He mentions in passing the many controversies about her life before and during the Revolution without explaining them. Castelot shows the evil of some revolutionaries but is careful not to take too hard a position against the Revolution - a difficult task when the satanic malice of the French Revolution was so well documented. Unlike most 19th century French historians, he tries to take a more neutral position towards the French Revolution and its victims. It is very lively and interesting, with lots of actual dialogue. He wrote it in the 1950s for a popular French audience. His style was more that of a journalist and a playwright than that of a professional historian. The author has had a mass of documents at his disposal while writing this book, many of them newly discovered in Viennese and Parisian archives, and never before presented to the public.Īndré Castelot wrote a decent biography of Marie Antoinette. We are carried from the intimate chambers of the young queen, through the incredible splendor and shocking discomfort of life at Court, to the awesome sounds of the rising mob, the last desperate flights, and the ultimate imprisonment and execution. Then, Louis XV died, and the courtiers coming to salute the new nineteen-year-old king found him and his queen on their knees weeping bitterly, "Oh, God," they cried, embracing each other, "protect us we are too young to reign."Īndré Castelot, a distinguished French scholar and historian, has in this book written one of the most brilliant of recent biographies, which makes Marie Antoinette, from her arrival in France, to the day she rode to her death in a cart, amazingly alive for the reader. Yet she soon won everyone's heart and had all Paris at her charming feet.īut as time went by, not only the court but the country as a whole and Marie Antoinette's mother (Maria Theresa of Austria, four hundred leagues away, and constantly advising her daughter by mail) were alarmed by the fantastic parties, wild extravagances, and excessive pleasures of the Dauphin's bride. The girl had many problems to cope with at the French court, among them her husband's lack of interest, the King's spinster daughters (almost her only companions at first) and Madame du Barry, the King's favorite.
He was a shy, heavy young man, overshadowed by his grandfather, Louis XV. She was fourteen when she first met her fifteen-year-old husband, the Dauphin of France. She was Marie Antoinette, a lovely Austrian princess.
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