Hailed by Mark Twain as "the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world”, the Lion Monument honors the over two hundred Swiss Guards massacred in 1792 during the French Revolution while serving as a part of the Royal Household of France. After the French King Louis XVI had to move his family to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, revolutionaries stormed in protest and overran the Swiss Guards. Their commander, Major Karl Josef von Bachmann, later died by the guillotine, after a formal trial and sentencing. Danish sculptor, Bertel Thorvaldsen, designed the memorial, and between 1820 and 1821, Lukas Ahorn cut the dying lion into a wall of sandstone rock.
Denkmalstrasse 4, 6002 Lucerne, CHE, Phone: 41-41-227-17-17