69 Quotes by Antonia Fraser

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation of the woman.

People cannot help their predilections, although they may conceal them.

As long as you persecute people, you will actually throw up terrorism.

Darnley, who, like Banquo's ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive.

A frequent charge made against “Antoinette” was that she was bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.

Like her marriage, Marie Antoinette’s death was a political decision.

The execration in best-selling pamphlets and obscene engravings did not cease, many people expecting the Queen to take Jeanne de Lamotte Valois’s former place in the Salpétréne prison. Any evil, including a daring jewel robbery brilliantly organized from a closed prison could be attributed to her.

For the King’s distaste at the idea of a mistress, Marie Antoinette can hardly be blamed; yet somehow she was turned into the scapegoat of this upsetting of the natural order of things-as the French court saw it.

As ever in a crisis, Marie Antoinette showed herself the forceful one who nonetheless could not bring herself finally to impose her will.