When Marie Antoinette, the 15th child of Empress Maria Teresa of the Holy Roman Empire, was sent on her way at 14 to marry the French Dauphin, the procession included "132 dignitaries, swollen to twice that number by doctors, hairdressers and servants, including cooks, bakers, blacksmiths and even a dressmaker for running repairs. For this there was need for 57 coaches and 376 horses; that entailed a total of 20,000 horses altogether posted along the route" from Vienna to the island on the Rhine where she would be officially handed over to France.
Once there the young bride would dismount from her carriage, which, protocol demanded, had its back wheels in Saxony and its front in France, and would be brought to a hastily constructed shelter where she would be stripped to the skin and dressed in French clothes. She wasn't necessarily seen as a person but rather as a property transferred from one great House to another to cement an alliance. She was a skinny, ill-educated, frivolous child with a pendulous lower lip and a haughty bearing. She was prime Habsburg beef sent to mate with the Bourbons.
Thus, Antonia Fraser sets the scene for her ambitious biography of possibly the most misunderstood of queens, Marie Antoinette. In 429 pages of text, packed with often dizzying detail of family lineage and court intrigue, Fraser sets out to examine the life as a journey taking little Antoine (as she was called by her parents and siblings) from her birth in 1755 to her appointment with Sainte Guillotine in 1793. It was the death of an elder sister, Marie Josepha, and the disfigurement by smallpox of another (causing a ripple effect in the line-up of marriageable Habsburg girls), which set Antoine on her course with destiny, and it seemed from the outset to have an air of doom about it.
Before she even arrived in France, Marie Antoinette was labelled L'Autrichienne, meaning, literally, the Austrian woman, but also incorporating the French word for bitch, chienne. She was greeted with suspicion by courtiers and the Dauphin's aunts alike - would her loyalties be with France or would she be forever a Habsburg? These suspicions weren't completely without foundation because, as Fraser points out, her position from the Austrian point of view was as a "sleeper" dispatched into the territory of a parallel power. Sent ostensibly to marry and mate, Marie Antoinette came with her own personal control in the form of Count Mercy d'Argenteau and her own confessor, AbbΘ de Vermond. This extremely immature teenager was expected to exert influence over her husband in Austria's favour while never seeming to do so, while at the same time her every move was monitored by Vienna.
Early in her marriage to the Dauphin Louis Auguste, she ran into the worst kind of misfortune. Regular dispatches to Vienna reported the continuing arrival of GΘnΘrale Krottendorf (the Habsburg euphemism for menstruation) and Versailles gossip rumoured the marriage to be unconsummated. Fraser implies that perhaps because of inbreeding the Dauphin was obese, libidinously challenged and possibly physically inhibited by phimosis. In character he was morose, clumsy, uncommunicative and indecisive. In the race to produce an heir to the French throne, his brothers soon overtook the Dauphin and his wife.
Seven years passed without even a pregnancy and it fell to Marie Antoinette's brother Emperor Joseph II to visit with some technical advice as to what went where. She went on to bear two daughters and two sons.
At last, all seemed as it should be. Marie Antoinette was the Princess Di of her time, a paragon of virtue and of fashion, renowned for her floating walk and marble-like skin. But beneath the adulation of the common people there was a nasty undertow of subversive satirising. Popular pamphlets accused her of everything from lesbianism to cuckolding her husband, to servicing half the Palace guard during an orgy. She would forever be the outsider, and when French finances ran out of control and the peasantry starved, she presented the ideal scapegoat.
Her husband, by now King Louis XVI, made ham-fisted efforts to save her reputation, and his own, but they were an abysmal failure. Revolution was under way and the pair were already inexorably on their way to the guillotine.
Florid and baroque, the period leading up to the French Revolution and covering the Terror, must be among the most studied and documented of historical eras. Anyone with even the most casual knowledge of the period will know that Marie Antoinette never actually said "Let them eat cake". Furthermore, modern historical scholarship, with its resistance to simplistic analyses, militates against any historical figure, with the exception of Hitler and maybe Stalin, being regarded as the fount of all evil. In this much there's nothing new about Antonia Fraser's popular biography. Although Fraser does not avoid mentioning the lavish and spendthrift lifestyles of the monarchy and the aristocracy, she provides little explanation for the forces which drew the bourgeoisie and the people together and towards revolt.
For all that, and despite the vexatious accumulation of often unnecessary detail about the royal families of Europe, Marie Antoinette is an absorbing read, written by way of rehabilitation, and a passionate testimony to the power of cultural misogyny gone mad.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist and critic