Poet, essayist, satirist, and historian, Belloc wrote from the Roman Catholic viewpoint. He was a prolific writer, authoring more than 150 books in his lifetime, he was also a close friend of G.K. Chesterton and with him founded the New Witness, a weekly political newspaper, which promoted distributism, a medieval, anticapitalist, and anti-Fabian socialist philosophy. Belloc writes in the Introductory Note: The Queen of France whose end is but an episode in the story of the Revolution stands apart in this: that while all around her were achieved the principal miracles of the human will, she alone suffered, by an unique exception, a fixed destiny against which the will seemed powerless. In person she was not considerable, in temperament not distinguished; but her fate was enormous. It is profitable, therefore, to abandon for a moment the contemplation of those great men who re-created in Europe the well-ordered State, and to admire the exact convergence of such accidents as drew around Marie Antoinette an increasing pressure of doom. These accidents united at last: they drove her with a precision that was more than human, right to her predestined end.