Marie Antoinette: The Journey
by Antonia Fraser
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Book Reviews of Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Book Review: Scapegoat of the Revolution
Summary: 5 Stars
Marie Antoinette has fascinated countless generations since she met her untimely death at the guillotine during the height of the French Revolution. Was she a wanton woman concerned only with her own pleasure or was she loving wife and mother, caught up in circumstances beyond her control? The general consensus now seems to be the latter and biographer Antonia Fraser makes a strong case for this perception. While Marie Antoinette had many faults (reckless spending chief amongst these), Fraser points out that Antoinette was only fourteen when she married Louis Auguste, the Dauphin, heir to his grandfather Louis XV. Never properly educated by her mother Empress Marie Therese of Austria, Antoinette did her best to fulfill her number one purpose in life-to produce an heir. Unfortunately, the Dauphin had almost no sexual drive at all, and the marriage would be unconsummated for years. It was during this time, that public opinion seemed to form its worst opinions of Antoinette. Seen as a reckless gambler, more concerned with parties and spending, Antoinette did court disaster with her own behavior. However, as Fraser points out, the inability to produce an heir was not her fault entirely but rather simply two very young and inexperienced people who had no real idea of what was expected of them. A visit from Antoinette's brother, the Emperor Joseph II led to a frank talk with both and soon after that, the marriage was finally consummated. It was not long before a child was born (a daughter), followed in turn by two sons and one more daughter (only two children would survive Antoinette).At this point, Marie Antoinette the mother becomes dominant and she no longer occupied herself with frivolous past times. But the die had been cast with the French people who could never see her than anything else but a pleasure loving seductress, living off the misery of others. Fraser does an admirable job of point out that Antoinette's expenditures were no more than the others around her and she possessed a real desire to help the French people. Those who knew her intimately thought her a kind and loving person and these qualities were put to the test after the French Revolution left her and her family at the mercy of the mob. It is in the last three years of her life that we see the real Marie Antoinette, a woman devoted to her husband and her family, a woman willing to do whatever she could to avoid bloodshed. But events moved too swiftly and hundreds of years of oppression by the nobility had focused the hatred of the French people on perhaps the most innocent of victims. I think it is interesting to note that Louis XVI had no mistresses, unlike his previous two successors, and that this allowed the French people to concentrate their hatred on Marie Antoinette since they felt no on else could have swayed his decision making. In previous reigns, the mistresses had been accused of leading the king astray. Madame Montespan, Madame de Pompadour and the Countess du Barry had been seen as the villains in early times and they bore the brunt of the ill feelings against the court.
While Marie Antoinette is the main focus of the biography, many other lives are illuminated. Maria Therese, Empress of Austria and mother of Antoinette is a stern woman, bent on ruling over the lives of all her daughters, regardless of their location or position. Louis XVI is a weak man, unable to make decisions when needed yet never cruel or vindictive. Count Fersen, the only viable candidate as an actual lover of Marie Antoinette, who never stopped trying to help her and her family during her final years as a captive of the revolution.
Antonia Fraser has done a marvelous job of making Marie Antoinette come to life, portraying both her good and bad qualities yet ultimately demonstrating that she surely never deserved what fate finally had in store for her. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a fuller understanding of the events leading up to the French Revolution and how a scapegoat was made of a young wife and mother unable to control the events around her.
Book Review: Marie Antoinette's day in court...209 years after her death
Summary: 5 Stars
Antonia Fraser does an excellent job with her detailed biography of one of history's most maligned figures, and offers a view of a different, more human Marie Antoinette. I liked very much that she took the time to provide the background of court life and politics in both France and Austria, what drove these two countries (not traditional enemies like France and Britain, but uneasy, distrustful, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies) to make the kind of political pact represented by the marriage of Marie Antoinette to Louis XVI, and the not-so-surprising results of the doomed-from-the-start union. She goes into great detail about how ill-prepared Marie Antoinette was to cope with being the Queen of France. She was poorly educated, not given enough instruction about political intrigue, nor given good advice about how to go about fulfilling her primary duties (to provide an heir to the Bourbon throne) when she had a husband who had no interest in her and plenty of his own issues to address! She was asked to serve far too many masters--her husband, France and the French people, her mother, Austria, her family, etc. The French people (and the French court) accused her of serving Austria. Her mother (Empress of Austria) accused her of forgetting her duties (she was married off to Louis in order to influence France and to bring France into a closer relationship with Austria) because she was not advancing Austria's cause! She was married to the heir to the throne who did not consumate the marriage for 7 years, yet she was blamed for not providing an heir! Granted, both she and Louis were very young when they married in 1770--she was only 14 years old, and Louis was only 15 years old. Fraser provides descriptions of a child-like (physically and emotionally) Marie Antoinette, and Louis as an overweight teenager who had issues of his own in addition to having been taught not to trust Austrians. Marie Antoinette was not perfect. She was extravagant, spent huge sums of money on clothes, parties, and a residence called (Le Petit Trianon) at a time when France was facing internal and external hardships. Should she have been wiser about the political storm brewing in her adopted country? Perhaps, but since she had so little influence with her husband, I have many doubts that she could have saved the monarchy by behaving differently. She was a convenient scapegoat for many different factions in France because she was considered an outsider, even after she had children. She became a symbol of everything that was wrong with the monarchy, and at that point, nothing could save her or her family. I enjoyed this book because Fraser shows a side of Marie Antoinette that is often conveniently forgotten in standard history classes, and gives her her day in court (a chance to state her side of the story, a chance to defend herself, a chance to be heard). I highly recommend it.
Book Review: Poorly written, poorly researched
Summary: 1 Stars
Marie Antoinette / 0-385-48949-8
I love reading and learning about Marie Antoinette as a historical figure - she had such a fascinating life, and was such an interesting person - but I could not have been more disappointed with this book. I'm really surprised that it has so many high ratings, so take my review with a grain of salt, but I just found this book to be a complete chore to wade through.
It's really frustrating to see Fraser take such a fascinating historical figure and rob her of all interest with some of the dullest writing and bald assertions I've ever seen in a biography. I'm sorry to say that the book reads like the worst of high school history books - dryly vomiting up names and dates with very little context, and jumping about the map to cover events "chronologically" with very little effort made to tie events to one another with any sort of compelling or competent narrative. Fraser seems to regard name-dropping and quote-dropping as being most crucial details, and thus she never hesitates to drop in random quotes from various philosophers, sooth-sayers, and poets - even when doing so is distracting and detracts from the narrative flow.
Too much bald assertion is used here, and to ill effect. For example, Fraser insists that Marie Antoinette's memorable "re-dressing" ceremony was simply not bothersome or traumatic to the young woman, because it was the fashion of the time, not unusual at all, and that "she had, after all, been treated as a doll, to be dressed up in this and that at the adults' whim since childhood; this was just one more example of that process." This may be personal preference, but I dislike this style of writing in biographies - either tell us how the subject felt through actual, historical sources OR tell us how they *might* have regarded an experience, based on conjectures from personality documented through actual, historical sources. Do not, however, just attempt to "channel" the spirit of the biography from the depths of time, and tell us how they felt, because it's just not accurate - it's one woman's opinion. The entire book is written in this vein, and you just never get the impression that you're reading actual history, but rather Fraser's version of how she has decided it must have been. Whether you trust her to be the expert and know what she is talking about is another matter.
I recommend avoiding this book. As a source for Marie Antoinette, I found it sadly lacking, as much of what Fraser asserts as truth is undocumented at best. As reading material, I was repulsed by the turgid prose and by the jump-around-the-map, cram-everything-in-without-context, and drop-a-lot-of-cool-sounding-quotes approach to history.
~ Ana Mardoll
Book Review: Marie Antoinette: The Journey By Madeline W.
Summary: 3 Stars
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
By Antonia Fraser
Marie Antoinette was the youngest and most controversial Queen of her time. In Marie Antoinette: The Journey, Antonia Fraser portrays Marie Antoinette's life as extravagant, complex, and difficult. In this 460-page biography, Antonia discusses different aspects of Marie Antoinette's life: her social life, her private life, and her life in respect to the wars and political matters. Antonia describes Marie Antoinette's life from her birth to her dramatic death. While some parts of Antonia Fraser's writing concentrated on the fascinating and thrilling parts of Marie Antoinette's life, most of the time Antonia focused on wars and political affairs.
I found that this biography wasn't my favorite for multiple reasons, though I did enjoy some parts.
First, I found many occurrences in the book pertaining to war and politics, which aren't my favorite subjects, to be dull and unentertaining.
Second, there were multiple superscripts in the reading that referred to citations. These superscripts distracted me when I was reading.
Also, I found that the author would occasionally get off topic. For example, the author would start by talking about one person, like the Queen, and then get off topic, and end up talking about another member of the royal family that had a distant relationship to the Queen.
I did enjoy the elaborate descriptions that Antonia Fraser created because I was able to clearly picture what she was describing in my mind. For example, one of my favorite occurrences in this book was when the Queen was forced to live in the tower, before her death. Though this was a quite sinister event, Antonia Fraser did an excellent job of describing the arrival of the royal party, and their miserable life in the tower. A quote from the book shows Antonia's excellent ability to describe locations and occurrences. "Lanterns illuminated the walls of the Temple when the royal party arrived, as though for a public festival, and a great crowd of people chanted `Long live the nation!' That cry at least was a familiar one. More sinister was the gleeful Marseillais chant of the guards: `Madame goes up into her Tower, when will she come down again?'" Because of the extensive amount of detail that Antonia puts into her writing you are able to visualize the current setting of the story.
Marie Antoinette: The Journey is an enjoyable biography, if you are in the mood for an extensive and historical book. Though this was not my favorite book, overall it was a stimulating and descriptive biography of the life of the famous Queen Marie Antoinette.
Book Review: The Austrian woman
Summary: 4 Stars
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 sūr, 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.