The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in European history, sociology, political science, and related fields.

Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen is about the last queen of France before the French Revolution. She was born an archduchess of Austria and was married to King Louis XVI.

Marie Antoinette was notably unpopular among French citizens. Some of them accused her of spending too much money on luxury items when many French people were impoverished.

During the French Revolution, the nation’s financial crisis was blamed on her lavish spending and her opposition to social and financial reforms that were recommended by some ministers.

Eventually, both Marie Antoinette and her husband were executed by guillotine after trials at the  Revolutionary Tribunal of high treason.

The TU Library collection includes a number of books about Marie-Antoinette and Revolutionary France.

One of the most famous phrases commonly attributed to Marie-Antoinette was apparently never said by her. Supposedly, when she was told that French farm workers did not have bread to eat, she replied, Let them eat cake.  This is an inaccurate translation from the original French story which is also fiction, but has Marie-Antoinette recommending that the people who do not have bread should eat brioche, a bread of French origin with high egg and butter content.

The book is by the English historian John Hardman, who tries to point out the positive aspects of Marie-Antoinette’s life.

While she did spend a lot of money and was often personally unpleasant to other people, the author explains that French people were very suspicious of Austrians and especially disliked her because she was born in that country.

Marie-Antoinette was always more popular with English observers than with the French. The noted historian Edmund Burke once wrote about her:

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists; and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever.

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

Another reason that Marie-Antoinette was disliked at court and by the public, according to the author, is that she herself believed, it was resented when she became involved in politics. She tended to want to help her friends and harm her enemies too much.

A Scottish historian, Thomas Carlyle, was also sympathetic about Marie-Antoinette, and wrote about her with emotion:

Ill-fated Queen! Her hair is already gray with many cares and crosses; her first-born son is dying in these weeks: black falsehood has ineffaceably soiled her name; ineffaceably while this generation lasts. Of her queenly beauty little remains except its stateliness; not now gracious, but haughty, rigid, silently enduring. With a most mixed feeling, wherein joy has no part, she resigns herself to a day she hoped never to have seen. Poor Marie Antoinette; with thy quick noble instincts; vehement glancings, vision all too fitful narrow for the work thou hast to do! O there are tears in store for thee; bitterest wailings, soft womanly meltings, though thou hast the heart of an imperial Theresa’s Daughter. Thou doomed one, shut thy eyes on the future!

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle

Another English writer, Hilaire Belloc, wrote about Marie-Antoinette:

The eighteenth century, which  had  lost  the  appetite for  tragedy  and  almost  the comprehension  of  it,  was granted,  before  it  closed,  the  most  perfect  subject  of tragedy  which history affords. The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not exalted; but her fate was enormous. It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation of those great men who recreated in Europe the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom.  These accidents united at last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to her predestined end. In all the extensive record of her actions there is nothing beyond the ordinary kind. She was petulant or gay, impulsive or collected, according to the mood of the moment: acting in everything as a woman of her temper — red-headed, intelligent and arduous— will always do: she was moved by changing circumstance to this or that as many million of her sort had been moved before her. But her chance friendships failed not in mere disappointment but in ruin; her lapses of judgment betrayed her not to stumbling but to an abyss; her small, neglected actions matured unseen and reappeared prodigious in the catastrophe of her life as torturers to drag her to the scaffold. Behind such causes of misfortune as can at least be traced in some appalling order there appear, as we read her history, causes more dreadful because they are mysterious and unreasoned: ill-omened dates, fortunes quite unaccountable, and continually a dark coincidence, reawaken in us that native dread of Destiny which the Faith, after centuries of power, has hardly exorcised. The business, then, of this book is not to recount from yet another aspect that decisive battle whereby political justice was recovered for us all, nor to print once more in accurate sequence the life of a Queen whose actions have been preserved in  the minutest detail, but to show a Lady whose hands — for all the freedom of their gesture – were moved by influences other than her own, and whose feet, though their steps seemed wayward and self-determined, were ordered for her in one path that led inexorably to its certain goal.

Marie Antoinette by Hilaire Belloc

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)