Book Review:
Walks Through Marie Antoinette's Paris
By: Diana Reid Haig

ISBN: 1905043082
Format: Hardcover, 160pp.
Pub Date: August 2006
Publisher: Ravenhall Books
Numerous illustrations, and maps

If you've seen the recent Hollywood movie about her, good! This Fall's spread in Vanity Fair, great! You can still benefit from Diana Reid Haig's Walks Through Marie Antoinette's Paris because this is a book about the real Marie Antoinette.

If you have seen neither the movie, nor the Vanity Fair article, don't worry. This book is a far better starting place to learn about one of history's most famous, but perhaps no so well known, personalities. (For example her famous contribution to the English language - Let them eat cake - is known by most everyone, but was probably never uttered by her.)

Diana Reid Haig's latest book (she also wrote Walks Through Napoleon and Josephine's Paris which we reviewed in the February 2004 Paris Kiosque.) is a delightful contribution toward informing the Francophile, the Paris tourist, the interested mind, or the curious royal watcher about many of the basics concerning the teen queen of France of the second half of the 18th century. What is more is that it is also a guide to the places associated with many events in Marie Antoinette's life that are still to be seen in and around Paris to this day. Its small hardback format makes it both pleasing to the eyes of bibliophiles as well as convenient for the purse, backpack, or large pocket if you decide to bring it with you as you walk through Marie Antoinette's Paris. Besides text, maps, and images taken from period books will guide you. "Walks Through Marie Antoinette's Paris" will fill those ever difficult to find lacune of friends who "have it all." And it will do so in style.

It is hard for the present day person to imagine what the French royal court was like in the eighteenth century. It was hard for the ordinary person in the eighteenth century to imagine it as well. Into this extraordinary collection of courtiers, functionaries, diplomats, clergy, and royalty arrived the "spoiled youngest daughter and fifteenth child of the ... Austrian empress Maria Theresa," the fourteen year old Maria Antonia, adapted to the French language as Marie Antoinette, on 14 May of 1770.

Although already married in absensia to the heir to the French throne, the sixteen year old Dauphin Louis-Auguste, son of Louis XV, the religious ceremony took place two days later on 16 May 1770, in the Royal Chapel of the Château de Versailles. Despite her age, it was Marie Antoinette's poise that impressed the assembled guest and dignitaries more than that of her husband. He seemed ill at ease - perhaps betrying his lack of preparation or understanding regarding the consumation of their marriage. It was not until perhaps the April 1777 visit of Marie Antoinette's brother - sent on a mission of state by their mother the empress of Austria deeply concerned that he daughter had not yet become pregnant - that things changed. Shortly afterwards Marie Antoinette wrote her mother that finally after seven years of marriage it had been consumated, and on 19 December 1778 she gave birth to her first child, Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte.

If this was a happy moment in her life, her end, on 16 October 1793 in what is now Place de la Concorde, was not. Having initially survived the Revolution of July 1789, and the beheading of her husband in January of 1793, the inevitability of her own execution was certain to all but those in the most extreme state of denial. The complexity of the times and the complexity of her character have have made the queen a rich subject of history. Nevertheless Diana Reid Haig's book will put you in touch with the real places in and around paris where she walked, slept, ate, ... and died.