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Marie Antoinette by: Antonia Fraser

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Rating: - Marie Antoinette

Brilliant - so good to have the true account of popular misconceptions. I was racing to get to the end of the tragic story. What tremendous research into everything. A superb read.

Rating: - A true masterpiece!

Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser is a true masterpiece. Ms. Fraser brings Marie Antoinette back to life in this comprehensive and thorough book. This is not an analytic or academic account of the life of Marie Antoinette. It does not, for instance, discuss the causes of the French revolution in depth. Yet, it is difficult not to feel that one is a direct observer of history in reading this book. It is like watching a film of the life of Marie Antoinette, complete with insights as to how she must have felt and what she must have thought in different points of her life. It is difficult to overstate how much I enjoyed this book.

Rating: - First but not the last historical biography I've read

I wasn't sure how I'd take to a historical biography, especially concerning royalty (not really my thing) but I loved this. It read almost like a novel and as a consequence, I couldn't put it down. Fraser has a really accessible writing style and the interesting little details about life in the French court brought the whole thing to life for me. I was sorry to finish this (despite the length of the book) and that's always a good sign.

Rating: - One of Antonia Fraser's best books

This biography of a very much misunderstood queen is one of Antonia Fraser's best books, giving us a real look at the woman behind the prevailing image. Who hasn't heard of the words 'Let them eat cake' which Marie Antoinette is supposed to have said when told the French peasants had no bread? This book scotches that myth for a start, along with many others.

I particularly enjoyed the account of Marie Antoinette's younger days, when she was a princess of Austria, the daughter of the formidable Empress Maria Theresa and one of a large family. Antonia Forest reminds us how the children of monarchs were pawns in a complicated game of royal chess, daughters in particular knowing they would most likely marry a foreign prince or king and thus have to live their life away from their home country. In Marie Antoinette's case we're shown how she was expected by her mother and later by her brother to remember she was Austrian and to promote Austria's interests even while she was Queen of France. This, of course, was one of the reasons for her downfall, as the French people vented their hatred of the 'Austrian woman' and in the end led to her death.

But politics is not really what this book is about; it's about the woman herself, from her girlhood until her death. The years in between show us the daily life of the princess/queen, her likes and dislikes, her friends, her homes, her clothes and jewels. We also learn of her relationship with her husband and about her children. Antonia Fraser is good at breathing life into her subjects and this book is no exception; we feel we know Marie Antoinette, how she thought and acted, the kind of woman she was. Some people have said the portrayal is one-sided and perhaps in some ways it is, but this may be because the author wants us to see just what an impossible task Marie Antoinette had, trying to please her blood family back home in Austria while at the same time trying to please the French people, being loyal to France while having to put up with the outrageous things being said and printed about her. She became the focus of hatred by the French people, more so than any other royal or aristocrat, yet there seems no real reason why that should have been so, other than her Austrian background.

The account of the royal family's imprisonment is heartrending, especially when they are split up. How must Marie Antoinette have felt when her husband was executed, knowing the chances that the same thing would happen to her were high? She had hoped Austria would have done more to rescue them, but as always politics and pragmatism came above sentiment and she was abandoned to her fate. She showed courage of a high order in the face of death - I'm glad Antonia Fraser let us see how she met her death by guillotine without faltering.

The book ends by tracing what came afterwards, including Marie Antoinette's daughter Marie-Therese's return to France after exile.

A wonderful book by the best biographer in the business!

Rating: - Educates and enlightens while it entertains.

This is the first of Antonia Fraser's historical biographies that I have read and on the strength of it I have already bought her biography on Henry the Eighth and his six wives and I intend to buy more. I absolutely adored the way this book was written, she sets the scene in such a realistic way that you can almost hear the baying of the angry mobs and smell the stench of the prison where Marie spends the last of her days.

Some historical biographies get too bogged down in historical data, quoting endless facts, dates and figures until you feel your brain can hold no more. This is the perfect biography in that it gives you the important information you need in order to understand the causes and effects of the revolution, yet the book never forgets the main subject which is Marie A herself. This book charts her course from a naïve, slightly uneducated child, pawn in her mother's imperial game into the most hated woman in all of France. This book succeeds in cutting through the gossip and anecdotes of the time, which haunt Marie A to this day, and gives her a human face. Yes she was flawed, but in this account we find some of the reasons behind her faults and ultimately come to see her as misguided rather than a bad person.

If this book has a flaw, it is that Antonia Fraser is maybe TOO sympathetic to Marie, in parts of the book you nearly feel like she is making excuses for all of Marie's bad behaviour rather than admitting when she was at fault. However this is the only flaw I could find in this book. Her descriptions of life at Versailles are truly stunning. I particularly enjoyed her description of the pomp and ceremony involved just in getting Marie dressed every morning! Overall, if you want a historical biography with flowing prose and true heart, then you will not find better than this one. I for one came away from the book with a new understanding of probably the most misunderstood woman in history.

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