Still a controversial figure - as well as a celebrated one - Marie Antoinette's dramatic life-story continues to arouse mixed emotions. Was she, as Edmund Burke thought, a misused heroine? Or would there have been no French Revolution without her, as Thomas Jefferson believed?
In this stunning biography, Antonia Fraser charts the journey made by this ill-fated Queen. Born in 1755, the fifteenth of sixteen children of the Empress of Austria, Marie Antoinette was despatched to France aged fourteen to marry the future Louis XVI. As the hated Autrichienne, she was a hostage to foreign policy from the start. On the one hand she was manipulated by her Austrian family, on the other she was accused of political inference by the French. Resented by both sides, Marie Antoinette suffered the additional humiliation of an unconsummated marriage, which denied her for eight years the family that would have cemented an alliance between the two countries.
Although Marie Antoinette ultimately bore four children, salacious slurs about their parentage and accusations of lesbianism were given credence by the long impotence of the King. But throughout these tribulations, the Queen's character gained in strength. The ill-educated and untrained girl, mocked by the French for her lack of sophistication, would grow into a magificent courageous woman. Her behaviour in the last days of the Ancient Regime, above all at her trial, aroused even her enemies' admiration. But it did not save her from execution by the guillotine in 1793.
