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.