Marie Antoinette

Desmond Seward's "Marie Antoinette" is one of the best biographies of the queen and better by far than Fraser's or Lever's popular works. Seward is a careful and deliberate historian, not hiding her failings but not twisting them to suit a romantic fairy tale or contemporary bias. He is one of the few historians not afraid to discuss the development of her spiritual life, especially after the death of her oldest son. He dismisses the rumors of an affair with Count Fersen as highly unlikely and not in accord with contemporary sources or with the queen's state of mind and moral habits. The build up to her final tragic hours is so well done that one is emotionally drained by glimpsing her sorrow. I wish this book had a higher profile because it really is one of the best.

Desmond Seward's biography of Marie Antoinette--like the larger volume on the unfortunate Queen written by Antonia Fraser--attempts a balance in the appraisal of this complicated, much reviled figure. Seward's book acknowledges Marie's faults (without whitewashing her frivolity and inexperience) while managing to show the squalid, terrifying ordeal her last years became. One comes away with the sense that Marie Antoinette was doomed from the beginning, and that her many social and political shortcomings prevented her from manipulating an admittedly unmanageable situation. I doubt if any biography can be completely subjective, but I never got the feeling that Seward was misstating facts or pleading Marie's case: he's clearly sympathetic to her, but who wouldn't be, considering the series of humilations and punishments to which she was subject? Reading the book put me in mind to seek other biographies of Marie Antoinette, though I doubt they'd read in such a brisk, storybook manner. I thought this was a fine job of making history come alive, and while the story was at times grotesque, there's a sense here of a life lived in extremes that made the book as fascinating as it was horrifying. If Marie Antoinette was a shallow and sometimes thoughtless spendthrift, she was also, in the end, a tragic figure, a devoted mother, and a ghastly example of what happens when the mighty finally fall.