On the morning of June 21, 1791, King Louis XVI was no longer in his bed in the Tuileries Palace. Panic then follows surprise, when we discover that Queen Marie-Antoinette and her children have also fled with the king. It is from the Palace of Versailles that Stéphane Bern recounts all the stages of this tragic adventure that will soon be called “the flight to Varennes”. It took a handful of seconds and a hundred meters for the royal sedan to reach its goal and change the course of history. Hesitations, blunders, discouragement, fatalism, bad judgment led and stopped the sedan in Varennes. Two years later, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette will mount the scaffold.
