When the King Took Flight

On a June night in 1791, King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette fled Paris in disguise, hoping to escape the turmoil of the French Revolution. They were arrested by a group of citizens a few miles from Belgium and forced to return to Paris. Two years later they would both die at the guillotine. Tackett recounts this story in gripping novelistic style.

The royal family's attempt to flee France in 1791 was one of the defining events of the French Revolution. Timothy Tackett, the most accomplished historian of the Revolution now writing, tells the story of the great flight memorably. The reader will feel that he or she is accompanying the disguised royal family out of the Tuileries in Paris and riding along with them in the big black coach as it falls further and further behind schedule. This is the story, brilliantly told, of how the decision to flee Paris changed the course of the Revolution. -- John Merriman, author of The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time Timothy Tackett has written a superb book. Not only is this a spellbinding story well-told, Tackett restores the centrality of Louis XVI to the history of the Revolution and shows how the royal betrayal had incalculable consequences for the monarchy and for the tragedies that lay ahead. -- Donald Sutherland, author of The French Revolution and Empire: The Quest for a Civic Order A meticulous work, combining smooth-flowing narrative with cogent analysis. He thereby demonstrates how far the Revolution had progressed by June 1791, and how the king's flight helps to explain its subsequent radical and repressive turns. -- Isser Woloch, author of The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, 1789-1820s

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