Axel Von Fersen The Younger - Politics

Politics

In August 1791, Fersen was sent to Vienna to induce the emperor Leopold to accede to a new coalition against revolutionary France, but he soon came to the conclusion that the Austrian court meant to do nothing at all. At his own request, therefore, he was transferred to Brussels, where he could be of more service to the queen of France. Before he left, he followed the imperial court to Prague for Leopold's coronation as king of Bohemia on 6 September. According to an account of the coronation published in Alexander von Kleist's Fantasien auf einer Reise nach Prag (1792), Fersen was present at a performance of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni given at the Estates Theatre on September 2. Kleist recorded that Fersen made a spectacle of himself trying to arrange romantic liaisons among the female audience members and noted how ostentatiously he displayed the French royalist white cockade.

In February 1792, at his own mortal peril, Fersen once more succeeded in reaching Paris in disguise and with counterfeit credentials as minister plenipotentiary to Portugal. On the 13th he arrived, and the same evening contrived to steal an interview with the queen in the Tuilleries Palace itself, unobserved. On the following day he was with the royal family from six o'clock in the evening till six o'clock the next morning, and convinced himself that a second flight was physically impossible. On the afternoon of the 21st he succeeded in paying a third visit to the Tuileries, stayed there until midnight and succeeded, with great difficulty, in reaching Brussels on the 27th. This perilous expedition, a monumental instance of courage and loyalty, had no substantial result. There followed some years of relative inactivity after Gustav III's assassination in 1792 and the execution of the French King and Queen in 1793. In 1797 Fersen was sent to the Second Congress of Rastatt as the Swedish delegate, but in consequence of a protest from the French government, was not permitted to take part in it.

During this congress it is told that Napoléon simply called him Monsieur, neglecting the fact that he was an appointed ambassador, a count, and one of the Lords of the Realm of Sweden (en av Rikets Herrar). Napoléon declared that he would never discuss anything with a person who had had an affair with the widow Capet (Marie Antoinette). Fersen thereupon served the following two years as Sweden's envoy to the court of Baden.

During the regency of the Duke Charles of Södermanland (1792–1796) Fersen, like other prominent Gustavians, or loyal supporters of the late Gustav III, was in disgrace. When Gustav IV Adolf attained his majority in 1796, Fersen was welcomed back to court. In 1799 he was made chancellor of Uppsala University to suppress radical student unrest and in 1801 was appointed Riksmarskalk, or Marshal of the Realm. On the outbreak of the war of the Third Coalition with Napoleon in 1805, Fersen accompanied Gustav IV Adolf to Germany as his political advisor. He prevented Gustav Adolf from attacking Prussia when it declined to join the war against France. During the rest of Gustav IV Adolf's reign Fersen was therefore in semi-disgrace, though he continued to serve in Sweden's interim governments when the king was abroad.