Brad Thor did a book called “The Lions of Lucerne”. Wonder if it had anything to do with that? Pretty good book by the way.
Thor's book title is a reference to the statue, yes; but a completely unrelated story, obviously.
Wikipedia:
From the early 17th century, a
regiment of
Swiss Guards had served as part of the
Royal Household of France. On 6 October 1789, King
Louis XVI had been forced to move with his family from the
Palace of Versailles to the
Tuileries Palace in Paris. In June 1791 he tried to
flee to Montmédy near the frontier, where troops under royalist officers were concentrated. In the 1792
10th of August Insurrection, revolutionaries stormed the palace. Fighting broke out spontaneously after the Royal Family had been escorted from the Tuileries to take refuge with the
Legislative Assembly. The Swiss Guards ran low on ammunition and were overwhelmed by superior numbers. A note written by the King half an hour after firing had commenced has survived, ordering the Swiss to retire and return to their barracks.
[4] Delivered in the middle of the fighting, this was only acted on after their position had become untenable.
[5]
Of the Swiss Guards defending the Tuileries, more than six hundred were killed during the fighting or massacred after surrender. An estimated two hundred more died in prison of their wounds or were killed during the
September Massacres that followed. Apart from about a hundred Swiss who escaped from the Tuileries, the only survivors of the regiment were a 300 strong detachment which, with the King's authorization, had been sent to Normandy to escort grain convoys a few days before August 10.
[6] The Swiss officers were mostly amongst those massacred, although Major
Karl Josef von Bachmann — in command at the Tuileries — was formally tried and
guillotined in September, still wearing his red uniform coat. Two surviving Swiss officers achieved senior rank under
Napoleon.
Memorial
The initiative to create the monument was taken by Karl Pfyffer von Altishofen, an officer of the Guards who had been on leave in Lucerne at that time of the fight. He began collecting money in 1818. The monument was designed by
Danish sculptor
Bertel Thorvaldsen, and hewn in 1820–21 by Lukas Ahorn, in a former
sandstone quarry near Lucerne. Carved into the cliff face, the monument measures ten metres in length and six metres in height.
The monument is dedicated
Helvetiorum Fidei ac Virtuti ("To the loyalty and bravery of the Swiss"). The dying lion is portrayed impaled by a
spear, covering a
shield bearing the
fleur-de-lis of the
French monarchy; beside him is another shield bearing the
coat of arms of Switzerland. The inscription below the sculpture lists the names of the officers and gives the approximate numbers of soldiers who died (DCCLX = 760), and survived (CCCL = 350).
[7]
The monument is described by
Thomas Carlyle in
The French Revolution: A History.
[8] The pose of the lion was copied in 1894 by Thomas M. Brady (1849–1907)
[9] for his
Lion of Atlanta in the
Oakland Cemetery in
Atlanta, Georgia.
Mark Twain on the monument
The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff—for he is carved from the
living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of France. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind, and a clear stream trickles from above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored, among the water-lilies.
Around about are green trees and grass. The place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion—and all this is fitting, for lions do die in such places, and not on granite pedestals in public squares fenced with fancy iron railings. The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere, but nowhere so impressive as where he is.
— Mark Twain,
A Tramp Abroad, 1880