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: 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: Biography as it should be
Review: Back on Sept 20, 1975, I read Stefan Zweig's biography of Marie Antoinette and said of it to myself: "Footnotes and bibliography are essential to a real biography." Since time is limited I usually do not read a second biography of a person, but when I saw Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette I knew I would have to read it, remembering, as I did, with pleasure her great biographies of Mary Queen of Scots (read Mar 7, 1970) and of Cromwell (read June 18, 2000). This is a biography written as good biography should be written: chronologically, with footnotes and a 12-page bibliography. A touch I appreciated is that the author has visited the sites where Marie Antoinette was and tells what is to be seen there now. She even makes reference to the fantastic apparition supposedly viewed by Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain on Aug 10, 1901! This is an immensely satisfying book, and well worth the time spent reading it, IMHO.
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: Antonia Fraser Has Done It Again
Review: As in the case of her history of "Mary, Queen of Scots," Antonia Fraser has taken a much mis-understood and maligned Queen and told her story with as much clarity and understanding as possible. Used by her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, as a pawn for European politics, Marie Antoinette was thrust into the vicious and decadent French court at an early age and had to endure years of humiliation from all sides because of her seemingly inability to produce an heir to the French throne (the Daulphin's impotence and stupidity notwithstanding). Once an heir was produced, three more children followed of which two died young. Lady Fraser is very adept at balancing Marie Antoinette's faults as well as her virtues in producing a portrait of a woman forced by circumstance to go her own way through French politics - because of this, she created many loyal friends and dangerous enemies. Her long time affair with Count Fersen as well as the diamond necklace fiasco has been told with clarity which finally puts to rest the many distortions and lies which have been handed down by less astute (and bias) historians. The final chapter is heart-rending to say the least, in which one finally glimpses Marie Antoinette's final hours in which she goes to her death serenely and forgives her enemies (the blood of Mary Stuart prevails at the end). Thank you Antonia for a truly unique reading experience.
Rating: 
Summary: The Austrian woman
Review: Pampered daughter of an Empress, doomed Queen of France, Marie Antoinette is one of the most Romantic figures in world history. Though many denounce her as selfish and stupid, she has her champions who see her as a compassionate woman victimized by historical circumstances. One of these is Antonia Fraser, whose "Marie Antoinette: The Journey" (2001) may well be one of the most sympathetic portraits ever written of a monarch, aside from "official biographies". (But then, the author handled Mary, Queen of Scots the same way.) Beginning with her childhood as an Archduchess in Vienna, daughter of the doting but stern Maria Theresa, the book follows Maria Antonia's journey into France as the fiancée of the hapless Dauphin, becoming the sparkling Marie Antoinette. Extraordinarily popular (at first), she usually displayed the finest discretion and kindness, despite her haughty attitude towards the Comtesse du Barry (who, incidently, was to share her fate). So many of the nasty rumors circulated about her were most likely untrue, including the "Let them eat cake" story, which Antonia Fraser says was first attributed to the wife of Louis XIV in the 17th Century. The libelles accusing Marie Antoinette of cruelty and promiscuity only prove that trashy publications are not confined to our era. Her attachment to Count Axel Fersen is recounted unblushingly, and it becomes particularly touching in 1791, when the dashing Swede tried to to help the Queen get her family out of France. Probably the most complicated and incriminating episode in Marie Antoinette's life was the Diamond Necklace Affair (Napoleon said it more than anything else led her to the guillotine), and Antonia Fraser describes its intricacies carefully -- emphasizing, bien sûr, the Queen's innocence. Oddly enough, of the many portraits of Marie Antoinette, few show her displaying a necklace at all, much less anything resembling the rivière of the scandal. For a woman supposedly so enamored of jewels, she didn't seem to wear many. (There are more than 50 illustrations, most of them color plates.) The book is nearly 500 pages long, but the descriptions of court life and an increasingly dangerous political situation make for easy reading. Despite her husband's respect and the adoration of her children, Marie Antoinette will always have her detractors. But this biography shows that the Queen's final torments, as well as the judicial travesties enacted against her, more than compensate for any mistakes she may have made during her luxurious journey to disaster.
Rating:
Summary: Read It and Weep
Review: I began reading this wonderful biography of Marie Antoinette while planning a trip to France and although the book is long, and at times rather tedious, it did not dissapoint my intrigue with this historically tragic figure. Antonia Fraser has written what seems to be about as accurate a biography as possible. Many horrible stories have been told about Marie Antoinette and this book covers those as well as many more that I never knew. Like most people my introduction to Marie Antoinette was with her "Let them eat cake..." speech and her over-extravagant life style. It seemed almost understandable that she was beheaded based on such misrepresentation. In reality the story reads much more tragically once you get to know a bit about her life and how it all ended. Imagine being a precocious but innocent young girl raised up like property to be sold to the highest royal bidder. Then at 14 being sent away from your friends and family to become the wife of another royal child. Marie Antoinette left Austria and had to adapt to becomming a future queen of France within only a few short years. The French, during those times, being notoriously inclined to think of Austrian women as unflattering and unfeminine oafs. But young Marie pulled it all off and successfully became the star of France. Her husband Louis XVI was more interested in hunting and gadgets than creating a future French dynasty with Marie. So it isn't a wonder that she fills up her life with all the riches of royality. Her life is a sad saga from beginning to end despite her royality and wealth. The final chapters of this book are unimaginable to fathom. She is taken from her family once again, thrown in a small cell, stripped of any royal privileges and left to contemplate her own demise. Imagine becomming all you never dreamed of, hearing the crowd cheer the beheading of your husband, listening to the coerced testimony of your only son stating the abuses he suffered by your own hands, seeing the head of your friend paraded on a stake past your cell window, hemorrhaging from stress and exhaustion and then having to walk up a platform towards your death with a roaring crowd surrounding you.....few of us could stand it, but Marie Antoinette did. Her story is a great read but in order to get Marie's true essence one must walk the halls of Versailles and then sit in contemplation near her cell in the La Conciergerie.....this extraordinarily strong woman lives on in infamy and her spirit reigns supreme.
Rating:
Summary: Very good biography on Marie Antoninette
Review: Marie Antoninette proves to be a highly readable and nicely research biography. Antonia Fraser made it pretty clear that this Queen of France was probably one of the most misunderstood and most falsely maligned personalities of the French Revolution, accused by her enemies from being a lesbian to a drunkard. While Marie Antoniette was a person of many weaknesses, the author made it clear that outside of her undereducated and immature mind, her spendthrift ways which probably wasn't good for France, Marie Antoniette was none of the things that she was accused of being. Actually in reading this book, I was bit surprised how ordinary and somewhat boring her life was until the last six years before her death. But here's lies the weakness of the book. The book really doesn't go that deep into Marie Antoniette's life during that crucial period. I have read more detail accounts of her life in other books that dealt strictly with the French Revolution then I have in this biography. The book was very good in informing the reader of the pre-French Revolution period of Marie Antoninette's life but faltered afterward. Maybe Antonia Fraser should have stop in 1789 since she really didn't have much to add that wasn't written before by other authors. (Of course, if she did that, it won't be a "complete biography".) Overall though, this book is well worth any reader's time to read if you have such interest in the life and time of Marie Antoninette. For those who don't read much on the French Revolution, its an excellent choice! Author's effort to rehabilitate Marie Antoninette's reputation proves to be pretty successful and with certain justice, long overdue.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent read..wish ending was better for Marie!
Review: I was so sad to have this book end! As you read the book, you learn to appreciate Marie for the person she was. There were so many facts about her life that I did not know. As you turn the pages, you share her good times and bad times. I wish the ending was better...but she was courageous to the end. Sorry that she had such a rotten ending. Buy this book!
Rating:
Summary: The very best biography of a complex and interesting woman
Review: Every elementary school student knows all about Marie Antoinette... the selfish, petty queen who said "let them eat cake!" and had her head chopped off. She is the byword for upper-class excess, for the demolition of monarchy, and for ditziness. Visitors to Versailles can wander around her strange little village, where she play-acted at being a commoner, and shake their heads, glad to live in a 21st century democracy.
This book cuts through the incredible amount of mythology that surrounds Marie Antoinette, and offers an excellent study of someone who you may be shocked to discover was actually an extremely complex character. You might even be surprised at the origin of the infamous baked-goods comment. You will certainly come away from this book feeling sorry for this much-maligned lady, who certainly was not perfect but was also absolutely not the monster that we teach our children about.
Mr. Frasier is one of the most talented historians writing today, and it is great to see her turn her attention to the other side of the Channel. Her research is, as always, impecable and her writing style is neat, accessible, and interesting. Long-time fans of Ms. Frasier will be thrilled with this book, and people who are unfamiliar with her work on Renaissance England will have a wonderful introduction to her work.
|
