Flight to Varennes (June 20-21, 1791)
Beginning at the first hour of June 21, 1791, King Louis XVI along with his family attempted a daring flight from Paris to Montmedy in the midst of the French Revolution. The reasoning behind this flight was to join up with royalist troops in order to mount a counter-revolution against the insurgency.
Commencing at the Tuileries Palace, the disguised royal family decided to slip out using the cover of darkness in the early hours of July 21 to increase their odds of success.¹ Even though, they unintuitively settled on traveling in a heavy and salient horse drawn carriage against the advice of the Swedish Count Axel Von Fersen, who had originally devised the plan. This, alongside a multitude of other drawbacks eventually led to the failure of the attempt. To elaborate, a series of miscalculations, lack of secrecy, and slow progression were the foundation of this immense failure. Frequently, while the carriage received repairs the King would hold conversations with the peasants and then the queen would even go as far as handing out valuables to help out the locals at the locations that they traveled through. Eventually, the journey would end up concluding in Varennes where detachments of cavalry caught up to the family and put them under arrest. This was all in part to a tip dropped by Jean-Baptiste Drouet, a postmaster in Sainte-Menehould who recognized the king with the help of the king's portrait printed on an assignat in his possession.
After his return to Paris and confinement to the Tuileries Palace, the king issued out a declaration to the people regarding his flight. In this declaration he made it known that in its current state, the National Assembly was not fit to rule over the country.² He also pleads for his liberty, claiming that he has always done what was best for the country and his people. He also tried to denounce a change in governing body, stating "Do you desire that the anarchy and despotism of the clubs replace the monarchical government under which the nation has prospered for fourteen hundred years?"³
Ultimately, this daring action by the king increased the hostility towards the ruling monarchy and showed the National Assembly as well as the people that the king could no longer be trusted.
1. Tackett, Timothy. “The Flight to Varennes and the Coming of the Terror.” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 29, no. 3 (2003): 469–93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41299285.
2. Tracey Rizzo and Laura Mason, “The Flight to Varennes, June 20, 1791,” The flight to varennes, June 20, 1791, accessed September 7, 2023, https://web.archive.org/web/20220806111622/http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/varennes.html.
3. Rizzo and Mason, The Flight to Varennes, June 20, 1791.
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