Portrait of Marie Antoinette
Born an Austrian archduchess, married into the glittering court of Versailles at just 14 and executed before she turned 40, Marie Antoinette’s life unfolds like a tragic opera at the heart of Europe’s most turbulent age. The young dauphine arrived in France as a symbol of alliance between two great powers—Austria and France—yet her foreign origins would forever shadow her reputation.
At the height of the Bourbon monarchy, Versailles was a theater of politics as much as of luxury, and the new queen found herself performing a role she neither could shape nor fully understood. From her early years navigating the etiquette and intrigues of the royal court to her emergence as France’s most visible—and eventually most vilified—public figure, Marie Antoinette became the embodiment of both grace and excess, fascination and resentment. But who was the real woman behind the legend?
Historian Alexander Mikaberidze looks beyond the caricature of the frivolous queen to rediscover Marie Antoinette as a complex political actor—a woman negotiating power, motherhood, and identity in an age of revolution. Drawing on art, private correspondence, and contemporary accounts, he re-examines how Marie Antoinette’s image was constructed, weaponized, and ultimately transformed—from royal scapegoat to enduring cultural icon. Her story is often seen as one of decadence and downfall, but it is also of how history, myth, and propaganda intertwined to shape the memory of one of the most interesting figures of the 18th century.
Mikaberidze is Boyd Professor of history and Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair at Louisiana State University, Shreveport, and is the author of over two dozen books on European history.
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