25. The Love of Marie Antoinette’s Life Tried to Spring Her from Revolutionary Paris
After a revolutionary mob stormed the Bastille in 1789, the king decided to go to Paris as a good will gesture towards the revolutionaries. Marie Antoinette went into hysterics when her husband left, and it took a lot of work by von Fersen and other close intimates to calm the queen down. The French Revolutionary Wars, and later the Napoleonic Wars into which they seamlessly segued, roiled Europe and much of the world from the 1790s until the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The years after the French Revolution broke out in Paris were tough on the French 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, both were executed. However, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, helped by Count Axel von Fersen, had nearly avoided that fate. Von Fersen did not abandon the French queen after revolution swept her country. The love of the French queen’s life tried to help her – as well as her royal hubby whom he had cuckolded – escape from revolutionary Paris to a monarchist stronghold. They almost made it.
