Connecticut is still recovering from our freak snowstorm and widespread power failure. I entertained myself by downloading a book on Kindle right before the storm. I seem to have a penchant for reading about doomed female monarchs, and having read a great deal about the Tudors and England, I have moved on to the French Revolution. Book #81 for the year was Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser.
Born an Austrian archduchess and married at 14 to the future King of France, Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna, better known as Marie Antoinette, is an elusive character to understand. Like Anne Boleyn, another doomed queen, she takes on many forms. On one hand, she's the she-devil who corrupted a nation, spent millions of dollars on frivolity, kept countless lovers while cuckolding her husband the King, and deserved the inglorious end she received. On the other, she's the tragic martyr of Versailles, a doting wife and loving mother who was falsely accused of a storm of accusations, betrayed by the nation she loved and whose interests she worked tirelessly for. It is difficult to remember that the woman who mounted the scaffold at thirty-eight years old began her life as an indulged little daughter of one of Europe's most celebrated monarchs, a young girl desperate to please all around her. Antonia Fraser takes this much-disputed figure and shows the journey from archduchess to queen to mother...to legend.
Like Alison Weir, Antonia Fraser has the gift of taking historical nonfiction and writing it like a novel. This book, long as it was (500 pages) was an incredibly fast read. Having seen the Sofia Coppola film that it was loosely based upon, I expected pages upon pages of indulgence, frivolity, and saccharine sweetness. The film does Fraser's book no credit. Antoinette's spendthrift days are over long before the book is halfway complete -- truly, Fraser spends the majority of her writing discussing and dissecting the long and terrible years of imprisonment and terror that Antoinette and her family spent after the liberation of the Bastille and the fall of the monarchy. A great deal of time is spent in trying to explain exactly why the French people so hated Marie Antoinette, that she became the scapegoat and the symbol of all that was wrong with the monarchy.
Growing up, most of us are introduced to Marie Antoinette as the frivolous queen who wasted the country's money like crazy and was too stupid to realize she was spending her way into her own grave. And Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst would surely point us in that direction. But Fraser's book offers a closer look into the life of the real Antoinette, her lifestyle, her motives, her viewpoints, and why, as Fraser believes, her tragic end was a foregone conclusion from the moment of her birth.
Rating: **** and 1/2
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