Marie Antoinette - the journey ...

Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna von Habsburg-Lothringen (November 2, 1755 – October 16, 1793), known to history as Marie Antoinette ...- was born an Archduchess of Austria, and later became Queen of France and Navarre. She was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I and Maria Theresa of Austria. She was married to Louis XVI of France at age 14, and was the mother of "the lost dauphin" Louis XVII. Marie Antoinette is perhaps best remembered for her legendary (and, some modern historians say, exaggerated) excesses, and for her death: she was executed by guillotine at the height of the French Revolution in 1793, for the crime of treason.

Born at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, Maria Antonia was the fifteenth child, and eleventh (and last) daughter, of Francis I and Empress Maria Theresa. Of the names given at her christening, Maria honored the Virgin Mary; Antonia honored Saint Anthony of Padua; Josefa honored her elder brother, Archduke Josef; and Johanna honored Saint John the Evangelist. The court official described the baby as "a small, but completely healthy Archduchess." Maria's siblings included an older sister Maria Carolina, a younger brother Maximilian, and three older brothers Joseph, Leopold and Ferdinand Karl, all of whom had already begun to exert their influence over the Habsburg Empire.
Legend claims that Maria Antonia and the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart became acquainted as children, when Mozart gave a short musical concert for the Imperial Family. Afterwards, when asked by the Empress what he would like as a reward for his performance, the young Mozart supposedly asked for Maria Antonia's hand in marriage. The Empress was said to have been most amused by this request, but clearly had grander aspirations for her youngest daughter.
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A child-princess is married off to a husband of limited carnal appetite. Her indiscretions‚ scorned by elderly dowagers, are coupled with charity, joie de vivre and almost divine glamour but her life is cut brutally short. The queen of France's life is rich in emotional resonance, riddled with sexual subplots and personal tragedies, and provides fertile ground for biographers. The writer´s sizable new portrait avoids the saccharine romance of Evelyne Lever's recent Marie Antoinette, balancing empathy for the pleasure-loving queen with an awareness of the inequalities that fed revolution after all, Marie herself was fully conscious of them. Her subject shows no let-them-eat cake arrogance, but is deeply (even surprisingly) compassionate, with a "public reputation for sweetness and mercy" that is only later sullied by vituperative pamphleteers and bitter unrest. She would sometimes be trapped by ingenuousness, and later by a fatal sense of duty. Yet her graceful bearing, acquired under the tutelage of her demanding mother, the empress Maria Teresa, made her an unusually popular princess before she was scapegoated as "Madame Deficit" and much, much worse. The portrait is drawn delicately, with pleasant touches of humor (a long-awaited baby is conceived around the time of Benjamin Franklin's visit: "Perhaps the King found this first contact with the virile New World inspirational"). Fraser's approach is controlled and thoughtful, avoiding the extravagance of Alison Weir's royal biographies. Her queen is neither heroine nor villain, but a young wife and mother who, in her journey into maturity, finds herself caught in a deadly vise.

Antoinette Journey Marie ...