Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen Of France [Hardcover]

Evelyne Lever (Author), Catherine Temerson (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 2000

Family life in Vienna, the wedding at Versailles, the French court, boredom, hypocrisy, loneliness, allies, enemies, extravagant entertainment, scandal, intrigue, sex, birth and bereavement, lovers, peasant riots, the fall of the Bastille, the attack on Versailles, confinement in the Tuileries, escape and capture, mob rule in Paris, imprisonment, the guillotine...

In Marie Antoinette Evelyne Lever tells the sumptuous story of the last--and the most infamous--queen of France. Married off at fourteen by her ruthless mother for political purposes to the unprepossessing Dauphin, the future Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette was immature, brazenly self-indulgent, impetuous and wholly unprepared for the role history cast for her. Her sad attempts to consummate her marriage read like bedroom farce, and she did little to quell the rumors of her increasingly dangerous liaisons. Bolstered by the staged receptions that she mistook for popular approval, she was willfully out of touch with the nation's dire economic troubles, the seething social and political climate of prerevolutionary France, and eventually retreated--from both her husband and the public--behind a wall of courtiers and into a world of opulent fantasy--until it was too late.

Based on diaries, letters, court documents and memoirs, Marie Antoinette paints vivid portraits of the Queen, her inner circle and the lavish court life at Versailles. Here are the formidable Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, using her daughter Antonia, as Maria Antoinette was called, to realize her own ambitions for the Habsburg empire; the legendary Madame du Barry, lover of Louis XV, whom Marie Antoinette vowed never to address; the dashing Count Axel Fersen, heir to one of the most powerful Swedish families and the grand passion of Marie Antoinette's life; and the inept and hapless Dauphin, a ruler incapable of action even as he watched the monarchy collapse around him.

From Marie Antoinette's birth in Vienna in 1755 through her turbulent, unhappy marriage, the bloody turmoil of the French Revolution, her trial for high treason (during which she was accused of incest) and her final beheading. Lever weaves a tragic hale of power and its abuse, and an unforgettable tapestry of life in eighteenth-century France.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

This highly readable translation of French historian Evelyne Lever's 1991 biography captures all the drama and pathos of Marie Antoinette's short life. Born in 1755, this carefree, fun-loving daughter of Austrian empress Maria Theresa inherited neither her mother's political shrewdness nor her sense of duty. She was married off at 14 to the stolid, clumsy French Dauphin, who would not fully consummate their marriage for another seven years, at which point he was King Louis XVI and their marital difficulties were the subject of public ridicule. She consoled herself by retreating to the artificial village she constructed at Trianon, where she could be free of the court etiquette she hated and indulge in expensive amusements that only increased her unpopularity. Her rare incursions into politics were just as ill judged; she alienated the French nobility with attempts to further Austria's diplomatic goals, and from the first rumblings of revolution in 1788, she influenced Louis to take a hard line on royal power when compromise might have saved the monarchy and prevented their executions in 1793. Lever does not soften Marie Antoinette's faults or downplay her poor judgment, but most readers will finish this absorbing narrative feeling very sorry for a pretty, goodhearted, but fundamentally frivolous woman thrown into a historical moment whose demands were beyond her. --Wendy Smith

From Publishers Weekly

This romantic portrait of the queen who was reviledAand eventually executedAby the French revolutionaries transforms the woman who supposedly said "Let them eat cake" from a symbol of the cruelty of class politics into a quaint sovereign. Lever, a French historian who has written biographies of Madame de Pompadour and other figures of the French court, sees Marie Antoinette as a fashionable and frivolous victim of salacious rumors. While she admits that her subject had a "complete lack of insight into the aspirations of the majority of the French people," Lever portrays Antoinette as the novelistic heroine she always wanted to beAnot an actor on the political stage. Her "voluptuous bosom," "fleshy mouth" and "supple neck," Lever writes, were unspoiled by her "slightly protruding blue eyes," and she "knew better than any other sovereign how to bring to perfection the aristocratic art of living of prerevolutionary France." Although a compelling narrative, the book doesn't do justice to the weighty moral and political themes Marie Antoinette's life and death raise. The queen, it is clear, was a political disaster, managing to alienate both a sizeable section of the courtly aristocracy and the starving masses. Her extravagance and counter-revolutionary impulses provoked "incredibly venomous" lampoons (and, of course, her death). But Lever never takes up these components of her life. Rather, she repeatedly ascribes acts of revolutionary violence to "madness" perpetrated by "madmen." Energetically researched in Paris, Vienna, even Sweden (the home of the queen's dark, handsome beau, who also "looked exactly like the hero of a novel"), the book is evocative, but romance, rather than historical analysis, takes precedence here. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; First Edition edition (July 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374199388
• ISBN-13: 978-0374199388
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #505,167 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #22 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( A ) > Antoinette, Marie

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Ditto!, July 31, 2000

By 

Glenn Brown - See all my reviews

This review is from: Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen Of France (Hardcover)

Like the reviewer who precedes me, I was not impressed with this biography of the Queen. More to the point, this book is NOT the most valuable addition to an understanding of Marie Antoinette's life since de Nolhac that John Rogister of The Times Literary Supplement would have us believe. As the title to this review indicates, I am in complete agreement with the other consumer's review...a rather surprising lack of critical facts and no feeling what so ever for the subject. In fact, Lever does little to soften what can only be the most horrible calumny of M.A.'s life: the fictitious case of incest between mother, aunt and her Louis XVII. Lever would lead us to believe that this child concocted the accusations against his mother and aunt purely of his own volition. The child's "tutor", the cobbler Simon, was no more than an imbecile, and Louis Charles, (by his mother's own admission in her admirable letter to Madame de Tourzel), had a vivid imagination. As every biographer of note before her has surmised, the "confession" was coerced from the boy. Period. Bottom line: the Queen refers to the accusation of incest clearly in her final letter, or will and testament, directly to Elisabeth herself, in the form of an apology which remarks words easily extracted from a child who does not understand what has been put to him. Yet it seems that Lever believes the child, by every account devoted to his mother, to have been a monster. Further more, Lever, like M.A. biographer Farr, makes much of Madame Royale's indifference to her mother, yet both feign ignorance that 4 year olds commonly hate, and even wish dead, the very person who prevents them from having fun, i.e., Mom. Certainly Marie Therese grew to favor her father and Aunt Elisabeth, but the tantrums of a toddler are hardly an argument for some deep seated hatred of her mother. It's interesting that recently we have had a spate of books published about the life of M.A., and yet none have added squat to anything that has come before. It bears repeating, Andre Castelot's Queen of France and The Fatal Friendship by Stanley Loomis are the only biographies needed by anyone interested in the last queen of France. Finally, the geneology featured on the inside front cover offers some interesting dates for the births of Marie Antoinette's contemporaries. Louis XVI was not born in 1744, dear. I would also check the dates regarding the Duc d'Angouleme. Strange too, that Lever did not include one likeness of Fersen, but instead chose Madame de Staal. While de Staal certainly witnessed the revolution and lived to tell about it, her feelings towards the Queen often changed with the wind, and I never felt Mme.de Staal to be a completely reliable source of information on M.A.(regardless of her plea for the reunion of the Queen and her son). Until truly illuminating correspondences, memoirs, etc. are unearthed, I hope we have seen the last of the biographies of Marie Antoinette.

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Harrowing look at the life of Marie Antoinette, November 27, 2000

By 

Dana Keish (Ohio, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen Of France (Hardcover)

A very good biography of Marie Antoinette, which mixes both the politics of the time along with the many mistakes made by Marie Antoinette. It is fascinating to read about a woman who when presented with two choices, almost always made the wrong one.

The last few chapters of the book, about the time period after the King and Queen are imprisoned by the revolutionaries is presented in a very harrowing manner. It is hard to imagine living through what Marie did in the final years of her life. The constant turmoil and apprehension and the pure misery that must have accompanied her final days is well documented and excellently written.

I would highly recommend this biography.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A famous person in history comes alive for modern readers, March 13, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen Of France (Hardcover)

My curiousity about Marie-Antoinette and her life first came about in high school, when my French teacher would tell us about the French queen's "Petit Trianon" and her "hameau" at Versailles. When I visited these places on a trip to France, I became even more intrigued. But not until I read this book did history truly come alive for me. I pictured this queen as a one-dimensional character. But in this book, I not only learned about the real person -- who had some very bad qualities, such as selfishness and an inability to understand that her choices brought consequences, but also some good qualities, such as her dignity and regal bearing during her last days and her last moments -- but I also learned a great deal about French society and royal life during the queen's day. For instance: Did you know that the public could watch the queen give birth to her first child, so that there would be plenty of impartial witnesses to verify that this indeed was a child of royal birth? This very readable book is a great peek into an important moment of history.