Marie Antoinette

Author: Antonia Fraser
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 1400033284
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 541

Book Description
France's iconic queen, Marie Antoinette, wrongly accused of uttering the infamous "Let them eat cake," was alternately revered and reviled during her lifetime. For centuries since, she has been the object of debate, speculation, and the fascination so often accorded illustrious figures in history. Married in mere girlhood, this essentially lighthearted child was thrust onto the royal stage and commanded by circumstance to play a significant role in European history. Antonia Fraser's lavish and engaging portrait excites compassion and regard for all aspects of the queen, immersing the reader not only in the coming-of-age of a graceful woman, but in the culture of an unparalleled time and place.

Marie Antoinette

Author: Evelyne Lever
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312283339
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
A biography of the French queen explores the intrigue surrounding her life from her birth, through her unhappy marriage, her lavish life at Versailles, to the events leading up to her death by beheading during the French Revolution.

Marie-Antoinette

Author: Helene Delalex
Publisher: Getty Publications
ISBN: 1606064835
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Book Description
Marie-Antoinette (1755–1793) continues to fascinate historians, writers, and filmmakers more than two centuries after her death. She became a symbol of the excesses of France’s aristocracy in the eighteenth century that helped pave the way to dissolution of the country’s monarchy. The great material privileges she enjoyed and her glamorous role as an arbiter of fashion and a patron of the arts in the French court, set against her tragic death on the scaffold, still spark the popular imagination. In this gorgeously illustrated volume, the authors find a fresh and nuanced approach to Marie-Antoinette’s much-told story through the objects and locations that made up the fabric of her world. They trace the major events of her life, from her upbringing in Vienna as the archduchess of Austria, to her ascension to the French throne, to her execution at the hands of the revolutionary tribunal. The exquisite objects that populated Marie-Antoinette’s rarefied surroundings—beautiful gowns, gilt-mounted furniture, chinoiserie porcelains, and opulent tableware—are depicted. But so too are possessions representing her personal pursuits and private world, including her sewing kit, her harp, her children’s toys, and even the simple cotton chemise she wore as a condemned prisoner. The narrative is sprinkled with excerpts from her correspondence, which offer a glimpse into her personality and daily life. Visually rich and engaging, Marie-Antoinette offers a fascinating look at the multifaceted life of France’s last, ill-fated queen.

Marie-Antoinette

Author: John Hardman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300249039
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 517

Book Description
This “wonderfully gripping biography” digs beneath the famous legend to present a nuanced and revealing portrait of a serious-mined monarch (Allan Massie, Wall Street Journal). As the last Queen of France before the French Revolution, Marie-Antoinette was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, while today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. But who was she really? In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on her story. Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how she refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, bravely took over the helm from her faltering husband, and, when revolution broke out, worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it. Named a 2020 Book of the Year by The Spectator

Moi and Marie Antoinette

Author: Lynn Cullen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1582349584
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Sebastien relates the life of Marie Antoinette as she goes from being a teenager devoted to him, her pug dog, to becoming the Queen of France and mother to two children.

Marie Antoinette and the Last Garden of Versailles

Author: Christian Duvernois
Publisher: Rizzoli International Publications
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Book Description
Marie-Antoinette has been idolized as the height of eighteenth-century French style and vilified as the spark that ignited the French Revolution. This book departs from such traditional interpretations of the infamous queen’s reign and chooses to reflect on the humanistic aspects of her private realm. To escape the formalities and royal obligations of Louis XVI’s court, Marie-Antoinette created a private realm of pleasure for herself at the Petit Trianon and Hameau, where she planted the first Anglo-Chinese garden; created a trysting grotto; a working farm; and revolutionized architecture and gardening trends for the century to come. Marie-Antoinette’s entire private domain and its story are told in beautiful photographic detail by François Halard for the first time since its recent restoration and accompanied by well-researched texts by garden expert Christian Duvernois.

Queen of Fashion

Author: Caroline Weber
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429936479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
In this dazzling new vision of the ever-fascinating queen, a dynamic young historian reveals how Marie Antoinette's bold attempts to reshape royal fashion changed the future of France Marie Antoinette has always stood as an icon of supreme style, but surprisingly none of her biographers have paid sustained attention to her clothes. In Queen of Fashion, Caroline Weber shows how Marie Antoinette developed her reputation for fashionable excess, and explains through lively, illuminating new research the political controversies that her clothing provoked. Weber surveys Marie Antoinette's "Revolution in Dress," covering each phase of the queen's tumultuous life, beginning with the young girl, struggling to survive Versailles's rigid traditions of royal glamour (twelve-foot-wide hoopskirts, whalebone corsets that crushed her organs). As queen, Marie Antoinette used stunning, often extreme costumes to project an image of power and wage war against her enemies. Gradually, however, she began to lose her hold on the French when she started to adopt "unqueenly" outfits (the provocative chemise) that, surprisingly, would be adopted by the revolutionaries who executed her. Weber's queen is sublime, human, and surprising: a sometimes courageous monarch unwilling to allow others to determine her destiny. The paradox of her tragic story, according to Weber, is that fashion—the vehicle she used to secure her triumphs—was also the means of her undoing. Weber's book is not only a stylish and original addition to Marie Antoinette scholarship, but also a moving, revelatory reinterpretation of one of history's most controversial figures.

Queen of France

Author: Andre Castelot
Publisher: Ishi Press
ISBN: 9784871878548
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
This is the biography of one of the most tragic women in History. It is the story of a frivolous young girl who threw wild parties and spent a lot of her husband's money and for that reason, and that reason alone, she had her head chopped off in public. The back cover photo here shows Marie Antoinette being given her last rights by a clergyman as she was waiting before the guillotine for the executioners to cut off her head, and while a crowd of thousands watched. Her last words were one of apology to one of her executioners, when she accidentally stepped on his foot. All of the events of the Life of Marie Antoinette are brilliantly explained in this biography by Andre Castelot. The most haunting and harrowing pages of the biography are Castelot's darkly etched picture of the Queen in the culminating moments of her life. Perhaps it is not in the least a paradox that one of the most arrantly self-indulgent women should, in her adversity, provide one of the most memorable images of mother love."

Marie Antoinette, Serial Killer

Author: Katie Alender
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545576997
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
Heads will roll! Paris, France: a city of fashion, chocolate croissants, and cute boys. Colette Iselin is thrilled be there for the first time, on her spring break class trip.But a series of gruesome murders are taking place around the city, putting everyone on edge. And as she tours the sights, Colette keeps seeing a strange vision: a pale woman in a ball gown and powdered wig, who looks like Marie Antoinette.Colette knows her status-obsessed friends won't believe her, so she seeks out the help of a charming French boy. Together, they discover that the murder victims areall descendants of people who ultimately brought about Marie Antoinette's beheading. The queen's ghost has been awakened, and now she's wreaking her bloodthirsty revenge.And Colette may just be one of those descendants . . . which means she might not make it out of this trip alive.Acclaimed author Katie Alender brings heart-stopping suspense to this story of betrayal, glamour, mystery, history--and one killer queen.

From Marie-Antoinette's Garden

Author: Elisabeth De Feudeau
Publisher: Flammarion
ISBN: 9782080203120
Category : Gardens
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A horticultural tour of Marie-Antoinette's domain, the lavishly constructed gardens at Versailles, accompanied by eighteenth-century archival illustrations. Plants, flowers, and trees were Marie-Antoinette's passion; she transformed the Petit Trianon's gardens into an enchanted escape from the oppressive shackles of Versailles. Based on archival documents, this book meanders through Marie-Antoinette's estate as the queen herself would have walked it: traversing hyacinths, buttercups, and anemones in the French Gardens, via winding paths in the Anglo-Chinese Gardens, through the conifers of the Belvedere Gardens--where fabulous nocturnal parties were hosted--past the entrancing aromas of the shrubs surrounding the Temple of Love, to the wildflowers of the Garden of Solitude.