1/28/23

A very well written, and very well researched book including little known facts, focusing on the royal family's flight to Varennes, the imprisonment and executions following, and of Marie Antoinette's fatal friendship with Count Ferson. ( )

Good read. Nonfiction. Solidly based on real history. Lots of suspense and a hint of illicit romance. ( )

1624 The Fatal Friendship: Marie Antoinette, Count Fersen and the Flight to Varennes, by Stanley Loomis (read 28 Mar 1981) Back in March of 1975 I read with tremendous appreciation Stanley Loomis' book Paris in the Terror. Recalling how much I enjoyed that book I noticed this book by him. One cannot fail to be caught up in the intense, incredible drama of the French Revolution. But Loomis is a popularizer--no footnotes at all! How much better a book he might have if he draped a little scholarly apparatus around it. This book tells the story of the friendship between Marie Antoinette and Count Fersen, a Swedish nobleman who was killed by a mob in Stockholm on June 21, 1810, 19 years to the day after the King and Queen were captured at Varennes. The detailed account of that flight in this book is fascinating and exasperating because it came so near to success. If they had escaped, how would history have been changed? One cannot know, but undoubtedly things would have gone differently. Not a profound book. but lots of fun to read and enjoy, though Loomis surely paints the Revolution more darkly than some. And yet, how can one justify the arrest of Marie Antoinette's lawyers? It is impossible to justify some of the evil that was perpetrated by the makers of that Revolution.
. ( )