To the Scaffold:

The Life of Marie Antoinette

By Carolly Erickson

Morrow, 384 pages, $22.95

When Maria Antonia, the 15th child of the Empress of Austria, turned 13 in 1768, dozens of ornate French dolls descended on the Hofburg palace in Vienna. Not toys, they were exquisitely gowned in current fashions by leading French dressmakers and had been sent to solicit orders from rich and noble clients outside Paris. A quaint merchandising device but in this case also an omen: In exchange, Austria was soon to send France one equally lovely, extravagant and empty-headed living doll.

The dolls were not birthday presents but more like wedding gifts, models for the future French queen`s trousseau. Two years later, when Maria Antonia entered France as the bride of the Dauphin, at the border she had to discard all her Austrian apparel. She also had to translate her name to ''Marie Antoinette'' and part with all former friends and attendants, except her dog. Paradoxically, though she was expected to leave Austria totally behind, to the French her supreme value was her royal Austrian status.

There would have been similar renunciations had she been Prussian, English or Italian, but the French were particularly sensitive in the case of Austria, a longtime enemy lately turned invaluable ally. The marriage between Antoinette (as biographer Carolly Erickson calls her) and the awkward 15-year- old Dauphin was considered a fine insurance policy by Empress Maria Theresa. This was also the case with Louis XV, the Dauphin`s grandfather.

Characteristically, Louis XV was charmed by the dainty new Dauphine, and so at first were all his subjects, except his vulgar mistress Madame Du Barry. Even the gauche Dauphin came under her spell. Ironically it was the Austrian ambassador to Versailles, Count Mercy, who was always Antoinette`s most judicious and candid critic. He scolded, nagged, complained to her mother, who warned her daughter that ''a Queen can only degrade herself by this sort of heedless extravagance in difficult times.''

Antoinette`s brother Joseph, on a brief visit to France, also wrote home bluntly: ''She is not doing her job.'' After the 1785 Affair of the Diamond Necklace, in which she was wrongly suspected of a devious ploy to acquire a flamboyant item of jewelry, the Parisians arrived at a harsher and finally fatal judgment.

Of course Antoinette`s husband, who became king five years after their marriage, made her job almost impossible. A queen`s first duty is to provide heirs, and her mother, for example, besides being a powerful administrator, had produced 16 children. One of the best scenes in ''To the Scaffold'' is of the birth of Antoinette. To avoid wasting time and energy, Maria Theresa arranged to have a decayed tooth pulled while in labor, and right up to and after the birth she worked on state documents.

Louis XVI was physically unable to consummate the marriage for seven years. The long wait for the first royal child, a girl, and then the birth of a sickly boy alienated every citizen.

In character, too, Louis XVI was a disaster as a king. Even before the marriage Count Mercy reported to the Empress, ''This prince, by his face and talk, shows only an extremely limited intelligence.'' Indeed, Louis XVI`s incompetence and negligence (his only interests seem to have been eating, hunting, making maps and designing locks) helped destroy his world.

Whether that destruction may have been inevitable, or even useful, is not the kind of question that Carolly Erickson (despite her doctorate in history) attempts to answer in what is, after all, a popular biography of a romantic figure. Such luminaries as Cecelia Holland and Elizabeth Longford have praised Erickson`s earlier biographies of English monarchs, yet a reviewer of her

''Bonnie Prince Charlie'' noted that the previous year four biographies of the Stuart prince had appeared-already an ''unnecessarily large number.'' Now Erickson trails the 1989 bicentennial spate of French Revolution books, and with a central figure already overexposed.

Marie Antoinette is perennially interesting and Erickson writes well, but by now anyone familiar with French history must hope for either new material or a fresh point of view. However, as Olivier Bernier said of Joan Haslip`s 1988 ''Marie Antoinette,'' this book offers ''a fairly standard portrait.''

A phenomenon that Erickson does stress effectively is the practical and symbolic importance in France of bread, on which, she claims, the average Parisian of that time spent half his income. Every time the price of a loaf rose by a sou there was a popular revolt. Antoinette was accused of engineering the high price of flour and the ensuing shortage of bread. It is significant that her fabled glib response to that shortage-''Well then, let them eat cake''-had been attributed also to the wife of Louis XIV and then to a daughter of Louis XV.

Cursed for proposing cake instead of bread, Marie Antoinette did not survive to hear the favorite heroine of the French Revolution denounce a more dreadful substitution. Appalled by the Terror, in which she too finally went to the guillotine, Madame Roland lamented: ''The time has come which was foretold, when the people would ask for bread and they would be given corpses.''