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Marie-Therese, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette's Daughter Kindle Edition
The first major biography of one of France's most mysterious women―Marie Antoinette's only child to survive the revolution.
Susan Nagel, author of the critically acclaimed biography Mistress of the Elgin Marbles, turns her attention to the life of a remarkable woman who both defined and shaped an era, the tumultuous last days of the crumbling ancien régime. Nagel brings the formidable Marie-Thérèse to life, along with the age of revolution and the waning days of the aristocracy, in a page-turning biography that will appeal to fans of Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette and Amanda Foreman's Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire.
In December 1795, at midnight on her seventeenth birthday, Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, escaped from Paris's notorious Temple Prison. To this day many believe that the real Marie-Thérèse, traumatized following her family's brutal execution during the Reign of Terror, switched identities with an illegitimate half sister who was often mistaken for her twin. Was the real Marie-Thérèse spirited away to a remote castle to live her life as the woman called "the Dark Countess," while an imposter played her role on the political stage of Europe? Now, two hundred years later, using handwriting samples, DNA testing, and an undiscovered cache of Bourbon family letters, Nagel finally solves this mystery. She tells the remarkable story in full and draws a vivid portrait of an astonishing woman who both defined and shaped an era. Marie-Thérèse's deliberate choice of husbands determined the map of nineteenth-century Europe. Even Napoleon was in awe and called her "the only man in the family." Nagel's gripping narrative captures the events of her fascinating life from her very public birth in front of the rowdy crowds and her precocious childhood to her hideous time in prison and her later reincarnation in the public eye as a saint, and, above all, her fierce loyalty to France throughout.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBloomsbury USA
- Publication dateDecember 1, 2010
- File size6880 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Review
“The woman in these pages emerges...as a veritable prototype of saintly Catholic forgiveness.” ―The Atlantic Monthly
“In Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror, Susan Nagel...faces the challenge of turning this largely unknown and fairly unsympathetic historical figure into a lively biographical subject....[Nagel] does capture the peculiar humanity of her subject as she evolved from princess to prisoner to decorous matron.” ―Valerie Styker, New York Times Book Review
“Gripping….providing new insights into a misunderstood and tragic figure and showing us the real human buffeted by all those historical crosscurrents.” ―Martin Rubin, Washington Times
“A fascinating, readable, and engrossing book that should interest general readers and scholars alike.” ―Library Journal, starred review
“This highly detailed, exhaustively researched, often riveting account will appeal especially to all those readers who've immersed themselves in the many recent books about Marie Antoinette” ―Booklist, starred review
“Relates the dramatic highs and lows experienced by the woman known as "Madame Royale"….highly detailed and sympathetic.” ―Publishers Weekly
“Enlivened by intriguing asides about the young Marie-Thérèse, such as the special sign language she developed to communicate with her parents in prison and the impact on her own development of her mother's bravery in the face of the French Revolution.” ―Kirkus Reviews
“Masterly and compelling...a triumph.” ―Tina Brown, author of the Diana Chronicles
“Few historical tales can match the family drama of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Beheaded in 1793 during the French Revolution, they left behind a daughter, Marie-Therese, who did everything she could to help restore the Bourbons to the throne. Author Susan Nagel puts to rest most of the doubts about the Bourbons (Was Therese the legitimate daughter? Did her brother the dauphin really die in Temple Prison?) via a thorough analysis of DNA samples and handwriting in family letters. But the best part of the tale isn't the clarification of the historical record--it's the engaging portrait Nagel paints of a young woman who gave up everything for the love of France and her family.” ―Virtuoso Life
“Taking one of those fascinating lives that have remained too long untold, Susan Nagel's Marie-Therese is a well-researched, entertaining and often poignant biography that recreates royalty, terror, tragedy, revolution, and restoration with verve and vividness.” ―Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Young Stalin and Stalin: The Court of the Red Star
About the Author
Susan Nagel is the bestselling author of Mistress of the Elgin Marbles and a critically acclaimed book on the novels of Jean Giraudoux. She has written for the stage, screen, scholarly journals, and Town and Country. She is a professor in the humanities department at Marymount Manhattan College and lives in New York City.
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Product details
- ASIN : B004INH3ZK
- Publisher : Bloomsbury USA; 1st edition (December 1, 2010)
- Publication date : December 1, 2010
- Language : English
- File size : 6880 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 562 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #627,889 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #387 in Historical France Biographies
- #394 in History of France
- #567 in Biographies of Royalty (Kindle Store)
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When I read history, I’m often more interested in what happens after, or what happens before the Big Event. It’s interesting to me. World War II is a fascinating, horrible conflict, but I’m less interested in the actual war, and more interested in what happened that allowed a war like that to even be a possibility in the first place, if that makes sense, and I’m interested in how Europe picked up the pieces right after. This book is sort of like that. The French Revolution, as told through the eyes of someone who lived through the meat of it, and survived long after.
This isn’t going to be one of my typical reviews, because I just can’t get this book out of my head.
Marie-Therese was the eldest child of Marie-Antoinette and her husband, Louis XVI. She was born into a life of luxury in the infamous Versailles Palace. She learned at an early age how to perform in public, and keep her royal mask on until she was in private and could truly be herself. In some ways, I think this made her a rather divided person, and that shows up again and again in this book, with her obvious discomfort in situations, but powering through them anyway.
When she was ten, the French Revolution really got going, and she and her family were moved out of Versailles forcefully (literally, lots of blood and guts, lots of things happening that were absolutely traumatizing to the children who witnessed them). They were moved into Paris, where the lived in an old, moldy palace surrounded by guards whose job was to watch them and report on everything that was said. Occasionally the family would be marched out for public events, or for trials where they would stand before a room full of people and have abuses heaped upon them. As a child, she’d have to stand there and stoically watch while her mother and father were dehumanized by a mob of angry French men and women.
At ten, you can imagine how traumatic this must have been.
Anyway, things happened. There was a failed escape attempt, and that was really when stuff went from bad to worse. This was when they were moved into a prison, when her father was beheaded, and the family was separated. And while I knew the outline of all these events, it was quite another thing to learn about it from the writings of a woman coming of age in the middle of all of this. And you know, I was fine… FINE… until I realized that the government forbid anyone from telling Marie-Therese that her mother was dead, and until I read about the absolutely horrible, awful conditions her brother lived in (that poor boy was abused in ways that nearly gave me nightmares), and how she was likewise unaware of his tragic, awful death despite the fact that he was kept in the room right below her.
So, she spends about seven years of her life in lockdown, living in one prison or another. As a teenager, she refused to talk for over a year. At one point, when she was nearing the age of seventeen, the government started to negotiate a trade (Marie-Therese for twenty hostages) with Austria, they sent someone to Marie-Therese to get her used to talking again, and using her voice. This woman, who became like a family to this isolated teenager, couldn’t take holding the secret of her mother and brother’s deaths anymore, so after years in the case of Marie-Antoinette, and months for her ten-year-old brother, she finally learned that she was the last person in her immediate family alive, and it nearly broke her, I’m guessing.
(Despite rumors that her brother had escaped, these are all unfounded.)
Then she leaves, and instead of getting time to adjust to life again, she has to navigate these treacherous waters of marriage, because whoever she marries matters. She throws her lot in with the monarchists, and France, and her life continues on… but on a personal level, going from being in one prison or another for seven years, to “hey, marry this guy” must have given her whiplash, the likes of which I cannot begin to fathom.
I know I’m going on a bit of a tangent here, and I’ll attempt to stop being so plot-spoilery here, but her life really, really floored me. We know about her parents losing their heads. We know about Marie-Antoinette and all her hair, but not much is known about Marie-Therese, and how she had to navigate these political waters, despite very obviously having some real, unaddressed PTSD, and emotional trauma from what she’d suffered through. She still pulled herself together and was a woman around whom events turned. It is unfortunate that her name isn’t spoken in wider circles even today.
The only real crime these children committed was the sin of being born, and her little brother suffered unimaginable abuses and died of starvation and (insert disease here… you can really just pick one and the poor boy had it) because of it, and Marie-Therese, I daresay, likely never had a “normal” life or psyche due to it.
I can’t imagine her life. I really can’t. I had to periodically stop reading this book so I could just absorb what I was taking in. And the thing is, this is a biography, but it reads more like a novel. If I didn’t know it was real, I wouldn’t believe it.
In her own way, Marie-Therese’s childhood, pre-French Revolution really was the bedrock upon which she built the house of her soul. She knew how to navigate these treacherous political waters, and despite always struggling with the memories of what happened, she remained doggedly loyal to her country and the people who live in it for all her days, even through her numerous stints in exile. She never had children, though she had very close friends and family, whom she considered her own. She was a person people went to for advice, and she was highly regarded and admired, even becoming somewhat of a pop-culture icon in her day.
Nagel wrote an absolutely amazing biography here. It honestly is probably one of the best biographies I’ve ever read, and I do think it’s rather criminal that more people haven’t read it. She’s managed to take someone that has maybe faded a bit in the historical tapestry, and breathed stunning life into them. Under Nagel’s deft hand, Marie-Therese was not just a person I read about, but hers was a story I felt like I was living. It gave me a new perspective of the French Revolution, and a new understanding of a heroic woman who somehow, despite all odds, survived a situation that I think would have broken most people.
If you’ve got any interest in the French Revolution, I think this book needs to be essential reading.
Top reviews from other countries
Until I discovered this book, I must confess I hadn’t given a great deal of thought as to what happened to Marie Therese after her parents were guillotined. The story is both heartbreaking and a triumph. She was 17 at the time of their death and escaped the Paris Temple prison. She had no idea what had happened and had spent months listening to the screams of her younger brother as he was tortured. It’s difficult to imagine a more inauspicious start and Nagel’s account is mesmerising.
It appears to be meticulously researched and is linear in structure, starting with her mother’s pregnancy and birth ( in full view of a large, rowdy crowd). Much loved by her parents, her life at Versailles and Le Petit Trianon was one of privilege and excess. Then came the Revolution and her world was ripped apart. This is a remarkable story of survival against the odds where she lived in Vienna, was exiled from France and whose later life appeared overshadowed by a profound sadness and sense of loss. It’s a fascinating story, really well told and accessible for any reader interested in social history.
Older edition which doesn’t offer for example the 2013 results of testing the DNA of the Dark Countess - proof that she was not daughter of Marie Antoinette...
Great read, 100% recommend!