He spent his childhood at the Swedish royal court, as his mother was a popular socialite and the personal friend of both Louisa Ulrika of Prussia and Gustav III of Sweden.

That evening, the three conspirators attended a masquerade ball at the Royal Opera House, during which either Anckarström or Ribbing (who boasted of it later when in exile)[2] shot and wounded the king.

Despite his enthusiasm for the Revolution he was unsettled by the burgeoning Reign of Terror and therefore left France, relocating first to Switzerland, where he had an affair with the famous writer Madame de Staël, and then back to Denmark.

As a known regicide, Adolph de Leuven (as he now called himself) did not feel safe during the White Terror of 1815, and he therefore left France again, this time for Brussels, where he found work as a journalist for the radical newspaper Le Vrai Libéral.

His writings for this organ earned him the enmity of King Frederick William III of Prussia, who in 1820 persuaded the United Kingdom of the Netherlands to deport him.