the tabloids of today what you pass at the supermarket checkout is extremely mild. This woman as Queen was accused with graphic drawings of every imaginable offense that came to the printer's salacious minds. This public humiliation that was routine years before she was imprisoned provided fertile ground for the fictions that were heaped upon her at her, "trial".

She certainly may have been guilty of errors but most would seem to be errors of omission rather than conspired strategy. As a 14-year-old semi-literate child she was married to another adolescent and then spent 7 years waiting for the marriage to be consummated. As customary as certain rituals may have been, being required to give birth in front of a crowd is demented. She was accused of having an affair with a certain Duke, so what? If she did not she would have been an exception to the rule. When a King had a favored mistress she was given a place at court.

I thought, "The Affair Of The Necklace", was well documented and put that accusation against the Queen to rest. As to the, "let them eat cake", comment, I don't believe she was clever enough to utter what was a well-known phrase long before she was even born. When the charges that were leveled at her including crimes against her children, it is clear this crowd that paraded heads about the city was interested in adding hers. Whether she was guilty of any crime was hardly proven, and rarely was there any evidence given.

At least from this reading I would surmise that the vilification of this woman was largely invented or spectacularly exaggerated. To the extent she did cause mischief it is hard to identify what it may have been, for distortion and not truth was the currency of late 18th Century France.

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Summary: Overblown Fan Letter
Review: Enormously imbalanced look at this possibly misunderstood historical figure. Ms. Fraser should know so much better than she appears to with her fawning approach and refusal to deeply examine the character of Marie Antoinette. It is hard to believe that historians up until now have so overlooked all of her seemly endless good qualities according to this author. So close to sainthood M.Antoinette appears, one would think Ms. Fraser had been commissioned by her heirs. Shame on you, Mrs. Pinter.