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Portrait Miniature of a Lady, John Smart, 1785

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Miniature of Archduchesses Maria Josepha and Maria Johanna Gabriela of Austria, with a jewelry box.

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A painting depicting Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun painting Marie Antoinette by Gustave Bettinger (1872-1914).

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I feel a lot of historical fiction and pop history makes the mistake of confusing a lack of evidence with a lack of personality, even down to a lack of personhood. People who die young, then and now, were real people. They had personalities. They got angry, they could be happy and sad, they wanted things, they cracked jokes, they loved people. Even if this doesn't appear on the historical record, this is true. They didn't spend their entire lives tucked up in chairs or beds and doing nothing but fainting or coughing blood into handkerchiefs like a tragic saint as violins softly played and angels wept. Those who died as a result of long-term illness weren't husks of human beings, they were still people. And that makes the assumption that death at a young age was the result of a chronic, long-term illness when it could just as easily be a sudden death.

I think this fact is particularly lost when it comes to women or girls, particularly those who died from complications in childbirth. I wish we spent a bit of time seeing them as people who, despite the lack of evidence, would have had a distinct personality, instead of seeing them passively tragic victims who were always doomed to die and so never developed a personality.

It's one of the reasons that I really appreciate the survival of two literary memorials to Blanche of Lancaster that showed the impact of her existence on those around her or attempts to build up a sense of what a woman was like outside of her death (Chris-Given-Wilson's discussion on Mary de Bohun was very much the basis for this post of mine). Even if the evidence can't bring give a sense of these people in same breadth as long-lived contemporaries it does tell us something about them. In the case of Blanche, we may never know what she was like beyond the heavily idealised memorial but we know she was valued and missed when she died. That must have been because of who she was.

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A portrait of Marie Antoinette and her son (presumably Louis Charles) by Luigi Vigotti, 1839.

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Reading Treasure: And Marie Antoinette Said: “I was a queen, and you took away my crown…”

Did Marie Antoinette really say this popular quote? Let’s take a closer look at its origins and possible authenticity!

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Although it is apparently a subject which is soon exhausted, Marie Antoinette ever remains of fascinating interest; she is one of those historical women who again and again attract our attention. Her life falls into two sharply defined portions: twenty years of triumph, which cost her five years of martyrdom. … If she is far from blameless in her youth, she develops on the other hand, in the days of her misfortune, a greatness of soul becoming in her as a queen, and as the child of Maria Theresa.

–Clara Tschudi, Marie Antoinette, 1894.

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Details from various 20th century illustrations of Marie Antoinette.

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The places that once knew her, know her forever. At Versailles, where we went one Sunday afternoon to see the great fountains play, we felt her wondrous presence everywhere. She walked smiling down the banqueting hall and the grand staircase, and out upon the terraces and beside the fountains. She stood, white with terror, but still all the queen, on the balcony from whence, eighty-six years ago, she looked on the howling, murderous mob. She drove before us, out of the great gate, a prisoner.

No other Queen, no royal mistress, so haunts the great palace … but she is there, not by the power of her beauty or misfortune, but by the grace of her penitence.

–Grace Greenwood, November 21, 1875, The New York Times

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A (very) non-exhaustive list of English-language books about Marie Antoinette. In no particular order.

General Biographies

Marie Antoinette: The Tragic Queen by Dorothy Moulton Mayer

Marie Antoinette by Desmond Seward

Marie Antoinette: The Journey by Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France by Évelyne Lever

Marie Antoinette by Joan Haslip

Marie Antoinette by John Hearsey

Marie Antoinette by Philippe Huisman

The Indomitable Marie Antoinette by Simone Bertière

Marie Antoinette: Portrait of an Average Woman by Stefan Zweig

Louis and Antoinette by Vincent Cronin

Marie Antoinette by Andre Castelot

Youth Biographies

Marie Antoinette and the Decline of French Monarchy by Nancy Lotz

Spilling the Beans on Marie Antoinette by Mick Gowar

Marie Antoinette by Katie Daynes

Who Was Marie Antoinette? by Dana Meachen Rau

Marie Antoinette, Queen of France by Mary Englar

Marie Antoinette, Fashionable Queen or Greedy Royal? by Sarah Powers Webb

Marie Antoinette, Madame Deficit by Liz Hockinson

Marie Antoinette: Controversial Queen of France by Heather E. Schwartz

Marie Antoinette’s Versailles & Petit Trianon Non-Fiction

Marie-Antoinette and the Last Garden at Versailles by Christain Duvernois

Marie-Antoinette and the Petit Trianon at Versailles by Martin Chapman

The Private Realm of Marie Antoinette by Marie-France Boyer

From Marie Antoinette’s Garden: An Eighteenth-Century Horticultural Album by Elisabeth de Feydeau

Marie Antoinette’s Versailles by Cécile Berly

Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture by Meredith Martin

Other Non-Fiction

Marie Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen edited by Dena Goodman

The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie Antoinette by Chantal Thomas

Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution by Carolyn Weber

The Queen’s Necklace: Marie Antoinette and the Scandal that Shocked and Mystified France by Frances Mossiker

Last Days of Marie Antoinette: An Historical Sketch by Ronald Sutherland Gower

Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Henrietta Maria and Marie Antoinette by Carolyn Harris

Marie-Antoinette Style by Adrien Goetz

The Fatal Friendship: Marie Antoinette, Count Fersen and the Flight to Varennes by Stanley Loomis

A Day with Marie Antoinette by Hélène Delalex

Secrets of Marie Antoinette: A Collection of Letters by Olivier Bernier

Fiction

Farewell, My Queen by Chantal Thomas

Flaunting, Extravagant Queen by Jean Plaidy

Marie Antoinette Trilogy by Juliet Grey

The Queen’s Confession by Victoria Holt

Abundance: A Novel of Marie Antoinette by Sena Jeter Naslund

Versailles: A Novel by Kathryn Davis

Marie Antoinette by F.W. Kenyon

Youth Fiction

Marie Antoinette, Princess of Versailles by Kathryn Lasky

The Secret Diary of a Princess by Melanie Clegg

The Bad Queen: Rules and Instructions for Marie Antoinette by Carolyn Meyer

Marie Antoinette, Phantom Queen by Annie Goetzinger

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer by Katie Alender

The Time-Traveling Fashionista at the Court of Marie Antoinette by Bianca Turetsky

Moi & Marie Antoinette by Lynn Cullen

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Plantade wrote a work brimming over with emotion, very feminine as befits [Marie Antoinette] but also one of ineffable gentleness, unspeakable brutality and respectful sweetness, which left us speechless after the final chords.

–Hervé Niquet, on Charles-Henri Plantade’s ‘Messe de Morts’ in memory of Marie Antoinette. You can listen to it on Spotify for free.  It is also available on Youtube.

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Thoughts on Farewell, My Queen (2012)

Some thoughts on what worked (and what didn’t work) in this adaptation of Chantal Thomas’ novel of the same name.

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For a long time to come everyone who awaited death in [the Conciergerie] asked: “Which was her room? What did she say?” It was her memory, already, that dominated all the others.

–G. Lenotre, The Last Days of Marie Antoinette

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(Thoughts On) L’Autrichienne (1990)

Some thoughts on one of the most overlooked yet historically rich films about Marie Antoinette’s final days.

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Marie Antoinette in Film

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Vienna, November 2, 1755.

Her windows wide open, as was her habit, regardless of the rigors of the season, the Empress Maria Theresa worked without respite. She was busy annotating reports, signing decrees, dictating her orders when the first pains suddenly made her wince. The thirty-eight-year-old sovereign, ruler of an empire, was to give birth for the fifteenth time in her life. Nature had reclaimed her rights and the female head of state could do nothing but stoically await her deliverance. But since Maria Theresa hated wasting time, she took advantage of the momentary inconvenience to have a decayed tooth extracted. Once that operation was disposed of, she settled, following German custom, into the low armchair where she would give birth to her child. Word was rushed to her husband, Francis of Lorraine, that the birth was imminent. The Prince was attending the All Souls’ Day mass with his son Joseph at the Augustinian church. After arranging for the young man to be escorted back to his apartment lest he hear “improper things,” he ran to his wife’s bedside. It was a difficult labor, but at around seven-thirty in the evening, a perfectly formed infant girl came into the world. On the following day, she was baptized Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna. Since all the archduchesses were given the first name of Maria, they were usually addressed by their second name. Maria Theresa would refer to her youngest daughter as Antonia. It was the French who would call her Marie Antoinette.

Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France - Evelyne Lever

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Yesterday I spent the time more in France than Austria, and I remembered all the happy times in the past, which is indeed gone. Just the memory consoles me…

–Maria Theresa to Marie Antoinette, 3 November 1780; written the day after Marie Antoinette’s birthday and just a few weeks before Maria Theresa’s death.

[translation: Olivier Bernier, Secrets of Marie Antoinette]