Main content

Marie Antoinette

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian princess who, while still a child, married the future Louis XVI of France only to face hostility and death under the French Revolution.

In a programme first broadcast in November 2018, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian princess Maria Antonia, child bride of the future French King Louis XVI. Their marriage was an attempt to bring about a major change in the balance of power in Europe and to undermine the influence of Prussia and Great Britain, but she had no say in the matter and was the pawn of her mother, the Empress Maria Theresa. She fulfilled her allotted role of supplying an heir, but was sent to the guillotine in 1793 in the French Revolution, a few months after her husband, following years of attacks on her as a woman who, it was said, betrayed the King and as a foreigner who betrayed France to enemy powers. When not doing these wrongs, she was said to be personally bankrupting France. Her death shocked royal families throughout Europe, and she became a powerful symbol of the consequences of the Revolution.

With

Catriona Seth
Marshal Foch Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford

Katherine Astbury
Professor of French Studies at the University of Warwick

and

David McCallam
Reader in French Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of Sheffield

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

49 minutes

Last on

Thu 9 Apr 2020 09:00
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

More episodes

Previous

Free Radicals

Next

Horace

See all episodes from In Our Time

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

Μύ

READING LIST:

Will Bashor, Marie Antoinette’s Darkest Days: Prisoner no. 280 in the Conciergerie (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)

Jonathan Beckman, How to Ruin a Queen: Marie Antoinette, the Stolen Diamonds and the Scandal that Shook the French Throne (John Murray, 2014)

Jack R. Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001)

Hélène Delalex, A Day with Marie-Antoinette (Flammarion, 2015)

Evelyn Farr, I Love You Madly: Marie-Antoinette and Count Fersen: The Secret Letters (Peter Owen Publishers, 2016)

Antonia Fraser, Marie-Antoinette: The Journey (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001)

Dena Goodman (ed), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen (Routledge, 2003)

John Hardman, The Life of Louis XVI (Yale University Press, 2016)

Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988)

Evelyne Lever, Marie Antoinette: The Last Queen of France (Piatkus, 2006)

Warren Roberts, Jane Austen and the French Revolution (first published 1979; The Athlone Press, 2000)

Catriona Seth, Marie Antoinette: Anthologie et Dictionnaire (Robert Laffont, 2006 – in French)

Chantal Thomas (trans. by Julie Rose), The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie Antoinette (Zone Books, 2001)

Chantal Thomas, Farewell, My Queen (Simon & Schuster, 2004)

Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (Picador, 2007)

Μύ

Broadcasts

  • Thu 8 Nov 2018 09:00
    Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
  • Thu 8 Nov 2018 21:30
    Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4
  • Thu 9 Apr 2020 09:00
    Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Radio 4

Featured in...

In Our Time podcasts

Download programmes from the huge In Our Time archive.

The In Our Time Listeners' Top 10

If you’re new to In Our Time, this is a good place to start.

Arts and Ideas podcast

Download the best of Radio 3's Free Thinking programme.

Podcast

  • In Our Time

    Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the ideas, people and events that have shaped our world.