In February I read Antonia Fraser’s biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey. It was a book club on YouTube that I sometimes read along with that provided the motive for picking up this book. Also, I previously (very much previously) read two other books by Fraser that I remember liking: The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Gunpowder Plot. That was in the 1990s.
I didn’t know anything about Marie Antoinette, except for two things: the “Let them eat cake” quote that she allegedly said about poor French people during a famine and that she was executed during the French Revolution. That quote was, by the way, totally untrue. The book was eye-opening in the way it showed that women in the public view were slandered and maligned in the past like the way they are so often treated online (and in real life) today.
Marie Antoinette was a daughter of the Habsburg Empress Maria Teresa. She had bit of a neglected (but mostly happy) childhood. The Empress had many daughters and used them as fodder for the marriage market to try to extend the Austrian influence on the other European courts. Marie Antoinette flew under the radar at first, because there were older daughters more accomplished and prettier. However, some of these died and so the choice landed on Antoine (as she was commonly called) to be married off to the French Prince Louis.
She couldn’t even read properly at age 13, because her governess had indulged her too much. She was 14 years old when she married the French Prince Louis. At first, the Prince wasn’t very keen on the marriage, and the French court was wary of the Austrian influence and therefore Marie Antoinette didn’t have much power. Later on, their marriage improved (but it needed an intervention by her brother).
At first, the French were enthusiastic about the young Princess, but in time she became a kind of scapegoat for everything that could be criticized about the French monarchy. She was slandered in the usual way women are still slandered today: her sexuality, her spending, her political influence. Most of it was either totally untrue or grossly exaggerated. She may have had an affair or two, but almost everyone else at court had many more affairs. Her spending wasn’t any worse than that of other aristocratic women, even more modest in some ways. And she never had much political influence, so everything that went wrong politically before and during the reign of Louis XVI was not at all her fault.
Marie Antoinette seems to have been a normal kind of person, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Her husband didn’t have the qualities needed to be a great king. When they were in the power of the French revolutionaries, Marie Antionette was brave and composed and worried about her children and her husband. If he hadn’t been such a ditherer, they might even have escaped from France. She was treated more harshly and with greater disrespect than the King, even on the way to the guillotine. She was also dropped by the Habsburgs, who only half-heartedly interceded on her behalf (if at all), never offering to pay a ransom, for instance.
A frequent charge made against ‘Antoinette’ was that she bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.
Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, p 657.
It was an interesting read, but also kind of sad. It was on my mind for quite a while after I’d finished reading. I’m not a fan of any monarchy, but I don’t see why the French royal family couldn’t have been exiled or something. The French Revolution was a bloody affair.
I like Antonia Fraser’s style – she’s written other interesting-sounding biographies and memoirs. Maybe I’ll pick up something else of hers to read in future.
Lesser Leaves 