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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

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.

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.