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

19. The Queen’s Swede

Axel von Fersen returned to France in 1778. Marie Antoinette, who had been crowned queen by then, had not forgotten the dashing Swede. She often inquired about von Fersen, and complained when he missed some of her informal parties at her private chateau in Versailles, the Petit Trianon. In his diary entry for November 19^th, 1778, the count wrote: “The queen treats me with great kindness; I often pay her my court at her card-games, and each time she makes to me little speeches that are full of good-will. As someone had told her of my Swedish uniform, she expressed a wish to see me in it; I am to go Thursday thus dressed, not to Court, but to the queen’s apartments. She is the most amiable princess that I know“. Von Fersen saved much of his correspondence with Marie Antoinette.

18. Marie Antoinette’s “Beloved”

There is no proof of a love affair in the correspondence between count and queen, but that is because von Fersen had censored and altered much of it before he died. Scientists recently subjected some letters between the count and queen to X-ray fluorescence, which revealed what had been originally written. Words such as “adore”, “madly”, and “beloved” jumped out of the pages to indicate that the relationship was not platonic. Even in worldly France and the decadent eighteenth century French court, women did not lightly use words like “beloved” to men who were not their husbands. That is how duels started, and in the case of a queen, could amount to treason and result in prosecution and execution for adultery.

17. An Impending Scandal

French history had examples of extramarital affairs with royal women that ended in the torture and execution of their lovers, and the imprisonment of the royal ladies. For Marie Antoinette to refer to von Fersen as her “beloved” on paper, in her own handwriting, was not like a modern innocent “Dear X”. The Queen of France’s attraction to von Fersen was remarked upon. Sweden’s envoy to the court of King Louis XVI noted in 1779 that Marie Antoinette could hardly hide her love for the Swedish count in public, and he worried that a scandal might erupt at any moment. He was relieved when his fellow Swede left for the American Colonies in 1780, where he served as an aide de camp to the Comte de Rochambeau, commander of the French army that fought on the American side.

16. The Count’s Codename for the Queen

Axel von Fersen was present when the allied French and American armies besieged and forced a British surrender at Yorktown in 1781. He returned to France in 1783, and resumed his love affair with France’s queen. Secret letters were exchanged, and his diary contains numerous entries about a woman named “Elle” – his codename for Marie Antoinette – whom he madly loved but could not wed because she was already married. In the meantime, it was an open secret that whenever von Fersen was in Paris, he spent days on end at Marie Antoinette’s private chateau, the Petit Trianon.  When he returned to Sweden a year later, von Fersen got the queen a dog, which she cherished and named Odin. It seems that the king knew of his wife’s love for the Swedish count, but did nothing to about it.

15. The King’s Bedroom Disappointments

For a French monarch, Louis XVI was not much of a womanizer. French kings were long infamous for their insatiable lust, but not this Louis. He married Marie Antoinette in 1770 when he was fifteen and she was fourteen, but showed little interest in her, and the marriage was not consummated until seven years later, in 1777. In a letter to his brother, Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II wrote that Louis had confided to him what he did with his queen. He: “Introduces the member … stays there without moving for about two minutes“, then pulls out without ejaculating and “bids goodnight“. Aside from inexperience and shyness, Louis might have suffered from phimosis, a foreskin condition that causes pain when the penis is erect. It was not until  he underwent surgery that he was finally able to consummate his marriage.

14. A Lackluster Marriage

The king and queen seldom spent much time together. Louis XVI often ate and drank so much that he became nearly senseless, and had to be carried to bed. With such a husband, Marie Antoinette unsurprisingly looked for love outside the marriage, and sought somebody who knew what to do in bed. Whatever the French royal couple’s love life, before von Fersen showed up, Marie Antoinette had not conceived her first child until seven years after she had been married to Louis. There was then a three year gap – which coincided perfectly with von Fersen’s absence in America – before she got pregnant again. Within a month of the count’s return to France in 1783, Marie Antoinette went from two pregnancies in ten years, to three pregnancies in three years.

13. Marie Antoinette’s True Love

Marie Antoinette miscarried her first pregnancy. Her second pregnancy produced a son, and the third a daughter who did not live long. The son – the future Louis XVII who died in captivity during the French Revolution – strongly resembled not the king, but von Fersen. Louis XVI was autistic, and although quite intelligent, had trouble looking people in the eye, was an obsessive-compulsive who needed to do things in accordance with a rigid schedule, and cried easily. He also did not seem to need sex. He liked his wife, but not for physical reasons: she was his emotional support. Marie Antoinette realized that, supported Louis emotionally, and did all she could to protect him. But as to love, her heart belonged to von Fersen, who was back in France as the king of Sweden’s personal envoy when the French Revolution began.

12. The King and Queen in the Revolution’s Clutches

After a revolutionary mob stormed the Bastille in 1789, Louis XVI decided to go to Paris as a good will gesture towards the revolutionaries. Marie Antoinette became hysterical when her husband left, and it took a lot of effort by von Fersen and other close intimates to calm the queen down. The French Revolutionary Wars, and later the Napoleonic Wars roiled Europe and much of the world from the 1790s until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The years after the French Revolution’s eruption were tough on France’s king and queen. A few months after the storming of the Bastille, the unwashed masses burst into the Palace of Versailles in October, 1789, and forcibly transferred the royal family to Paris. Eventually, the royal couple were executed. However, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, helped by von Fersen, had nearly avoided that fate.

11. The Royal Prisoners

Von Fersen did not abandon the French queen after revolution swept France. The love of Marie Antoinette’s tried to help her – as well as her cuckolded husband – escape from revolutionary Paris to a monarchist stronghold. They almost made it. Ever since they had been taken to Paris by a revolutionary mob, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived as virtual prisoners of their subjects. They felt humiliated as they were forced to adjust to the role of constitutional monarchs, so the royal couple decided to flee Paris. Von Fersen began to arrange plans for the king and queen’s flight in the spring of 1791, and that June, he secured a type of light carriage known as a Berline to whisk them away to safety.

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.

9. When the Queen Finally Got Off Her Chest What She Really Thought About Her Subjects

The Marquis de Lafayette, who was in charge of the palace guard, arrived in a torch-lit carriage just as the queen was about to leave. She had to hide in the darkness until Lafayette went on his way, before she could join the rest of her family. Behind in the Tuileries Palace, the king left a document addressed to the National Assembly. In it, he declared his intention to roll the clock back to the royal concessions granted in 1789, before the French Revolution started. In private correspondence, Marie Antoinette took an even more reactionary line, and declared an intention to return to the old order, without any concessions at all. Von Fersen personally drove the carriage that contained his love and her family to a spot a few miles from Paris. There, the queen’s maids awaited, along with fresh horses to whisk the royals to safety.

8. The Flight of von Fersen’s Lover

Outside of Paris, the escape party broke up. The royals took a post route, while von Fersen continued on via a different route. They planned to meet again at Montmedy, but the reunion never took place, thanks to a change of plans. To spirit away the royal family and their close intimates, von Fersen had arranged for two fast light carriages, that could have made it to Montmedy swiftly. However, to make that work, the royal family would have had to split up and travel in two separate carriages, and the king and queen refused to accept that. Instead, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette decided on a different ride at the last minute: a bigger and more conspicuous carriage drawn by six horses that could accommodate everybody. It was a bad choice.

7. Recapturing the Royal Couple

Louis XVI entered the carriage disguised as the valet of a Russian noblewoman – the royal children’s governess, who pretended to be their mother. Marie Antoinette pretended to be a governess, while her sister acted like a nurse. They made it out of Paris unchallenged, but soon regretted their last minute transport change. The heavy carriage that carried the French royal family was slow, and had to stop for repairs when its traces broke. The royal couple’s disguises were also flimsy, and they were recognized by many along the route. The escape ended at the small town of Varennes, just thirty miles shy of safety. The local postmaster recognized Louis XVI from currency that bore his likeness, and the royal family were arrested and returned to Paris. It was an unmitigated disaster.

6. A Disastrous Attempted Escape

The revolutionaries had initially accepted Louis XVI as a constitutional monarch, and took his assurances that he agreed with them at face value. His flight, coupled with the documents that he and Marie Antoinette had left behind that expressed what they really thought, changed their minds. Until then, abolition of the monarchy and the declaration of a republic had been a fringe position pushed only by radicals. Now, it quickly gained in popularity. On September 21^st, 1792, the monarchy was abolished and the French Republic was declared. As to von Fersen, his role in the royal family’s flight came to light, and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He fled France, and got in touch with aristocratic French exiles led by Louis XVI’s younger brother, the Comte d’Artois, who wanted to roll back the French Revolution and restore the Ancien Regime.

5. The Last Time the Swedish Count and French Queen Saw Each Other

Von Fersen assisted in efforts to try and get other European powers to declare war on revolutionary France. In August, 1791, he traveled to Vienna, where he met Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II, the brother of von Fersen’s love, Marie Antoinette. He snuck back into Paris, disguised with a big wig and fake moustache, and claimed to be an envoy from Portugal’s queen. That got him into the Tuileries Palace in December, 1791. There, the king and queen were held captive under tight guard. He proposed another escape plan: since the roads were now closely watched, the king would flee through the woods, and then by sea. In the meantime, Marie Antoinette’s love would spirit her and the children away via another route. Louis rejected that plan because he did not believe it would work. That night, von Fersen saw Marie Antoinette for the last time.

4. The Royal Executions

After Louis XVI rejected von Fersen’s escape plan, the Swedish count departed France. His and the French emigres’ efforts to instigate war between Europe’s monarchies and revolutionary France finally bore fruit in the summer of 1792, when hostilities commenced between France and Austria. Rather than help von Fersen’s love and her family, however, the war doomed them. That September, the French National Assembly abolished the monarchy and declared a French Republic. Louis XVI was tried for treason in December, 1792, convicted, and guillotined a month later. Von Fersen proposed a cavalry raid to try and snatch his love Marie Antoinette from Paris, but the generals he pitched the plan to rejected it as hopeless. The French queen met the same fate as the king, and was guillotined in October, 1793.

3. His Lover’s Execution Devastated von Fersen

Von Fersen wrote about his reaction to Marie Antoinette’s execution: “Though I was prepared for it and expected it since the transfer to the Conciergerie, I was devastated by the reality. I did not have the strength to feel anything … I thought about her constantly, about all the horrible circumstances of her sufferings, of the doubt she might have had about me, my attachment, my interest. That thought tortured me“. Distraught, he returned to Sweden, where he fell into disfavor at court and lost much of his political clout. From his home country, he was forced to stand by helplessly and watch as Revolutionary France, which had killed his love, expanded its reach across Europe. Von Fersen eventually regained favor at court, and was sent as an envoy to France, where he met Napoleon Bonaparte in 1797.

2. Von Fersen’s Attempts to Thwart Revolution in His Native Sweden

Napoleon recalled von Fersen’s efforts against the Revolution and on behalf of the executed French king and queen. As the Swedish count recounted, Napoleon: “remarked that the Court of Sweden seemed to take a pleasure in sending agents and ambassadors who were personally disagreeable to every French citizen“. When he returned to Sweden, von Fersen was alarmed by a rise in popular sympathy for revolutionary France. In 1801, he became Marshal of the Realm, Sweden’s highest court official, and did all he could from that position to thwart the spread of revolution to his country. In 1809, a coup deposed Sweden’s King Gustav IV Adolf, and replaced him with his uncle, Charles XIII. A dispute then erupted about who should succeed Charles.

1. Von Fersen Met an Even More Violent End at the Hands of Revolutionaries Than Did His Lover

Count Hans Axel von Fersen supported the deposed king’s son, Gustav, Prince of Vasa, and opposed the popular Charles August, who was adopted by Charles XIII and became Crown Prince, or heir to the throne. However, Charles August fell off his horse in 1810, had a stroke, and died. Rumors spread that he was poisoned, and von Fersen was a prime suspect. On June 10^th, as Marshal of the Realm, he rode in a carriage at the head of the Crown Prince’s funeral procession, only to be attacked by a mob as soon as he reached Stockholm. The crowd dragged the count out of the carriage, and the funeral’s armed military escort did not intervene. Von fersen broke free and ran into a nearby house, but the mob followed and dragged him back out into the street, where it beat him to death.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

Daily Beast – Marie Antoinette’s Adultery Unmasked by Modern Science

Encyclopedia Britannica – Hans Axel von Fersen

Fersen, Hans Axel – Diary and Correspondence of Count Axel Fersen, Grand Marshal of Sweden, Relating to the Court of France (1902)

Fraser, Antonia – Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001)

Goldstone, Nancy – In the Shadow of the Empress: The Defiant Lives of Maria Theresa, Mother of Marie Antoinette, and Her Daughters (2021)

History Collection – 10 Things We Owe the French Revolution of 1789

Loomis, Stanley – The Fatal Friendship: Marie Antoinette, Count Fersen, and the Flight to Varennes (1972)

Tackett, Timothy – When the King Took Flight (2003)