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Shocking Marriage Details from History that Really Take the Cake

Khalid Elhassan September 12, 2022 39 min

A Royal Marriage That Was Simultaneously Strained and Strengthened by a Shared Sense of Humiliation

Marriage - Marie Antoinette and her children — Marie Antoinette and her children. Wikimedia

Since the moment they were taken to Paris by a revolutionary mob, King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived as virtual prisoners of their subjects. Their marriage was further strained – but in some aspects also strengthened – by the shared sense of humiliation they felt as they were forced to adjust to the role of constitutional monarchs. Eventually, the royal couple decided to slip out of Paris. Count Axel 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.

The plan was to take the king and the royal family to the citadel of Montmedy, about 200 miles from Paris. There, 10,000 men under a royalist general awaited Louis. 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 the broad French masses were on his side. With their support, he planned to restore his kingdom to the way it had been.

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.