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Shocking Marriage Details from History that Really Take the Cake

Khalid Elhassan September 12, 2022 39 min

A Nerve-Wracking Wait

Marie Antoinette at the Tuileries Palace. Imgur

Count Axel von Fersen had carriages placed near the Tuileries Palace, where the royal family were kept under guard. At 11:15 PM on the night of June 20^th, 1791, the royal children were brought out. Half an hour later, the king and his sister, Madame Elizabeth, followed. It took Marie Antoinette a bit longer to join them. Just as she was about to leave, the Marquis de Lafayette, who was in charge of the palace guard, showed up in a torch-lit carriage. The queen had to hide in the darkness until Lafayette went on his way, before she was able to join the rest of her family.

Louis XVI left a document in the Tuilereis Palace, 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 began. In private correspondence, Marie Antoinette took an even more reactionary line. She 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, Marie Antoinette’s maids waited, along with fresh horses to whisk the royals to safety.

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.