Louis XVIII has busied himself drafting a…
December 1795 CE
Louis XVIII has busied himself drafting a manifesto in response to Louis XVII's death.
The manifesto, known as "The Declaration of Verona," is Louis XVIII's attempt to introduce the French people to his politics.
The Declaration of Verona beckons France back into the arms of the monarchy, "which for fourteen centuries was the glory of France".
Louis XVIII negotiates Marie-Thérèse's release from her Paris prison in 1795.
He desperately wants her to marry her first cousin, Louis-Antoine, Duke of Angoulême, the son of the Count of Artois.
Louis XVIII deceives his niece by telling her that her parents' last wishes were for her to marry Louis Antoine, and she duly agrees to her uncle-king's wishes.
She was liberated on December 18, 1795, on the eve of her seventeenth birthday, exchanged for prominent French prisoners (Pierre Riel de Beurnonville, Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Hugues-Bernard Maret, Armand-Gaston Camus, Nicolas Marie Quinette and Charles-Louis Huguet de Sémonville) and taken to Vienna, her mother's birthplace and the capital city of her cousin, the Holy Roman Emperor Francis II.