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The Secret Love Life of Marie Antoinette and More Historic Romance

Khalid Elhassan December 16, 2021 38 min

Path of the French royal family’s flight. Wikimedia

24. Von Fersen’s Arrangements for the Flight of His Love and Her Family

Ever since they had been taken to Paris by a revolutionary mob, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lived as virtual prisoners of their subjects. They felt humiliated as they were forced to adjust to the role of constitutional monarchs, so 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 in June of that year, 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, roughly 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 used to be.

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.