Marie Antoinette

By Desmond Seward

Giddy and extravagant, Marie Antoinette came to France as a child-bride from Austria, France’s traditional enemy.

But the hatred she aroused at Versailles seems out of proportion to her faults, which were mostly those of an inexperienced girl suddenly presiding as queen over the most formal and splendid court in Europe. It was not the sans-culottes who first bitterly called her ‘L’Autrichienne’ or accused her of every kind of vice, including perverted sexual tastes: the campaign of vilification and scurrilous ballads originated among the nobility. Most persistent of all the brilliant and deadly slanders aimed at her throughout her life in France was the rumour that she said of the starving peasantry: ‘Let them eat cake’.

Posterity has seen her as foolish, immoral and devious, as a meddler in politics who unduly influenced her husband, the amiable and incompetent Louis XVI. Desmond Seward, re-examining memoirs and correspondence, finds a different Marie Antoinette: a strong-minded, religious, devotedly maternal woman, surrounded by enemies, forced by her husband’s lethargy to intrigue as best she could to save the monarchy for her son. She failed: but could any woman have done better in the chaotic onrush of events in Revolutionary France?

This new biography tells the fascinating drama of Marie Antoinette’s life, from the pleasure-filled early years at the Petit Trianon, to the terror and humiliation of her imprisonment with her family, and the dignity with which she faced death.