Marie-Antoinette
The Making of a French Queen
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Marie-Antoinette
Buy Now for $29.99
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Narrated by:
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Jonathan Cowley
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By:
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John Hardman
About this listen
A new look which fundamentally overturns our understanding of this famously "out of touch" queen
Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story.
Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it.
©2019 John Hardman (P)2019 Tantor(1) Bizarre pacing (for a book about Marie Antoinette, it tore through/ignored many key parts of her early life, then would get bogged down in trivial minutiae about court family trees that added nothing to the story).
(2) The book is not very well-edited: numerous grammatical errors (subject-verb disagreement being a particular bugbear) and a strange, oscillating, tone that swings between gossip magazine article and dry, scientific report. It doesn't read like an academic piece.
(3) Author has a heavy bias against Marie Antoinette - not to say she didn't have plenty of flaws, but the picture created by this story is that she was simultaneously stupid, flippant, conniving, manipulative, powerless, ignored and a deeply powerful, driving force behind a large majority of the king's decisions. If you are interested in Marie Antoinette, an incomparably better, and more nuanced, book is Antonia Fraser's 'Marie Antoinette: The Journey's. Though Fraser clearly comes from a very sympathetic position, her analyses are nevertheless well-researched, well-written, and much more balanced, compelling and insightful than any contained in this book.
(4) Perhaps the most annoying thing (which, to be fair, is outside the author's control): the narrator. It is a little odd, but not unbearable, that his voice and tone sound like he's reading a children's story. But what finally made me give up was his awful french pronunciation; one can only take so many "Mar-*FLEM*-ie Antoinette"s.
Save yourself and give this one a miss.
Superficial and irritating
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