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Marie Antoinette: The Courageous End by Margaret Anne MacLeod: book review




Marie Antoinette: The Courageous End (2018) is set in 1792, the last year of the life of Marie Antoinette, wife of King Louis XVI of France. 

Four years after Louis married Marie Antoinette, he become king, living in the Versailles Palace, near Paris, from 1774-1792. Married at 14 years of age, Marie Antoinette was 18 when she reigned over Versailles in luxurious and extravagant fashion. But the novel begins in August 1792, at age 36, and the advent of the French Revolution. The people of Paris were discordant, protesting in anger. Paris was rising!

Holed up in the Tuileries Palace, Marie Antoinette knew that the revolutionaries would attack at dawn. Her husband was weak and apathetic, but she was not. She fought for her life and that of their children. Enduring the onslaught for six hours, could her lover for the past 18 years, the handsome Swedish nobleman Axel de Fersen, save her? 

King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793. Marie Antoinette was on trial by the Revoutionary Tribunal – in which her lawyers had less than 24 hours to prepare her defense – imprisoned in solitary confinement, and executed eight months after the death of her husband. ‘The authorities had taken every precaution imaginable to make even the most determined attempt at a last-minute rescue impossible’ – 30,000 troops guarded the streets to the Place de la Revolution where the guillotine had been erected. Unlike her husband, she was courageous to the end. 

At the end of the book, the author includes extracts from personal letters, and a summary of ‘what happened next?’ – her children’s lives after the deaths of their parents. 

This is a blow-by-blow account of the people in the palace, in politics, on the streets – the incidents, the actions, the brutality, and her solitude – from Marie Antoinette’s point of view in an attempt to persuade readers of her fair qualities. Was she the Queen of France that brought her country to financial ruin? Was her death the end of class conflict, obscene wealth, and extravagant aristocracy? The author dares readers to take sides in support of, or opposed to, Marie Antoinette’s trial and death for high treason. 

Quite an interesting read. 




MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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