Marie Antoinette

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: Unquiet ghosts of Versailles
Review: The best biographers know they have to be sympathetic to their subjects somehow or the biography just isn't very interesting; fortunately in Marie Antoinette Antonia Fraser found not only someone sympathetic but even someone who was, for all her faults, ultimately admirable in her composure and grace in the midst of horrors. Fraser does not whitewash the queen's extravagance nor her intellectual limitations nor even her affair with Count Felsen of Sweden, but she also shows that the Austrian-born consort has been unjustly maligned for being excessively Machiavellian (which she was almost incapable of being) and for the Diamond Necklace Affair (where the queen was almost wholly innocent, although she did mismanage her own exoneration). She is also very moving in her descriptions of how Marie Antoinette was a pawn in her mother's dynastic strategies, and perceptive in her explanations of how Louis XVI's sexual awkwardness resulted initially in the queen's constant anxiety regarding her inopportunity to provide an heir and then later in her unlucky assumption of the roles usually accorded to the king's mistress.

Fraser writes beautifully, with a strong sense of narrative and character: I found it a hard to stop reading. The color photo inserts are also quite well chosen. My only strong gripe would be the inadequate genealogical charts Fraser provides, which is especially unfortunate given the multiple (and confusing) titles assumed by the king's and queen's immediate Bourbon and Hapsburg family members. Fraser wastes space providing a chart showing how both Louis and Marie Antoinette are descended from mary Stuart--something of great interest to her, perhaps (as the foremost biographer of Mary, Queen of Scots), but not to her readers, who would benefit more from a chart explainging other things.