Marie Antoinette

Antonia Fraser has written an absorbing, richly detailed and pleasingly illustrated new study of the French Queen which is a careful rexamination of the stereotypical embodiment of wilful extravagance and flouncing arrogance. The 'journey' of the title, is that of the 14-year old princess from the Imperial palace in Vienna, via the Royal Court of her husband Louis XVI at Versailles to a 'squalid cell' in Paris prior to execution by guillotine, her head displayed on a spike to an uproarious crowd. There seems a terrible inevitability in the journey: Marie Antoinette was mistrusted in France from the start: vilified as 'L'Autrichienne', her task was impossible, to unite in the person of an heir the two warring nations of France and Austria. She thus became, in Antonia Fraser's judgement, 'the female scapegoat' for the ills and excesses of the Court, her extravagance legendary, though in fact modest in comparison to that of her husband and others at a court where display and the ability to dazzle equalled power. She was, Antonia Fraser concedes, frivolous, imprudent and weak, yet she was also intelligent, neither wanton, nor manipulative, and no, she never actually said 'let them eat cake' when the people asked for bread - this was an accusation flung at most 18th century foreign queens - though by 1793 had Mary Antoinette leaned from the window of her carriage and offered the starving poor a brioche, they would probably have spat on it, suspecting that it would be poisoned such was the hatred and fear of 'the royal monster'. (Kirkus UK)