The Five best marie antoinette books around the last french queen

Interestingly, Marie Antoinette’s birthday falls just in the end Souls Day. Vilified throughout the French Revolution, Marie Antoinette’s status has gotten a pardon recently. Because of several supportive films, including Sofia Coppola’s 2006 film “Marie Antoinette” (starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman) and also the 2012 French film “Farewell, My Queen” (directed by Benoît Jacquot, starring Diane Krueger, Léa Seydoux, and Virginie Ledoyen), the queen has lost her icy remove. Both in, the queen is portrayed like a vulnerable and passionate lady. Yes, she may love cake, grandiose fashion, and gambling, but her frivolity is presented like a reaction to the sheltered and isolated existence she experienced at court.

Cinema isn’t the only cultural site which has labored to redeem the queen. This season, a significant retrospective from the queen’s portrait painter and friend Louise Élisabeth Vigée LeBrun traveled towards the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Several massive portraits from the queen and her children featured conspicuously within the exhibition. Because the bicentennial of French independence, several serious books happen to be printed that chronicle the brief existence from the last French queen. Listed here are five of the greatest books on Marie Antoinette that explore the way the polarizing queen was caught between your legacy of royalty and also the push for revolution.

Marie Antoinette: Your Way by Antonia Fraser

This trade paperback is the grade of contemporary biographies on Marie Antoinette. Legendary biographer Antonia Fraser has researched and written extensively about European royalty. Here, Fraser positions Marie Antoinette like a tragic figure. Her supportive perspective casts the queen like a lonely teen, sent from her native Austria to some foreign French court that never fully accepted her. Celebrating her joie de vivre instead of damning her carefree ways, it’s possible to observe how Sofia Coppola made a decision to adapt this unique biography on her 2006 film.

Towards the Scaffold: The Existence of Marie Antoinette by Carolly Erickson

Historian Carolly Erickson also appeals up to the more vulnerable narrative all around the existence of Marie Antoinette. She emphasizes the innocence that Marie Antoinette possessed like a youthful lady who found herself thrust from her home in Austria and right into a complicated and deceitful French court. Confronted with an infantile dauphin for any husband and castigated to supply an heir, Marie Antoinette switched to delicious delights as a way of escape. Like a mother and queen, she found greater confidence within the role existence has cast on her. Yet her devotion to her new homeland and husband grew to become her downfall as she grew to become victim towards the revolution through her husband’s clumsy decisions.

The Final Queen of France by Evelyne Lever

Converted in the French, The Final Queen of France draws a fleshed out portrait from the French court. Lever pulls from the wide quantity of primary sources including diaries, documents, letters, and firsthand histories to recreate the extravagant world that in france they royalty spiraled to the finish. Beyond Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, Lever concentrates alternatively figures in the game. This inclusive portrait provides a historic narrative that reads like a tightly plotted tale of fiction. Because of the details she includes, the readers may marvel at just how these historic details are really true.

Queen of favor: What Marie Antoinette Used towards the Revolution by Caroline Weber

Using fashion being an access point, Barnard College French and Comparative Literature professor Caroline Weber carefully analyzes the way Marie Antoinette grew to become a lightning fishing rod for that adoration and hostility all around the French monarchy. As was traditional, before Marie Antoinette walked into France to be able to marry Louis-Auguste, who’d become King Louis XVI, she was stripped naked of her Austrian clothing. Once she dressed herself in entirely French attire could she enter her new homeland. She accomplished it in the tender chronilogical age of 14. This introduction grew to become an obsession that increased tremendously until she grew to become a well known figure. While history’s opinion of her may wax and wane, her effect on fashion won’t ever alter.

Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig

Recently, the writer Stefan Zweig has enjoyed a brand new audience because of the New You are able to Overview of Books’ reissued books in addition to his role being an inspiration for Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Hopefully, his biographies will start to have a wider audience too. Inspired through the correspondence between Marie Antoinette and her mother in addition to her lover Count Axel von Fersen, Zweig produced a mental biography. Inside it, he sifts with the inner struggles of the lady who must conserve a very public face while suppressing her private misery through wealthy diversion before a violent and tragic finish. This type of discussion may lead someone to consider Marie Antoinette because the first modern celebrity. It’s been stated this biography was the muse for Antonia Fraser’s Marie Antoinette: Your Way.

Resourse: http://signature-reads.com/2016/11/the-5-best-marie-antoinette-books-on-the-last-french-queen/

PBS Marie Antoinette [SD, 854×480].mp4

Video COMMENTS:

jeances severo: I just love Marie Antoinette's story, I wouldnt get tired hearing it and telling it over and over again. She's one of my favorite queens. Her life was tragically beautiful.

Farshid Behroozian: Can't be more agreed ..

Heidi Embrey: Is Satan a big hero of yours too? Hitler? This woman was responsible for millions of deaths. The epitome of evil.

ohsweetheaven: this documentary made her sound guilty…

jeances severo: ohsweetheaven I dont blame her for what had happened to France

Heidi Embrey: Not like every other teenager. I wanted social justice and human rights as a teenager. I had no interest in LOOKING PRETTY as you say. And Should have ''thanked the french? They were starving and dying to pay for her lavish stuff don't you all get this?

Anne Boleyn: Her duty as queen was to produce heirs and this she did, once her hubby got over his neurotic aversion to sex. She had no political influence over the king so she could do nothing there.

alejandromolinac: I think this documentary didn't really show the natural aversion the French felt towards Austria to which she seemed to have been fallen into…. Also they made it seem she was totally clueless about the poor… Which I don't think she was…

Anne Boleyn: The people who knew her personally, including her servants, loved and revered her. They said how kind and humane she was. She certainly identified with the poor of Austria as her mother taught her to do. At Versailles it was much more formal and she had to toe the line, but she did rebel in the ways she could, as teenagers do. Sadly she was made a scapegoat for all of France's ills, which lay with previous regimes who set the political tone and the rules at court. And her poor young husband who never wanted to be king and was never prepared for kingship or trained in statecraft. It was a pity that all the heirs ahead of him died and he was thrown into something he had no hope of coping with.

Robert Posey: Superb documentary !