Marie Antoinette: the journey Antonia Fraser Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 448pp, £25 ISBN 0297819089

Marie Antoinette always seemed to me like the fairy on top of the Christmas tree: gilded, pointlessly frilly and out of reach. It is testimony to Antonia Fraser's rhetorical powers that she persuaded this republican reviewer to take her new biography seriously. So many sycophantic and hagiographic studies of Marie Antoinette have been published that it is hard not to yawn at the prospect of yet another. Fraser certainly does not write as a radical. She is a historian more interested in aristocratic individuals than in the clashes and fate of classes. She refers to the Parisian people as "the mob", for example, as though that term were completely unproblematic. But by filling out her story with a wealth of sociological detail, Fraser offers a picture of the queen made interesting, even sympathetic, because set in context.

Her thesis is that Marie Antoinette, as the victim of her mother's matrimonial alliances and the diplomatic ventures of the King of France, eventually became the scapegoat blamed for hastening the revolution. Born in 1755, 15th in a family of 16 children born in the imperial court in Austria, she was trained, as a princess, to obey those in authority. First and foremost, this meant her formidable mother, the Empress Maria Teresa. At the age of 14, Marie Antoinette was married off to the French Dauphin (the grandson and heir to Louis XV) in order to cement a Hapsburg-Bourbon treaty, entered into after the Seven Years' War, which had reversed traditional alliances. She quickly fell foul of her suspicious adoptive country by obeying her mother's instructions to promote Austrian interests. Even before she arrived in France, she was nicknamed l'Autrichienne (chienne meaning bitch).

Doomed from the start, Marie Antoinette made matters worse by being too obviously naive and badly educated, by being extravagant and therefore apparently heartless, and by being seen to take an interest in politics. Princesses did not expect personal happiness in those days, but Fraser empathises with an innocent whose consort did not want to go to bed with her for the first seven years of their marriage - he was finally bullied into it by his brother-in-law - and who had no power over the pamphleteers who lampooned her as a perverted lesbian, a slut and, later, as an incestuous and abusive mother.

In that age of savage satirists, others besides the queen were mercilessly mocked. But Fraser is performing a delicate and sensitive rehabilitation job. She argues persuasively for Marie Antoinette's blamelessness in the infamous Affair of the Diamond Necklace, and also states that it was not she, but a princess before her, who told the starving populace to eat cake. Fraser portrays her as a tender and devoted mother whose compassionate impulses were misunderstood. At the age of 18, for example, when she rescued a peasant child from a stag-hunt by removing him to the royal palace, she was guided, we are told, by the most selfless of motives, yet to some of us the incident smacks more of baby-snatching.

Fraser skims over Marie Antoinette's reported coldness towards her mother; and she defends her against accusations of impro- priety by arguing that, if she engaged in over-intimate liaisons with confidants of both sexes, well, she was isolated and lonely and needed friends.

Where this biography really comes into its own is in its depiction of the horrors of formal court life at Versailles. You do not have to see Marie Antoinette as a victim to understand her as locked into a static, monolithic culture, a golden fly trapped in a vast web of etiquette, rigid practices and trade favours. Consumption was necessarily conspicuous, symbolising value and virtue. Because nobody worked for a living, the king's patronage was all. National revenue translated into enormous sums of royal pocket money wasted on elaborate parade and display, on courtiers' rights to gifts and extensive handouts and pensions. The hierarchy was complex and overarching, enshrined by tradition. A vast and unwieldy structure of hangers-on fought for privileges, jockeyed for position, watched spitefully and eagle-eyed for those in higher or lesser places to make the tiniest slip.

In this context, the young queen was an object always on view, never given privacy, eavesdropped and spied on. She was a doll, handed about to be undressed and washed, her cheeks daubed with bright circles of rouge by one aristocrat and her hair powder dusted on by another. On occasion, she was left standing naked and shivering while two duchesses squabbled over whose right it was to hand the royal chemise. She caused a scandal when she declined to give birth in public and had the audience of noisy onlookers banished to an adjoining room. She faced her death with equal courage.

Michele Roberts's latest book is Playing Sardines (Virago Press, £9.99). She is a 2001 Booker Prize judge

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