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Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’s Escapades, and Other Lesser Known Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan January 21, 2020 33 min

William Carver - Butch Cassidy — Butch Cassidy, far right, The Sundance Kid, far left, and other members of the Wild Bunch gang. Wikimedia

11. The Royal Flight

Path of the French royal family’s flight. Wikimedia

King Louis XVI planned to flee with his family to the citadel of Montmedy, roughly 200 miles from Paris, where 10,000 men under a royalist general awaited. After regaining his freedom of action, Louis planned to launch a royalist counter revolution, and restore France to pre-revolution days. On the night of June 20^th, 1791, he and Marie Antoinette gathered their family, and prepared to slip out of the Tuileries Palace.

Behind, Louis left a document addressed to the National Assembly, letting them know his intent to roll the clock back to the royal concessions granted in 1789, before the Revolution began. In private correspondence, Marie Antoinette took a more reactionary line, declaring an intention to return to the old order, without any concessions at all.

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.