Zweig writes that on the day of the revolution’s eruption, with the storming of the Bastille (July 14th, 1789), King Louis went to sleep at ten o’clock as normal, despite having received messages alerting him to the events in Paris. When the queen encounters the convulsive forces of the French revolution, she proves powerless to master the storm.

This was a key event that had precipitated her into deep unpopularity. 3 In the notorious Diamond Necklace Affair (1785), she was a victim, but people saw her as misusing valuable resources and taxpayer’s money.

Regarded as the “Austrian woman” and deemed the “fundamental adversary,” 2 she failed to reach out to ordinary members of society and understand their plight, although she might have had sympathy for them. Her capture in Varennes, when she tried to flee France in June 1791, was the first time she had ever been in a bourgeois house. She did not rise to becoming a queen of the people. Zweig’s use of “average” refers to how Marie Antoinette couldn’t find a way through historically challenging circumstances to realizing this path. This personal union between the great European and often conflicting royal dynasties of the Habsburgs and Bourbons stirred hopes which form the opening pages of the book. In doing so, he is certainly not negating the extraordinary potential of her marriage as an Austrian princess, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, to the future French King Louis XVI. Stefan Zweig, in his famous biography of Marie Antoinette, 1 published in 1932, describes her as an “average woman” (a strict translation of the original German would be “a mediocre character”). Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, “Marie Antoinette in Court Dress” (1778), oil on canvas, 107.5” x 76”, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna Stefan Zweig’s The Portrait of an Average Woman, Seen Through Painting by Judith Brown

Marie Antoinette by Stefan Zweig