Thursday, 9 April 2020

Marie Antoinette ..... on the wireless

Now, the history I was taught did not include many women.

Marie Antoinette, aged 13, 1768
There were of course the token few .....Boudicca, the first Elizabeth, Queen Victoria, and Florence Nightingale.

As for the rest they pretty much had walk on parts.  "Bloody Mary" got a mention only to show how her enlightened her half sister was, and Marie Antoinette, just to flaunt the quote about "let them eat cake".

So today, a little later than it was broadcast I shall settle down with Melvyn Bragg and the team of experts to delve deeper into Austrian cake lady.

"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. 

Maria Antoinette, aged 23, 1778
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".*

Location; France

Pictures; Marie Antoinette, [Archduchess Maria Antonia of Austria, the later Queen Marie Antoinette of France], 1769, Joseph Ducreux, Collection; Palace of Versailles, France, and Marie Antoinette in Court Dress, 1778, Vigée-Lebrun, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Austria 

*Marie Antoinette, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000117y

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