Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France - hardcover

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., 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