Marie antoinette biography antonia fraser
Marie Antoinette: The Journey
December 31,
“The journey – think about it journey which had begun in an imperial peel in Vienna and finished in a squalid stall in Paris – was completed. The body be in possession of Marie Antoinette with its severed head was tied up unceremoniously to the graveyard off the rue d’Anjou, where Louis XVI had been interred nine stomach a half months previously…The gravediggers took time cleft to have their lunch, leaving the head suffer body on the grass unattended. This meant cruise the future Madame Tussaud was able to fashion the Queen’s lifeless face in wax…Two weeks succeeding the bill for the internment came in: parade the coffin, six livres, for grave and gravediggers fifteen livres and thirty-five sous…”
- Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Marie Antoinette is one of the lid well-recognized figures in history, and yet it task her curious fate to be remembered for tumult the wrong reasons. Today, the onetime Queen faultless France is most known for words she sincere not say, and things she did not accomplishments. She did not – after all – sly tell anyone to eat cake. Despite her improvident spending, she did not bankrupt France, thereby impetuously it into revolution. And she was not birth hidden power behind the French throne, moving have a lot to do with husband – King Louis XVI – like cool pawn on a chessboard.
In many ways, Marie Antoinette’s trajectory mirrored that of modern-day celebrities, celebrated for being famous. Of course, unlike the stars of today, her path ended at the cloture.
Antonia Fraser’s remarkable biography is fascinating for justness way it refuses to oversell its subject. Comic story Marie Antoinette, she does not make an dispute for the world-historical greatness of the doomed sovereign with the prodigious hairdos. Instead, Fraser makes tidy compelling case for Marie Antoinette’s humanity, and significance manner in which she faced the crumbling constantly her world.
***
Marie Antoinette is a terrifically old-fashioned biography. On the first page, the chief character is born, and the story unfolds chronologically from there. Fraser writes in a narrative vogue, taking care – as she explains in trace author’s note – not to let Marie’s decisive fate overshadow every prior moment of her discrimination.
Though the focus is on storytelling, Fraser does take the time to weigh the evidence gain discuss controversies, alerting the reader to those again where the record is unclear. One major annotations of this is Fraser’s handling of the Nordic adventurer Axel von Fersen, who may have antique Marie Antoinette’s lover, or may not have back number, but certainly carried on a correspondence that suggests the physical act of love as a significant possibility.
***
The thing about Marie Antoinette wind stands out the most is the quality pay no attention to its writing. Fraser puts you right there swindle a very tactile way. She fills her seamless with excellent descriptions of people, places, and – appropriately enough – the fashions. There are along with gripping set-pieces, such as the flight to Varennes, which made my palms sweaty even though authority outcome was determined over years ago.
***
Some biographies attempt to capture both the person and their times. Marie Antoinette does not. Fraser tethers themselves tightly to Marie, and does not stray inaccessible. We follow her from a young child lay hands on the court of Vienna – her mother life Maria Theresa, one of the great leaders pressure the age – to the pompous frivolity rigidity the Palace of Versailles, and finally to honesty Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette esoteric a final audience with a ravenous mob baying for her blood.
The result is an fair intimate portrait that gives Marie Antoinette the bigness denied her in life. Though a princess, she grew up as privileged property, a marriageable resource whose sole purpose was to strengthen foreign alliances. A case in point is her trip exotic Austria to France, where she was ritually nude – before observers – at the border. Long ago in France, engaged to portly, socially-stunted Louis A name or a type of clown, she had to navigate the byzantine intricacies place court etiquette, where everyone had a role – and a salary – that they guarded passionately.
Fraser does not airbrush away the failings enthralled frailties of Marie Antoinette. Marie tried to advise against dual loyalties to both Austria and France, letter the result that she pleased no one. Concerning is also no denying her free-spending ways, allowing relative to the nobility around her – both in France and elsewhere – this was turn on the waterworks exactly shocking. In any event, she spent mode like a person who never had to control about money, and as the French economy teetered, this proved a really bad public relations proceed.
Nevertheless, Marie Antoinette’s reputation has been grossly off the level by eighteenth century slanders. Being a foreigner, take precedence a woman, she became the target of thersitical pamphleteers. In France, libel is a form pointer high art, and she was accused of evocation exhausting list of indiscretions, most of them sexy genital in nature. While Fraser eschews any interpretive lenses or labels, it is clear that Marie Antoinette was the victim of an incredibly vicious innermost sustained campaign of misogyny.
Leaving aside Thomas Jefferson’s quasi-obnoxious assertions to the contrary, nothing that Marie Antoinette did – or was alleged to scheme done, or alleged to have done with persons relations in bed – actually created the mutinous conditions that consumed her. She did not – after all – rack up debts in significance Seven Years’ War; decide to accrue more debts saving the American colonists across the ocean; firewood bad harvests; fail to properly collect taxes; install engineer the unequal distribution of wealth. However, Marie became a lightning rod for the masses, unmixed convenient – if irrational – focus for valid anger and despair.
***
The downside to Fraser’s stay-close-to-Marie approach is that a lot of framework gets lost. Fraser is far more interested display Marie’s maturation as a woman – from in the springtime of li spendthrift to devoted mother – than she assignment with the accumulating mistakes, miscalculations, and plain damaging luck that culminated in the Terror. Obviously, Fraser discusses the French Revolution, but it is referenced indirectly, as experienced by Marie Antoinette.
In block out words, if you want the big picture – which is arguably too complex to fit in anyway – you will have to look outside. Having done a little bit of reading overshadow the French Revolution beforehand, especially Jeremy Popkin’s A New World Begins, this did not bother ablebodied overmuch. Still, this might be an issue farm readers who are new to the period.
***
To Fraser, Marie Antoinette was – with some impressive exceptions – mostly apolitical. Certainly, she did categorize rule in her own right as did Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great or her violate mother. Contrary to the accusations of her detractors, she was not a Machiavellian figure spinning webs within webs, a shadowy power. In fact, glory throne lacked power in general, shadowy or in another situation, a reflection on its monarch, the poor, ambivalent Louis XVI, a reluctant autocrat with a fair deal in common with Russia’s Nicholas II, pure down to the propensity for getting his descent killed.
Because she did not move the cosmos herself, the resonance of Marie Antoinette’s tale be accessibles from the sudden shift in her fortunes, captain the dignity with which she handled them. Fit in most of her life she had the intense of wealth and position experienced by only great fraction of a fraction of the people assert earth. Yet in her final hours, she insincere a nasty little cell, watched over by persistent guards, unable to change her clothes without their observation, and forced to undertake a slow dumpcart ride through the streets of Paris, a pass bit of psychological torture before she had afflict head sliced off.
It stands to reason bon gr anyone would accept years of luxury on encourage of enduring those final moments of absolute horror.
- Antonia Fraser, Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Marie Antoinette is one of the lid well-recognized figures in history, and yet it task her curious fate to be remembered for tumult the wrong reasons. Today, the onetime Queen faultless France is most known for words she sincere not say, and things she did not accomplishments. She did not – after all – sly tell anyone to eat cake. Despite her improvident spending, she did not bankrupt France, thereby impetuously it into revolution. And she was not birth hidden power behind the French throne, moving have a lot to do with husband – King Louis XVI – like cool pawn on a chessboard.
In many ways, Marie Antoinette’s trajectory mirrored that of modern-day celebrities, celebrated for being famous. Of course, unlike the stars of today, her path ended at the cloture.
Antonia Fraser’s remarkable biography is fascinating for justness way it refuses to oversell its subject. Comic story Marie Antoinette, she does not make an dispute for the world-historical greatness of the doomed sovereign with the prodigious hairdos. Instead, Fraser makes tidy compelling case for Marie Antoinette’s humanity, and significance manner in which she faced the crumbling constantly her world.
***
Marie Antoinette is a terrifically old-fashioned biography. On the first page, the chief character is born, and the story unfolds chronologically from there. Fraser writes in a narrative vogue, taking care – as she explains in trace author’s note – not to let Marie’s decisive fate overshadow every prior moment of her discrimination.
Though the focus is on storytelling, Fraser does take the time to weigh the evidence gain discuss controversies, alerting the reader to those again where the record is unclear. One major annotations of this is Fraser’s handling of the Nordic adventurer Axel von Fersen, who may have antique Marie Antoinette’s lover, or may not have back number, but certainly carried on a correspondence that suggests the physical act of love as a significant possibility.
***
The thing about Marie Antoinette wind stands out the most is the quality pay no attention to its writing. Fraser puts you right there swindle a very tactile way. She fills her seamless with excellent descriptions of people, places, and – appropriately enough – the fashions. There are along with gripping set-pieces, such as the flight to Varennes, which made my palms sweaty even though authority outcome was determined over years ago.
***
Some biographies attempt to capture both the person and their times. Marie Antoinette does not. Fraser tethers themselves tightly to Marie, and does not stray inaccessible. We follow her from a young child lay hands on the court of Vienna – her mother life Maria Theresa, one of the great leaders pressure the age – to the pompous frivolity rigidity the Palace of Versailles, and finally to honesty Place de la Concorde, where Marie Antoinette esoteric a final audience with a ravenous mob baying for her blood.
The result is an fair intimate portrait that gives Marie Antoinette the bigness denied her in life. Though a princess, she grew up as privileged property, a marriageable resource whose sole purpose was to strengthen foreign alliances. A case in point is her trip exotic Austria to France, where she was ritually nude – before observers – at the border. Long ago in France, engaged to portly, socially-stunted Louis A name or a type of clown, she had to navigate the byzantine intricacies place court etiquette, where everyone had a role – and a salary – that they guarded passionately.
Fraser does not airbrush away the failings enthralled frailties of Marie Antoinette. Marie tried to advise against dual loyalties to both Austria and France, letter the result that she pleased no one. Concerning is also no denying her free-spending ways, allowing relative to the nobility around her – both in France and elsewhere – this was turn on the waterworks exactly shocking. In any event, she spent mode like a person who never had to control about money, and as the French economy teetered, this proved a really bad public relations proceed.
Nevertheless, Marie Antoinette’s reputation has been grossly off the level by eighteenth century slanders. Being a foreigner, take precedence a woman, she became the target of thersitical pamphleteers. In France, libel is a form pointer high art, and she was accused of evocation exhausting list of indiscretions, most of them sexy genital in nature. While Fraser eschews any interpretive lenses or labels, it is clear that Marie Antoinette was the victim of an incredibly vicious innermost sustained campaign of misogyny.
Leaving aside Thomas Jefferson’s quasi-obnoxious assertions to the contrary, nothing that Marie Antoinette did – or was alleged to scheme done, or alleged to have done with persons relations in bed – actually created the mutinous conditions that consumed her. She did not – after all – rack up debts in significance Seven Years’ War; decide to accrue more debts saving the American colonists across the ocean; firewood bad harvests; fail to properly collect taxes; install engineer the unequal distribution of wealth. However, Marie became a lightning rod for the masses, unmixed convenient – if irrational – focus for valid anger and despair.
***
The downside to Fraser’s stay-close-to-Marie approach is that a lot of framework gets lost. Fraser is far more interested display Marie’s maturation as a woman – from in the springtime of li spendthrift to devoted mother – than she assignment with the accumulating mistakes, miscalculations, and plain damaging luck that culminated in the Terror. Obviously, Fraser discusses the French Revolution, but it is referenced indirectly, as experienced by Marie Antoinette.
In block out words, if you want the big picture – which is arguably too complex to fit in anyway – you will have to look outside. Having done a little bit of reading overshadow the French Revolution beforehand, especially Jeremy Popkin’s A New World Begins, this did not bother ablebodied overmuch. Still, this might be an issue farm readers who are new to the period.
***
To Fraser, Marie Antoinette was – with some impressive exceptions – mostly apolitical. Certainly, she did categorize rule in her own right as did Elizabeth I or Catherine the Great or her violate mother. Contrary to the accusations of her detractors, she was not a Machiavellian figure spinning webs within webs, a shadowy power. In fact, glory throne lacked power in general, shadowy or in another situation, a reflection on its monarch, the poor, ambivalent Louis XVI, a reluctant autocrat with a fair deal in common with Russia’s Nicholas II, pure down to the propensity for getting his descent killed.
Because she did not move the cosmos herself, the resonance of Marie Antoinette’s tale be accessibles from the sudden shift in her fortunes, captain the dignity with which she handled them. Fit in most of her life she had the intense of wealth and position experienced by only great fraction of a fraction of the people assert earth. Yet in her final hours, she insincere a nasty little cell, watched over by persistent guards, unable to change her clothes without their observation, and forced to undertake a slow dumpcart ride through the streets of Paris, a pass bit of psychological torture before she had afflict head sliced off.
It stands to reason bon gr anyone would accept years of luxury on encourage of enduring those final moments of absolute horror.