Marie Antoinette by Antonia Fraser
What I said then:
Chunky bio of the doomed French princess.
Chunky bio of the doomed French princess.
What I say now:
I've had this sucker on my shelf since before the Sofia Coppola/Kirsten Dunst movie came out all the way back in 2006. Maybe if I'd liked the movie more it wouldn't have waited so long to get an airing, but regardless: after watching Cadel kick arse in Le Tour I decided to pull out a book on French history as a teeny tribute to him (seriously, they ride bikes up mountains ... it's pretty incredible if you stop to think about it).
What did I know about Marie Antoinette before I read this book? Well, the same two things I figure everybody knows about her: she said "Let them eat cake," and she ended up being guillotined during the revolution. Other than that, she was a complete blank to me ... which I guess constitutes its own implied criticism of the afore-mentioned movie (this is all I remember: jarring musical choices; converse shoes; and thinking that Jason Schwartzman should never act in period films because he's got one of those voices that can't be anything but modern). Of those two glimmers of knowledge, the first turns out to be utter fabrication (apparently the same 'cake' anecdote was being said about an unpopular Spanish queen more than a century before Marie Antoinette's time) and the second didn't happen at all the way I'd assumed.
Marie Antoinette initially led a sheltered, carefree life as the youngest daughter of the Austrian Empress. In the high-stakes game of alliance-by-marriage that the European royal families were playing, she was --- as the thirteenth child --- too junior to ever have been considered particularly noteworthy and so she was utterly neglected, particularly with regards to her education. But then several of her older sisters passed away and the task of marrying France's Dauphin (the heir to the French throne) fell to her. Belatedly they began to teach her to read and write before, at the age of fourteen, she was sent away from her family to a foreign country to be its princess, and ultimately its queen.
Rather than reading and writing, what she really needed (and never got) was an education in how the French court at Versailles actually worked. It was completely different from the Austrian system that she'd grown up in, and Fraser seems to posit that the majority of Marie Antoinette's problems stem from the utter inability of Versailles to understand her, and of her to understand Versailles. Nicknamed 'The Austrian Woman,' she was never able to overcome her outsider status.
One of the major issues was her (relatively) staunch Christian morality: having no acknowledged lovers --- the way everybody else did --- left the press of the time free to imagine her guilty of the most bizarre and unlikely couplings, rumours they spewed out with such venom for so long that she ended up despised. It's a sad irony to think that she was ultimately condemned by all the world as a despicable harlot for the precise reason that she wasn't one.
(As a side note, however horrifying the standard of the press is these days --- and if you're not horrified then you haven't been paying attention --- they've got nothing on the libellistes of Marie Antoinette's day. Essentially, she became the star of a cascade of pornographic pamphlets that linked her, in the most imaginative and energetic terms possible, to anyone and everyone she ever came in contact with. There are still a few levels lower that Murdoch and his cronies can sink.)
Of more importance to Marie Antoinette herself, however, was the lack of a sex life between she and her husband, Louis XVI. The whole point of princesses (and especially queens) was to have lots of male babies to keep the whole shebang running into subsequent generations. Louis XVI seems to have been a shy, awkward kind of a guy, and his ambivalence wasn't helped by the fact that Versailles was considered a public domain. If he wanted to visit his wife's bed (they didn't share quarters), he'd invariably have to pass an entire commentary team in the hallways. Because Louis was French and the King, and Marie Antoinette was Austrian and only the Queen, the blame for their childlessness fell to her. She wasn't tempting enough, or she wasn't fertile enough, or she wasn't doing it right. Even after she had given birth to her own young Dauphin, fulfilling her primary duty as a royal woman, accusations about the child's true parentage haunted her.
All this takes place against a backdrop of breathtaking financial irresponsibility. Fraser makes clear that the ship of the French state was going to be wrecked regardless: too much was spent on too little, for too long. Marie Antoinette's extravagancies on furniture, clothes and makeup sound incredible, but when Fraser ranks them alongside the expenditures of other nobles, it's clear that the entire aristocracy was equally at fault. I'd have liked some more information on the brewing revolution --- Fraser all but ignores it until the washerwomen of Paris are beating on the door --- but that's a minor quibble.
Once the Revolution did come, I'd always presumed that an angry mob had stormed the palace, seized Marie Antoinette and dispensed summary justice then and there. It was actually a much more complicated, much more drawn out process which, in its own way, was probably even more horrible than being torn apart by a crowd would have been. Over the course of more than two years imprisonment, she was slowly separated from everyone and everything that she valued: her friends, her husband, and lastly her children. She was given a trial, but it was a sham, the outcome pre-determined by political expediency. The cold cruelty of her accusers was breathtaking.
On the whole, probably a bit too much of the book was taken up in describing pre-Revolution Versailles politics (all the Comtesses and Princesses and Duchesses started to blend into each other after a while) that turn out to be utterly inconsequential, but it's a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the period. Now I just need a Napoleon biography to follow on from this one (he's just entering the picture when Marie Antoinette gets the chop), anybody know a good one?
Cheers, JC.
about to read: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
books to go: 99 (Ooh, I got a little thrill of pleasure typing that. I'm down into double digits!)
I've had this sucker on my shelf since before the Sofia Coppola/Kirsten Dunst movie came out all the way back in 2006. Maybe if I'd liked the movie more it wouldn't have waited so long to get an airing, but regardless: after watching Cadel kick arse in Le Tour I decided to pull out a book on French history as a teeny tribute to him (seriously, they ride bikes up mountains ... it's pretty incredible if you stop to think about it).
What did I know about Marie Antoinette before I read this book? Well, the same two things I figure everybody knows about her: she said "Let them eat cake," and she ended up being guillotined during the revolution. Other than that, she was a complete blank to me ... which I guess constitutes its own implied criticism of the afore-mentioned movie (this is all I remember: jarring musical choices; converse shoes; and thinking that Jason Schwartzman should never act in period films because he's got one of those voices that can't be anything but modern). Of those two glimmers of knowledge, the first turns out to be utter fabrication (apparently the same 'cake' anecdote was being said about an unpopular Spanish queen more than a century before Marie Antoinette's time) and the second didn't happen at all the way I'd assumed.
Marie Antoinette initially led a sheltered, carefree life as the youngest daughter of the Austrian Empress. In the high-stakes game of alliance-by-marriage that the European royal families were playing, she was --- as the thirteenth child --- too junior to ever have been considered particularly noteworthy and so she was utterly neglected, particularly with regards to her education. But then several of her older sisters passed away and the task of marrying France's Dauphin (the heir to the French throne) fell to her. Belatedly they began to teach her to read and write before, at the age of fourteen, she was sent away from her family to a foreign country to be its princess, and ultimately its queen.
Rather than reading and writing, what she really needed (and never got) was an education in how the French court at Versailles actually worked. It was completely different from the Austrian system that she'd grown up in, and Fraser seems to posit that the majority of Marie Antoinette's problems stem from the utter inability of Versailles to understand her, and of her to understand Versailles. Nicknamed 'The Austrian Woman,' she was never able to overcome her outsider status.
One of the major issues was her (relatively) staunch Christian morality: having no acknowledged lovers --- the way everybody else did --- left the press of the time free to imagine her guilty of the most bizarre and unlikely couplings, rumours they spewed out with such venom for so long that she ended up despised. It's a sad irony to think that she was ultimately condemned by all the world as a despicable harlot for the precise reason that she wasn't one.
(As a side note, however horrifying the standard of the press is these days --- and if you're not horrified then you haven't been paying attention --- they've got nothing on the libellistes of Marie Antoinette's day. Essentially, she became the star of a cascade of pornographic pamphlets that linked her, in the most imaginative and energetic terms possible, to anyone and everyone she ever came in contact with. There are still a few levels lower that Murdoch and his cronies can sink.)
Of more importance to Marie Antoinette herself, however, was the lack of a sex life between she and her husband, Louis XVI. The whole point of princesses (and especially queens) was to have lots of male babies to keep the whole shebang running into subsequent generations. Louis XVI seems to have been a shy, awkward kind of a guy, and his ambivalence wasn't helped by the fact that Versailles was considered a public domain. If he wanted to visit his wife's bed (they didn't share quarters), he'd invariably have to pass an entire commentary team in the hallways. Because Louis was French and the King, and Marie Antoinette was Austrian and only the Queen, the blame for their childlessness fell to her. She wasn't tempting enough, or she wasn't fertile enough, or she wasn't doing it right. Even after she had given birth to her own young Dauphin, fulfilling her primary duty as a royal woman, accusations about the child's true parentage haunted her.
All this takes place against a backdrop of breathtaking financial irresponsibility. Fraser makes clear that the ship of the French state was going to be wrecked regardless: too much was spent on too little, for too long. Marie Antoinette's extravagancies on furniture, clothes and makeup sound incredible, but when Fraser ranks them alongside the expenditures of other nobles, it's clear that the entire aristocracy was equally at fault. I'd have liked some more information on the brewing revolution --- Fraser all but ignores it until the washerwomen of Paris are beating on the door --- but that's a minor quibble.
Once the Revolution did come, I'd always presumed that an angry mob had stormed the palace, seized Marie Antoinette and dispensed summary justice then and there. It was actually a much more complicated, much more drawn out process which, in its own way, was probably even more horrible than being torn apart by a crowd would have been. Over the course of more than two years imprisonment, she was slowly separated from everyone and everything that she valued: her friends, her husband, and lastly her children. She was given a trial, but it was a sham, the outcome pre-determined by political expediency. The cold cruelty of her accusers was breathtaking.
On the whole, probably a bit too much of the book was taken up in describing pre-Revolution Versailles politics (all the Comtesses and Princesses and Duchesses started to blend into each other after a while) that turn out to be utterly inconsequential, but it's a good read, and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in the period. Now I just need a Napoleon biography to follow on from this one (he's just entering the picture when Marie Antoinette gets the chop), anybody know a good one?
Cheers, JC.
about to read: The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
books to go: 99 (Ooh, I got a little thrill of pleasure typing that. I'm down into double digits!)
No comments:
Post a Comment