Christy Morrison read and liked jenng's review of Marie Antoinette: The Journey:

"When men in history are remembered despite their flaws, women are only remembered for their flaws.

Marie Antoinette cannot be judged for what she might have done or what standards hindsight has assigned her. One can criticize Marie Anto...more When men in history are remembered despite their flaws, women are only remembered for their flaws.

Marie Antoinette cannot be judged for what she might have done or what standards hindsight has assigned her. One can criticize Marie Antoinette for many things, but she fulfilled the obligations and responsibilities of the role life assigned to her with grace and compassion. Unfortunately, she lived in an time when the world moved faster than the French monarchy and her rather weak husband could react and conform.

Her only crime was being a woman, which made her an easy target. American revolutionaries had George III to direct popular anger; French revolutionaries used Marie Antoinette as the face of Ancien Regime.

There is a throwaway fact that really takes the cake: Thomas Jefferson, having witnessed the awful brutality and violence, wrote that had the Queen only agreed to quietly taken the veil, the worst excess of the revolution would have been avoided. Here was a man that has been exalted as a forwarding thinking genius excusing unbridled butchery on a powerless mother who only wanted to protect her children and her rightful place.

For all his greatness, Thomas Jefferson believed blacks were naturally inferior and incompatible with American society and, after the abolition of slavery, should be returned to Africa. He refused to aid one of the first countries to follow America's example and win independence, Haiti, because he feared the unnatural slave uprising would spread to the American south. And, yet still, he had a lifelong affair with a slavewoman, refusing her wishes to stay in France as a freewoman, and only freeing her and their children at his deathbed.

And yet we still remember him in popular memory and children's books as a great American. Jefferson, arguably, deserves such acclaim, but Marie Antoinette does not deserve being remembered for "let them eat cake." Something she never even said.(less) "