Antonia Fraser: Marie Antoinette: The journey

By MARGIE THOMSON

It turns out that the unlucky Queen of France almost certainly never exhorted starving peasants to eat cake if there was no bread - it was a line attributed to many princesses before her, like an historical urban myth.

Marie Antoinette, Fraser reveals, was a victim from birth, a pawn in the hands of her calculating Austrian mother, already known as the "Austrian bitch" before she had even set foot in France, because Austria and France had hated each other for generations.

That is, she was hated not for who she was but what she was, and became the scapegoat for a French society and government that desperately needed changing. She was a victim long before she lost her head.

This is no hagiography (we see her imprudence, her love of pleasure) but it is time to incorporate her good points, her sensitivity, her philanthropy, her desire to do good, into her historical portrait, and Fraser does it with rigour and flair.

Orion

$39.95