The Indomitable Marie-Antoinette

“The Indomitable Marie-Antoinette” is an valuable contribution to our understanding of the significant role women have always played in history. It is one of a series of six biographies of the queens, regents and royal mistresses of the French monarchy. In it, the highly acclaimed Simone Bertiere re-reads the innumerable source materials about Marie-Antoinette, and in a most engaging style, paints a startlingly new portrait of the queen. With great psychological insight, she brings Marie-Antoinette and her circle back to life not as representatives of their class, but as flesh-and-blood human beings in positions of extraordinary power and privilege, facing profound changes in the world they could not understand but were supposed to lead. Why “indomitable”? Because however frivolous her tastes may have been, the fierce determination she showed in getting what she wanted was only matched by her resistance to anything she didn’t. She willfully carved out a private life for herself in the face of opposition from a most rigid and hierarchical court. And despite being ill prepared for it, she would in the end play a key political role in the French Revolution, incurring the hatred of the masses rising up against the crumbling monarchy.