This is so fascinating, I've learned so much about Queen Marie Antoinette that I never even heard of before! I am doing a magazine article for school, but even though it is only supposed to be about the bad things about Marie, I now know about some of the good things about her too. Thank you Leah! No, thank you AnonyMouse, for taking the time to vis my blog and leave such a kind comment! You do have to know that she herself was almost hated by her own mother and that her lack of education was the product of neglect.
I personally see her as a poor, naive, young woman. She did spend a lot but how the heck was she supposed to know? She was never educated in state affairs. All she knew was that her duty was to dress well, make the palace look beautiful, to produce children, and do some charity.
I don't really think she was an ingrate for the spinning wheel- you also have to know that at this point, she and her young husband were still weren't getting along quite well. They had no common interests and at her still you age, why would she spend her time with a spinning wheel rather than doing mischievous things? And I really don't think it mattered to Louis whether his young wife appreciated his gift or not. All that mattered was he was able to craft a spinning wheel and he was very proud of it.
He wouldn't need it either way even though he purposely made it for Antonia. It was the self-satisfaction he was after. And by goodness, she was a princess raised by an ever fashionable empress. It's not like she purposely lavished herself with extravagance, she grew up rich even though they lived quite "simply". It was a sense of style embedded in her skin. She never realized that it was perceived as "lavishness" by the French people until it was too late.
In short, she was raised fashionable. She didn't know how hard diamonds and pearls had to be acquired, how would she know? From the spectacle of her adversity he concluded that. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The few facts of her life are overshadowed by analysis of her handwriting and her astrological chart.
Although Bashor admits that the queen faced her execution with a bravery that was noted even by the fiercest republicans, his only interest is her sexual reputation. John Hardman occupies a middle position on this spectrum of opinions, but his stance is not just middle-of-the-road.
Marie-Antoinette: The Making of a French Queen presents her as much more than a symbol whose meaning is in the eye of her beholder. Despite her lack of education, Marie-Antoinette quickly learned to make her way among the various factions at the French court, and from onward, Hardman claims, she intervened with increasing success in the selection of ministers and the determination of policy. She was able to act in this manner because the king lost his nerve in the face of a growing fiscal crisis and the adamant refusal of the courts and specially convened aristocratic assemblies to agree to his plans for reform.
The real twist in the tale came in , however, when the queen entered into an improbable alliance with Antoine Barnave, a brilliant twenty-nine-year-old lawyer from Grenoble and leading revolutionary.
Barnave was one of the three commissioners from the National Assembly sent to accompany the royal family back to Paris after their attempted flight that June. Barnave, in contrast, showed real concern for the family and gradually won the confidence of the queen. After their return to Paris, and despite the official fiction that the royal family had been kidnapped, the king and queen were kept under strict surveillance, making it impossible for Barnave to visit them in a public manner.
So he and the queen exchanged secret letters using a simple code for names. The supposed goal of this pact was a strengthened constitutional monarchy. War would be avoided, order would be restored, and the revolution, Barnave hoped, would end with the guarantee of fundamental changes but the monarchy still in place.
None of these plans came to fruition, though they were no more fantastical than the other options then under consideration. In a country shaped by centuries of monarchical rule, a republic remained inconceivable for most people, including the majority of the National Assembly, even after the flight of the king and queen. It only became a viable alternative when war threatened to destroy the revolution altogether; the republic was not declared until September The monarchists proved incapable of formulating a unified position, however, much less a united government.
The emperor convinced himself that the mere threat of retaliation would force the revolutionaries to back down and that if war came—which it did, at least partly in response to his and Prussian attempts at intimidation—it would be short and entirely to his advantage, especially once he concluded a secret alliance with his arch-enemy Prussia in February War turned out to be unavoidable, but only after the initiatives undertaken by Barnave and others failed to shore up the monarchy.
In April the king himself proposed a declaration of war on Austria because he dreamed that it would finally bring resolution.
Either France would lose within months or, if French armies managed somehow to prevail, the aristocratic commanders would turn their troops back on Paris and chase out the increasingly bumptious republicans. These projections proved as illusory as those of Austria and Prussia. The menace and then reality of invasion galvanized the people of Paris and radicalized the deputies who had been elected to a new Legislative Assembly in September They arrested the king in August and called a constitutional convention that began by declaring a republic, then brought him to trial and executed him as a traitor.
By then, Barnave had long since given up and gone back to Grenoble, and Marie-Antoinette had returned to her families, both the French and Austrian ones. She sent the French campaign plans to the Austrians and to Fersen, whom she loved and who was most likely her lover, and she arranged for the king to promise a subsidy to the Prussians to pay for their invasion.
The sudden unraveling of the unlikely partnership between Barnave and the queen in early January raises many questions. Since no falling out between the two has been recorded, why did he leave Paris and attempt to retire from public life? Hardman insists that both of them were sincere. Barnave saw an opportunity to get the queen and king to see the necessity of cooperating with the constitutional monarchists if they wanted to save the monarchy and themselves.
To explain his departure, he cited family business and a simple desire to return home. A new assembly had been elected, and by law he could not serve in it. At the end of July she wrote to the Austrian ambassador:.
Right now I have a sort of correspondence with the last two which no one knows about, even their friends. I have to do them justice. Her image features on boxes of chocolates and macarons snapped up by tourists and she is celebrated in literature, contemporary arts and cinema.
This week, to mark the anniversary of her death, the exhibition Marie-Antoinette: the Metamorphosis of an Image opens at the Conciergerie, a former prison on the left bank of the River Seine, where the queen was held in a cell before her execution. It features works of art and objects including her last letter, portraits, caricatures and other representations, and contemporary uses of her image in manga, film and fashion.
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