This summer I have swallowed Stefan Zweig’s biography of Marie Antoinette, and its exciting reading coincided with the opening of the Paris Olympic Games. At the ceremony, a singer dressed as Marie Antoinette, already decapitated and with the head in her hands, sang ‘Ça ira’ – one of the hymns of the revolution – accompanied by a hard rock band. The show took place in the Conciergerie, where King Louis XVI and the Queen were imprisoned before being guillotined, and the end of the performance erupted in a splendid shower of streamers as red as spilled blood. The scene made me laugh: how proudly the French have incorporated into their imagination one of the crudest and most liberating episodes of their history, and then I went back to the book.
Zweig’s narrative is brilliant because he treats the characters without prejudice. He paints the picture of an era, contrasts the great scenes and miseries of the people, It speaks of beings who live between the privilege of luxury and the unconsciousness of a destiny that will change history. Through a robust prose makes known the constant party that took place in Versailles, the excesses of Marie Antoinette, the sickly passivity of the king, the intrigues of those who wanted to blow up that decadent world from within. More than 200 years have passed, but then — as today — There was a journalism made of lies and judges who were not impartial. As these lives approach the abyss, Zweig looks at everything with a point of compassion, And as a reader you almost hope that Marie Antoinette won’t be killed. But the story was already written.
Watching these days the aerial images of Paris, with the Olympic flame balloon watching over the Bastille, the Tuileries or the Bourbon Palace of the National Assembly, I thought of the beauty of a city that emerged from a tumultuous era, which has shaped the character of generations of French people. Meanwhile, at the inauguration, part of the public whistled at their president Macron, And a few days later a French woman of Congolese parents scored two goals for the national football team: her name is Marie-Antoinette Kototo.
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