• Marie-Antoinette

  • The Making of a French Queen
  • By: John Hardman
  • Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
  • Length: 17 hrs and 47 mins
  • 3.1 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)

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Marie-Antoinette

By: John Hardman
Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley
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Publisher's Summary

A new look which fundamentally overturns our understanding of this famously "out of touch" queen  

Who was the real Marie-Antoinette? She was mistrusted and reviled in her own time, and today she is portrayed as a lightweight incapable of understanding the events that engulfed her. In this new account, John Hardman redresses the balance and sheds fresh light on Marie-Antoinette's story.  

Hardman shows how Marie-Antoinette played a significant but misunderstood role in the crisis of the monarchy. Drawing on new sources, he describes how, from the outset, Marie-Antoinette refused to prioritize the aggressive foreign policy of her mother, Maria-Theresa, bravely took over the helm from Louis XVI after the collapse of his morale, and, when revolution broke out, listened to the Third Estate and worked closely with repentant radicals to give the constitutional monarchy a fighting chance. For the first time, Hardman demonstrates exactly what influence Marie-Antoinette had and when and how she exerted it.

©2019 John Hardman (P)2019 Tantor

What listeners say about Marie-Antoinette

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I didn't enjoy the book and won't finish it.

I am not judging the accuracy of the book, but its organization. I feel the book is a collection and disgorgement of infomation, without the flow I expected. Too often the content jumped around in time period, and I lost track. I could not stay interested.

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  • Amazon Customer
  • 12-28-19

Dreadful Narration

So disappointed by the reader. Was really looking forward to listening to this but found Jonathan Crowley’s narration unbearable. For a start, a professional reader who consistently pronounces the word ‘a’ as ‘A’ should know better or at least should have been corrected by a producer. I do wonder if Audible just churn books out without a producer or director on board. This should have been fascinating given that it sheds new light on the French monarchy during the revolution, but Crpwley fails to make it so. There are no changes of pace, no sense of insight, no real engagement with the text and it’s incredibly boring as a result. Really disappointed to have wasted a credit on this.

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  • Mr MJ
  • 10-28-21

Ruined by rubbish narration

As another reviewer has already noted, the narration of this book is quite awful. It lacks any performance and is so full of mispronunciations that it spoils the listening experience. The audio quality is also very poor. John Hardman's book is interesting and important and it deserves much better treatment than this.

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  • Amazon Customer
  • 03-27-23

Superficial and irritating

I tried to finish this. I really did. But a combination of the following eventually had me bowing out of my efforts to get to the end:

(1) Bizarre pacing (for a book about Marie Antoinette, it tore through/ignored many key parts of her early life, then would get bogged down in trivial minutiae about court family trees that added nothing to the story).

(2) The book is not very well-edited: numerous grammatical errors (subject-verb disagreement being a particular bugbear) and a strange, oscillating, tone that swings between gossip magazine article and dry, scientific report. It doesn't read like an academic piece.

(3) Author has a heavy bias against Marie Antoinette - not to say she didn't have plenty of flaws, but the picture created by this story is that she was simultaneously stupid, flippant, conniving, manipulative, powerless, ignored and a deeply powerful, driving force behind a large majority of the king's decisions. If you are interested in Marie Antoinette, an incomparably better, and more nuanced, book is Antonia Fraser's 'Marie Antoinette: The Journey's. Though Fraser clearly comes from a very sympathetic position, her analyses are nevertheless well-researched, well-written, and much more balanced, compelling and insightful than any contained in this book.

(4) Perhaps the most annoying thing (which, to be fair, is outside the author's control): the narrator. It is a little odd, but not unbearable, that his voice and tone sound like he's reading a children's story. But what finally made me give up was his awful french pronunciation; one can only take so many "Mar-*FLEM*-ie Antoinette"s.

Save yourself and give this one a miss.