New take on Marie Antoinette

Kirsten Dunst as Marie-Antoinette with Jason Schwartzman in Sofia Coppola's new film. Picture / Reuters

PARIS - She was neither monster, meddler nor traitor, but a devoted mother and a good wife. She may have been a little dizzy at times and was big on shopping, yet was sent to her death by jealous rivals, vicious slander and bloodthirsty mobs. And she never said "let them eat cake".

Fairer winds have started to blow for Marie-Antoinette, one of the most tragic figures in France's long and colourful past.

For more than two centuries, French school history books have never been flattering about the young woman who did so much to spark the 1789 revolution.

Portraits of the wife of King Louis XVI have traditionally placed a heavy emphasis on her frivolity or supposed immorality.

The long list includes her buying three or four dresses per week, her love of jewellery, her retinue of favourites, the reputed string of lovers of both sexes, the endless parties and card games - and of course her extraordinary realm at the Chateau de Versailles, where she had her own palace and even a theatre and hamlet where she could play at being an actress or countrywoman.

And she was not just an amiable bubble-head, according to this view. She was good at bearing grudges and interfering in affairs of state, getting hubby to fire ministers or officials she didn't like. And by trying to stir up a counter-revolution after the storming of the Bastille, she doomed French monarchy forever.

She made it impossible for Louis, always weak and indecisive, to make the transition from absolute to constitutional King. Both died in the maelstrom of the Terror, separately hauled to the guillotine set up in the Place de la Revolution.

Today, though, the pendulum is swinging back in Marie-Antoinette's favour.

By remarkable coincidence or commercial stealth, a Hollywood movie and four new biographies of the beheaded Queen have emerged, giving a more positive view of her brief life. Timed with this, Marie-Antoinette's domain at Versailles is just completing a €3 million ($6.02 million) overhaul. The result is a burst of heart-searching, with many asking whether it is now time for France to feel penitent over her death.

"The so-called Austrian woman has taken her revenge on her executioners, the Robespierres and the Fourquier-Tinvilles, who have been cast into the dungeons of history," said Le Figaro in a special edition entitled Marie-Antoinette, Superstar.

Marie Antoinette - a contender for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival - is at least the ninth cinematic take on the Hapsburg Princess.

Directed by 35-year-old Sofia Coppola, best known for Lost in Translation, the film is inspired by the biography of Marie-Antoinette by Lady Antonia Fraser with Kirsten Dunst in the title role.

To get a modern feel, the soundtrack includes music from New Order, the Cure and Bow Wow Wow, and at one point, a pair of trendy Converse sneakers can be spotted for a few seconds among the 18th-century courtly slippers.

Not surprisingly, such anachronisms have triggered near-apoplexy among historians.

But others like the fresh feel of this Marie Antoinette.