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Title: Marie Antoinette: The Journey
Author: Antonia Fraser
Genre: Non-fiction (Biography)
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Anchor
Basic
The Positives: For those who don't know, this was the book Sophia Copolla used to base her film Marie Antoinette on. While I have not seen the film, I was interested to read the book and therefore snatched it up when I saw it in the used book store.
This book was a tougher read in many ways than the last historical biography I read about, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I also believe it's somewhat of it's own sort of French Revolution, or at least a revolution in the way Marie Antoinette is portrayed.
A blurb on the back of the book praises Fraser's evenness in neither portraying a heroine nor a villainness, and I tend to agree. I think that the study of Marie Antoinette has long suffered from a lack of objectivity or fairness.
What Fraser does is show, without ever saying so, that things aren't all luck, but they're not all skill either and unfortunately, Marie Antoinette - partly due to personality, partly due to upbringing and partly due to circumstance - was neither lucky nor strong nor smart enough to overcome the difficulties she faced.
Fraser does a credible job of weighing sources and while she does draw from the libelles - propaganda of the time - she makes sure to weight their value against what the authors, or supposed authors, could possibly have known. There is a fair amount of detective work in Fraser examining where and when her sources would have had access to Marie Antoinette or Versailles at all.
The great triumph of this book is in not only explaining, but exploring the causes of Marie Antoinette's weaknesses and personality. There seems to be a historical irony in Marie Antoinette being thought of by modern historians as so quintessentially French when the people of her own time thought of her as always being "the Austrian woman", a foreigner. Exploring Marie Antoinette's Austrian roots and discovering that in many ways she was vastly different from the French society in which she was placed goes a long way toward uncovering what it was that contributed to her being so hated by the French people.
I also appreciated that Fraser took the time to examine the family Antoinette grew up in, especially her strong, domineering, contradictory mother and the prodigously large numbers of siblings that surrounded her. What was baffling to me as a student of history previously now is perfectly obvious having read and researched what Fraser has brought to light about Marie Antoinette. She was not distinguished or treasured or lauded. She was not used to the limelight. She was just one of many, stuck in a corner and largely forgotten until she was useful to her mother's dynastic plans. Her education, even for a noble woman, was lacking because she was not thought to be destined for anything important.
This portrait of an accidental queen, put on the throne of France in place of a sister who could not fulfill the function she was meant to fulfill and shipped off at the tender age of fourteen puts paid to a lot of the popular images of Marie Antoinette being a grown woman who took the throne of France as a whimsical, haughty, spoiled, uncaring woman. In a large way, the libelles have haunted Marie Antoinette from beyond her grave - causing historians to get a very false read on the actual person behind the rumors and mud slinging of the Revolution.
Importantly, Fraser shows that while Marie Antoinette's expenditures were lavish, they were not particularly outstanding amongst the others at Versailles and indeed, compared to the King and other lords and nobles, Marie Antoinette kept a downright modest household. Given, the average French peasant scrambling for bread could hardly have been expected to appreciate this fact, but emphasizing it in a historical sense helps to strip away the myth and legend that have falsely and disingenuously been attached to this woman.
The most important fact that emerges from this intelligently written biography is that Marie Antoinette is, ironically, not that special when examined carefully under an objective lens. She was part and parcel of a system that was failing long before she arrived. Yes, she was out of touch with the common people and rather weak - but so was the entire court of Versailles, including her husband. And it is this that ought to be examined, not the myth.
Another note on the movie: I can't say I've seen the film - but given what the promotional imagery and the posters and whatnot look like, I'm inclined not to believe that the book and movie are very closely related. For one, casting the beautiful, girlish, high-spirited Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette seems wrong. The book clearly states that Marie Antoinette was not thought of, even by her own mother, as a particularly great beauty. She suffered from a jutting Habsburg jaw and chin (the result of genetic abnormalities heightened by generations of royal imbreeding between cousins and near relatives. The defect became so severe that Charles II of Spain was deformed to the point of being unable to chew) - as well as a docility and patheticness as well as a general lack of smarts and sharp intelligence that I think are belied by Dunst's general demeanor.
There's also an air of youthful exuberance and wild times in the film's promotional materials that belies the general misery that seemed to follow Marie Antoinette her entire life. From the time she arrived at Versailles to her execution, she had few truly happy moments. The splendor of Versailles was not particularly charming for her, as she spent a lot of her time beseiged by her mother and brother's criticism, the people's hatred, the sniping court politics, or her desperate desire for children.
Again, I haven't seen the movie so I might be wrong.
The Negatives: I have only two real issues with this book.
My first is that Fraser's prose can sometimes become somewhat muddled. Fraser tends to, on a prose level, favor complicated sentences that sometimes run on or lose their subjects. This can make reading difficult.
There is also a lack of clarity in the general narrative. Sometimes a thread of discussion about, say, politics or personal life will stop and be interrupted by another thread of discussion which does not seem to flow smoothly with it's predecessor. It's not an insurmountable difficulty, but it made reading this book a little more difficult for me than the previous one, which is written with Weir's far more fluid, connected style.
The other complaint is that there is a lack of context in certain places. While getting the inside scoop on Antoinette's family and childhood life is marvelous, Fraser's book could have benefitted from some discussion of the politics going on between Austria and France, especially the politics prior to Marie Antoinette's birth.
I understand that it was Fraser's intent not to make the conclusion of Marie Antoinette's life a foreboding and foregone conclusion even when discussing her childhood - but the history between those two countries was a decisive factor in determining the course of her life. France and Austria's tenuous relationship molded her even before she became the queen of France and therefore deserved more discussion - especially since that history might not have been as well known to a lot of readers as the later events in her life.
I think, as well, some of the context of Versailles itself is lost in the narrow focus. Both France and Austria came with histories to bear upon Marie Antoinette, and there are moments when the absurdities of Versailles seem inexplicable, especially if one does not know where the traditions stem from or why these nobles were behaving in the way they had. A few simple pages of summary explaining how Versailles, as a court and a culture, came to be in the place it was when Marie Antoinette arrived as queen would have gone a long way.
CoC Score: 0. No significant characters of color in this book. There are discussions of foreign dignitaries visiting in one paragraph and a brief mention of them being delegates from India begging for help against the British, but they are not mentioned again and are not significant.
Gender Score: 10. A very fairminded narrative of a woman which highlighted that though there were gender disparities, Marie Antoinette and other women of Versailles held important roles and had power of their own.n
GLBT Score: 5. There is mention of a rumored lesbian relationship between Marie Antoinette and one of her female advisors, mostly put forth by libelles - negative propaganda of the time. Fraser dismisses the possibility of a sexual relationship between Marie Antoinette and any of the women with her but does forward that romantic and emotionally intimate relationships with her female companions were not only possible but likely. I feel that Fraser is taking a more conservative view towards the evidence, but that her conclusions are not unfounded.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-23 10:06 pm (UTC)It is a stylized film, not intended to be only a dry historically accurate presentation-- and the despair of the decadent 1980s seems to be a good mix with the despair of pointlessly decadent French court life.
I haven't read Marie Antoinette: The Journey, but I am a fan of some of Antonia Frasier's earlier works-- have you read her The Wives of Henry the Eight? It's similarly sympathetic and balanced.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-24 02:38 am (UTC)I've read other works by Fraser. The Gunpowder Plot was similarly effective in dispelling a lot of the myths surrounding a well known historical event that had been buried in legend and misconception. I'm definitely going to pick up more works by her when I get the chance.