At first sight, it may seem bizarre that this aspect of her life needs underlining, given the part she played in that political upheaval par excellence, the Revolution. He chooses to focus on the political role Marie Antoinette played, from becoming queen of France in 1774 to her execution in 1793. What ensures this is the particular approach Hardman takes. Of course, that alone does not guarantee that this biography will provide a major contribution to the subject. As the author of the standard biography of her husband, Louis XVI, John Hardman has every qualification for turning his attention to Marie Antoinette. The answer, as this fascinating biography proves, is emphatically yes.
After so many books and so much polemic about the queen and her fate, is there anything more to say? At an early age, however, both left home for France (Marie Antoinette at fifteen, Napoleon at nine), and both were defined by the most extraordinary event in its modern history, the French Revolution – Napoleon as its beneficiary, Marie Antoinette as its victim. I thought history was a boring roll call of dates, battles and dead men until I read Zweig's Marie Antoinette.A fter Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. I doubt that I would have become a historian without this book because I had a string of absolutely terrible history teachers in Germany who made me hate the subject with a passion. What I do know is that I devoured it when I was 16 or 17 and that it planted a seed that has grown ever since. I don't dare open its pages ever again, in case the book is different to what I remember – which makes describing it somehow difficult.
It has stayed with me almost as if encapsulated in a bubble. Stefan Zweig's Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman is not like that. Some are cringingly embarrassing because they are so pompously pretentious, but that is what I consumed as a teenager. Those books are the opposite of being "timeless" because they are deeply rooted in a particular period or linked to a certain age. I have books in my head and heart for every Lebensabschnitt. Instead I've picked one for a Lebensabschnitt – "a stage or period in one's life".
We Germans have a compound noun for almost everything and I shall use one as an excuse for not being able to settle on a single defining book of a lifetime.
0 kommentar(er)
