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Axel von Fersen, the Tragic Romance of a Count Who Loved a Queen but Couldn’t Save Her

Khalid Elhassan April 16, 2025 16 min

Fersen - Hans Axel von Fersen — Hans Axel von Fersen. Wikimedia

10. Planning a Royal Escape

The plan was to take Louis XVI and the royal family to the citadel of Montmedy, 200 miles from Paris, held by a royalist general and 10,000 men. After he regained his freedom of action, the king planned to launch a royalist counterrevolution. He mistakenly believed that only radicals in Paris supported the revolution, and that the peasants and broad French masses were on his side. With their support, he planned to restore France to how it used to be. Von Fersen had carriages placed near the Tuileries Palace, where the royal family was kept under guard. At 11:15 PM on the night of June 20^th, 1791, the royal children were smuggled out. Half an hour later, the king and his sister, Madame Elizabeth, followed. Marie Antoinette took a bit longer to join them.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.