To Kill a Queen: : The Last Days of Marie Antoinette
Linda Porter

Marie Antoinette is one of history’s most famous queens. The flaxen-haired Austrian archduchess who arrived in France as an ill-educated fourteen-year-old had danced her way through Versailles as a teenage bride, careless of the undercurrents that would eventually sweep her intelligent but emotionally immature husband from the throne. The spendthrift Madame Deficit, the hated foreigner and sexual libertine of a thousand salacious news-sheets became the physical embodiment of the frailty of the French monarchy twenty-four years later, unrecognisable from suffering and illness, as a jolting farm-cart conveyed her to the guillotine.

 The drama of the last year of her life, which saw the royal family degraded and imprisoned, the king executed, her son removed from her and the conditions of her confinement become ever more sordid, is the stuff of nightmares.  Its full horrors have only recently come to light in the researches of leading French historians and are not yet available to English-speaking readers. Most biographies of the queen devote only a chapter or two to this period. This book will be the first in English on this topic, based on new material drawn from private archives in the UK and seldom-used French and American sources.  It will focus on four key areas:  

 - The queen’s experience in her own words and that of the four brave women who supported her during this terrible year.  For despite the growing harshness of her treatment, Marie Antoinette was not alone. Her sister-in-law, Madame Élisabeth, her daughter, Marie- Thérèse, her servant at the Conciergerie, Rosalie Lamorlière and the extraordinary English actress and royalist supporter, Charlotte Atkyns, all attempted to alleviate her ordeal.  The book will introduce them to a wider public and demonstrate their fidelity and ingenuity.

 -  Reveals the uncertain response of the British and American governments to the queen’s predicament, as well as the concerns of her own wider family, and explain why, ultimately, they all failed to help her.

 -  Explores the ambivalence of the leading revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Hébert, towards the queen’s fate, in the context of the beginning of the Terror and show why she was eventually sacrificed.

 - Highlights the queen’s trial, using the original transcript which has recently been rediscovered in the Archives Nationales in Paris. From early in the morning of 14 October 1793 until four in the morning of the 16^th, Marie Antoinette faced her accusers, conducting herself with dignity. She seems to have clung to the hope, until sentence was pronounced, that she might be expelled rather than executed. After the verdict, she wrote her own testament to Madame Élisabeth, herself a victim of the guillotine the following year.  At the end, Marie Antoinette went to her death with something like relief.