Antonia Fraser Quotes

I was actually very hesitant to write about Marie Antoinette. She seemed at first glance - well, I cannot think of any other term - an airhead of the first degree.

Marie Antoinette was funny, I'm sure she was just misinterpreted. You know the 'Let them eat cake' line. She seems like she was kind of funny, like a Chelsea Handler or Kathy Griffin type.

I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on in Marie Antoinette's life.

The concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood and on her family influences. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France!

Never in a million years would I want to live at Versailles with Marie Antoinette or anybody else. I hate to tell you this but I did not even like visiting Versailles. I found it just too ornate. It was like a complete diet of cotton candy, marzipan, and whipped cream.

One of the many pleasures of 'Versailles' is the way in which it seems to emanate not only from the vexed inner being of Marie Antoinette but from the interstices between what we imagine of her and what she was.

The guillotine was most effective and used until fairly recently.

The love of Louis XVI for mechanical works is well known. He had a little workshop at Versailles where he amused himself making locks, assisted by Francois Gamain, to whom he was much attached and with whom he spent many hours in projecting and executing mechanical contrivances.

Heard that the mob at Paris had rushed into the Senate and proclaimed the downfall of the dynasty, proclaiming a Republic! This was received with acclamation…. Not one voice was raised in favour of the unfortunate Emperor! How ungrateful!

Marie-Antoinette was born in 1755, the youngest daughter of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria and Emperor Francis I. She was intelligent and artistic but devoid of the ambition or calculation required to survive in the fetid atmosphere of the French court. In many ways, her character was not unlike that of Mary, Queen of Scots.

Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before the general gaze from the foundations of the world - the figure of the sharp female called La Guillotine. It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache, it infallibly prevented hair from turning gray, it imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into the sack.

Marie Antoinette. Her last words were,"Pardon me sir. I did not mean to do it,"to a man whose foot she stepped on before she was executed by the guillotine

Marie Antoinette: The Portrait of an Average Woman was one of those books I read in my mid-twenties that was life-changing. I think I had a very black-and-white view of Marie Antoinette before, but in reading that book, I developed a lot of empathy for her. She was just caught up in history. There was no place for a woman to do anything at that time anyway.

I am a huge admirer of Elizabeth I, and this intriguing biography gives a wonderful picture of the era.

I think, first and foremost, Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe, having surveyed a few boxes full of letters, diaries, bank statements and photographs, that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

Ever since reading Jean Plaidy's 'Queen in Waiting,' I've felt deep admiration for Caroline of Ansbach.

Cut off heads for me! Cut off heads for me! The French Revolution cut off forty thousand, and for all that the population did not diminish.

The “terror” of the French Revolution lasted for ten years. The terror that preceded and led to it lasted for a thousand years.

Still dreadful news from Paris. The Commune have everything their own way, and they go on quite as in the days of the old Revolution in the last century, though they have not yet proceeded to commit all the same horrors.

The ship of the revolution can only arrive in port on water red with blood.

The guillotine governs.

Was the blood which has just been shed so pure?

The system of Terror now proscribed throughout the French Republic cannot for one moment be tolerated in our little country without destroying it forever. Our system of government, our domestic circumstances and our dealings in commerce are all too sensitive to survive a repetition of these scenes of violence.

France was given up to fire and bloodshed, she experienced famine, she experienced the worst of things, she was nearly chopped up in pieces forever because of the decision... to exclude, to brand one party as guilty and annihilate them.