Louis XVII
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Louis XVII (born Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy; 27 March 1785 – 8 June 1795) was the younger son of King
When his
Biography
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6c/Acte_de_bapt%C3%AAme_de_Louis_Charles.jpg/290px-Acte_de_bapt%C3%AAme_de_Louis_Charles.jpg)
Louis-Charles de France was born at the
As customary in royal families, Louis-Charles was cared for by multiple people. Queen Marie Antoinette appointed governesses to look after all three of her children. Louis-Charles' original governess was
Some have suggested that Axel von Fersen, who was romantically linked with Marie Antoinette, was the father of her son. The fact that Louis Charles was born exactly nine months after he returned to court was noted, but this theory was debunked by most scholars, who reject it, observing that the time of his conception corresponded to a time that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had spent a lot of time together. The king wrote in his diary about the birth as "when my son was born". Marie Antoinette reportedly retained her charisma after her pregnancies, cutting an imposing figure in her court. She was said to have many admirers, but remained a faithful, strong-willed wife and a stern but ultimately loving mother.[4]
On 6 October 1789, the royal family was forced by a Parisian mob mostly composed of women to move from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where they spent the next three years as prisoners under the daily surveillance of the National Guards who did not spare any humiliation to the family; at that time Marie Antoinette was always surrounded by guards, even in her bedroom at night and these guards were present when the Queen was allowed to see her children.
The family lived a secluded life, and Marie Antoinette dedicated most of her time to her two children under the daily surveillance of the national guards who kept her hands behind her back and searched everybody from the Queen to the children to see if any letters were smuggled to the prisoner.
On 13 August, the royal family was imprisoned in the tower of the
Naming
At his birth, Louis-Charles, a Fils de France ("Son of France"), was given the title of Duke of Normandy, and, on 4 June 1789, when Louis Joseph, Dauphin of France, his elder brother, died, the four-year-old became Dauphin of France, a title he held until September 1791, when France became a constitutional monarchy. Under the new constitution, the heir-apparent to the throne of France, formerly referred to as the "Dauphin", was restyled the Prince Royal. Louis-Charles held that title until the fall of the monarchy on 21 September 1792. At the death of his father on 21 January 1793, royalists and foreign powers intent on restoring the monarchy held him to be the new king of France, with the title of Louis XVII. From his exile in Hamm, in today's North Rhine-Westphalia, his uncle, the Count of Provence and future Louis XVIII, who had emigrated on 21 June 1791, appointed himself Regent for the young imprisoned king.
Prison and rumours of escape
1793: In the care of Antoine Simon
Immediately following Louis XVI's execution, plots were hatched for the escape of the prisoners from the
On 3 July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and put in the care of
On 6 October,
1794: Illness
On 19 January 1794, the Simons left the
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/73/Louis_Charles_of_France2.jpg/200px-Louis_Charles_of_France2.jpg)
Louis-Charles was then taken out for fresh air and walks on the roof of the Tower. From about the time of Gomin's arrival, he was inspected, not by delegates of the Commune, but by representatives of the civil committee of the 48 sections of Paris. From the end of October onward, the child maintained silence, explained by Laurent as a determination taken on the day he made his deposition against his mother. On 19 December 1794, he was visited by three commissioners from the Committee of Public Safety — Jean-Baptiste Harmand , Jean-Baptiste Charles Matthieu and Jacques Reverchon — but they failed to get the boy to say anything at all.
1795: Death
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Jeton_sur_la_mort_de_louis_XVII.jpg/220px-Jeton_sur_la_mort_de_louis_XVII.jpg)
On 31 March 1795,
Louis-Charles died on 8 June 1795. The next day an autopsy was conducted by Pelletan. In the report it was stated that a child apparently about 10 years of age, "which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet's son", had died of a
Louis-Charles was buried on 10 June in the
Heart of Louis-Charles
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/93/Coeur_de_Louis_Charles_de_France_%28Louis_XVII%29.jpg/220px-Coeur_de_Louis_Charles_de_France_%28Louis_XVII%29.jpg)
Following a tradition of preserving royal hearts, Louis-Charles's heart was removed and smuggled out during the autopsy by the overseeing physician, Philippe-Jean Pelletan. Thus, Louis-Charles' heart was not interred with the rest of the body. Dr. Pelletan stored the smuggled heart in distilled wine in order to preserve it. However, after 8 to 10 years the distilled wine had evaporated, and the heart was from that time kept dry.
After the
It was later offered to
Finally Maria della Neve offered the heart to
It was in 2000 that the
Of these results, historian Jean Tulard wrote: "This [mummified] heart is ... almost certainly that of Louis XVII. We can never be 100 per cent sure but this is about as sure as it gets".[14][15]
In the light of this conclusion, French
Lost Dauphin claimants
As rumors quickly spread that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers, the legend of the "Lost Dauphin" was born. When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, some one hundred claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward.
Naundorff
Karl Wilhelm Naundorff was a German clockmaker whose story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him, Paul Barras determined to save the Dauphin in order to please Joséphine de Beauharnais, the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the Dauphin's existence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The Dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure with a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child, but the Dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, to be retrieved by friends before it reached the cemetery.
Naundorff arrived in Berlin in 1810, with papers giving the name Karl Wilhelm Naundorff. He said he was escaping persecution and settled at
However, DNA testing conducted in 1993 proved that Naundorff was not the Dauphin.[19]
Richemont
Baron de Richemont's tale that Jeanne Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely. Richemont, alias Henri Éthelbert-Louis-Hector Hébert, began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. He died in 1853.
Williams
Reverend
Williams was a missionary to Native Americans when, according to him, the
In fiction
Novel
- 1884 – ISBN 9780486280615(a character falsely claiming to be him)
- 1913 – ISBN 9780755111121
- 1937 – ISBN 9780755115440
- 1951 – ISBN 0090031903
- 1953 – ISBN 9780110500645
- 1955 – Carley Dawson, Dragon Run
- 2000 – ISBN 9780312283124
- 2003 – ISBN 2070314200
- 2003 – ISBN 9782070302284
- 2005 – ISBN 2264037903
- 2007 – ISBN 2246625815
- 2009 – ISBN 0956151809
- 2010 – ISBN 9780385737647
- 2011 – ISBN 9782266188906
- 2011 – ISBN 9782916831169
- 2011 – ISBN 9781610402842
Cinema
- 1937 – Le roi sans couronne played by Scotty Beckett
- 1938 – La Marseillaise played by Marie-Pierre Sordet-Dantès
- 1938 – Marie Antoinette played by Scotty Beckett
- 1945 – Pamela played by Serge Emrich
- 1957 – Dangerous Exile played by Richard O'Sullivan
- 1982 – The Scarlet Pimpernel played by Richard Charles
- 1989 – La Révolution française played by Sean Flynn
- 1991 – Killer Tomatoes Eat France played by Steve Lundquist.
- 1995 – Jefferson in Paris played by Damien Groelle
- 2001 – The Affair of the Necklace played by Thomas Dodgson-Gates
- 2006 – Marie Antoinette played by Jago Betts, Axel Küng, Driss Hugo-Kalff
Music
- 2014 – Symphony of the Vampire by Kamijo
- 2018 – Sang by Kamijo
See also
- Alexei Nikolaevich, heir to the Russian Empire; imprisoned and killed by the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War
- King John
- Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York, the Princes in the Tower who vanished towards the end of the Wars of the Roses; alleged to have been murdered by their uncle Richard III
References
- ^ a b public domain: Bryant, Margaret (1911). "Louis XVII. of France". In Chisholm, Hugh (ed.). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 45. This article incorporates text from a publication now in the
- ^ a b Lever, Evelyne: Marie-Antoinette, Fayard, Paris, 1991, p. 480
- ^ Alain Decaux, Louis XVII retrouvé, 1947, p. 306."Gallica". BNF. 1927.
- ^ Fraser 2001, pp. 180–200, 305–313
- ^ Fraser 2001, pp. 350–360
- ^ Philippe Huisman, Marguerite Jallut: Marie Antoinette, Stephens, 1971
- ^ Bloy, Léon (2022). The Son of Louis XVI. Sunny Lou Publishing.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-7475-9666-0.
- ^ "tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis" at Dorland's Medical Dictionary
- ISBN 978-1357844646.
- ^ Xavier de Roche (1995). Louis XVII. Le livre du bicentenaire (in French). Editions de Paris. p. 12.
- ^ messire62. "la science au secours de l'histoire". histoiredefancescience.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ^ "Cottin". Archived from the original on 25 June 2013. Retrieved 19 May 2015.
- ^ from the original on 12 January 2022. Retrieved 17 March 2020.
- ^ Bryant, Elizabeth (3 June 2004). "France buries 200-year-old royal mystery". United Press International. Retrieved 17 March 2020.
- ^ "The mtDNA and its role in Ancestry: Part XIV (Descendents of Maria-Theresa)" Genebase Archived 13 May 2009 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved 22 June 2009
- ^ Revue rétrospective, BNF
- ^ "French boy king's heart to be buried in crypt". Kingsport Daily News. Paris. Reuters. 7 June 2004. p. 1.
- ISBN 978-0385489485.
- ^ a b Mainville, L'abbé M. (1897). "Louis XVII est-il venu au Canada?". Le Bulletin des Recherches Historiques. 3 (5): 66–70.
Further reading
- Cadbury, Deborah. The Lost King of France: Revolution, Revenge and the Search for Louis XVII. London: Fourth Estate, 2002 (ISBN 0-312-32029-9, paperback reprint). (Note that subtitles vary in different editions of the book.)
- Reviewed by Hilary Mantel in the London Review of Books, Vol. 25, No. 8, 17 August 2003.
- 'Live Free or Die' (historical thriller novel) by Dominic Lagan ISBN 978-0-9561518-0-3, Editions Gigouzac 2009 paperback
- Alcide Beauchesne "Louis 17. Sa vie, martyr et agonie" 1852. Plon. Paris.
External links
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/4a/Commons-logo.svg/30px-Commons-logo.svg.png)
Primary sources
- (in French) Duchess of Angoulême's Memoirs on the Captivity in the Temple (from the autograph manuscript)
- Duchess of Angoulême's Memoirs on the Captivity in the Temple (1823 English translation of a slightly redacted French edition)
Other material
- (in French) Philippe Delorme's website (Philippe Delorme's website : one page in English).
- (in French) Details about the DNA analysis of the heart believed to be that of Louis-Charles.