The Queen of spend

MARIE ANTOINETTE: The Journey by Antonia Fraser

(Weidenfeld, 20)

EVERYBODY has heard of Marie Antoinette. She was the Queen of France who callously said "Let them eat cake "when told that the people had no bread, and who got what she deserved when the revolutionaries later guillotined her.

Antonia Fraser briskly dispatches this hoary old myth before she even begins her lavish new biography. Let them eat cake was a remark regularly attributed to unpopular foreign consorts long before Marie Antoinette was born. The problem then is not whether she said it. It is why people believed she had said it.

Many years ago, lecturing in America, I was buttonholed by a romantic admirer of the tragic queen. "I wanna tell ya '"he said, "that that poor gal was just a victim o 'circumstance. "And so she was. Married at 14 to the fumbling heir to the French throne in order to cement an alliance that most French people thought disastrous, she was contemptuously known from the start as "the Austrian woman ". Thanks more to his sexual ineptitude than hers, she was unable to give Louis XVI an heir until 11 years after the marriage. And because, unlike most of his ancestors, he was a faithful husband, the queen attracted all the venom and scape-goating normally reserved for royal mistresses. She had nothing to do with the catastrophic financial misjudgments which precipitated the French Revolution, but as queen she was compelled to live with the political and personal consequences as her husband 's morale collapsed. By then, nobody in France trusted her. Even royalists found it convenient to blame her for the downfall of the monarchy.

In all this, it is hard to deny her some sympathy, and her biographer bestows it whenever she can. But this is no dewy-eyed whitewash. Lady Antonia knows - and shows - that Marie Antoinette was a woman of no judgment.

Constantly in the public eye, she repeatedly offered hostages to fortune in her choice of friends and favourites, her promotion of their interests, and increasing interference in politics. And she was suicidally extravagant. Her milkmaid games in the plasterboard village that can still be seen at Versailles have remained notorious. Less well-known is her acceptance of a spare palace bought for her by a doting husband in 1784. It is true that she did not order the diamond necklace which embroiled her in a criminal conspiracy the next year. But the whole episode could not have occurred if people had not thought it the sort of thing she would do.

With a wife like this, who could be surprised when Louis XVI's finances collapsed into chaos?

Yet the Revolution was the making of her. It taught her, as early as October 1789, that there was nothing she could do to please or conciliate the French. Consequently, she stopped trying. She now bent all her efforts to saving the king and preserving her family.

Repeated shows of bravery when in mortal peril did little to endear her to her husband 's former subjects, but won her the respect of foreigners and, more importantly, of posterity. At her trial, the prosecutors helped by the ludicrousness of their allegations. Like her now-dead husband, she redeemed herself by her public dignity in the face of adversity and death.

THE poignancy of the imprisoned queen 's last months, and the vindictiveness of her treatment, are brought out with all the skills of the experienced biographer whose first life was of another executed queen, Mary Queen of Scots. But the judgments are measured, the documentation full, and the illustrations superb. Scholars may cavil on some points of interpretation, or object that some challenges are ducked. Presumably it is more than a coincidence that the publication date is that of the royal flight to Varennes in 1791. All the more reason for a fuller discussion than we get of what the fugitives were trying to achieve in that lamentable episode. And were the queen and her Swedish admirer Count Fersen ever lovers? Unlike Fersen 's best recent biographer, Lady Antonia thinks so, and even hopes so, but ruefully admits that she lacks conclusive proof. Even for a life so public and so often chronicled, the last word can seldom be said. But this readable and reliable account of Marie Antoinette's "journey " comes as close as we are ever likely to get.

William Doyle is Professor of History at the University of Bristol and author of The Oxford History of the French Revolution.

Copyright 2001
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