Louis XVII

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.

Louis XVI taking care of the education of his son in the Temple, (Musée de la Révolution française).

Immediately following Louis XVI's execution, plots were hatched for the escape of the prisoners from the Temple, the chief of these plots were engineered by the Chevalier de Jarjayes, the Baron de Batz, and Lady Atkyns. All came to nothing.

On 3 July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and put in the care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler who had been named his guardian by the Committee of Public Safety and was expected to transform the young boy from a former prince into a staunch republican citizen.

The tales told by royalist writers of the cruelty inflicted by Simon and his wife on the child have not been proved. Louis Charles' sister, Marie Therese, wrote in her memoires about the "monster Simon", as did Alcide Beauchesne. Antoine Simon's wife Marie-Jeanne, in fact, took great care of the child's person. Stories survive narrating how he was encouraged to eat and drink to excess and learned the language of the gutter. The foreign secretaries of Britain and Spain also heard accounts from their spies that the boy was raped by prostitutes in order to infect him with venereal diseases to supply the Commune with manufactured "evidence" against the Queen.[7] However, the scenes related by Alcide de Beauchesne of the physical torment of the child are not supported by any testimony, though he was at this time seen by a great number of people.

On 6 October, Pache, Chaumette, Jacques Hébert and others visited the boy and secured his signature to charges of sexual molestation against his mother and his aunt.[7] The next day he met his elder sister Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte for the last time.

On 19 January 1794, the Simons left the Temple, after securing a receipt for the safe transfer of their ward, who was declared to be in good health. A large part of the Temple records from that time onward disappeared under the Bourbon Restoration, making ascertaining of the facts impossible. Two days after the departure of the Simons, Louis-Charles is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room which was barricaded like the cage of a wild animal. The story runs that food was passed through the bars to the boy, who survived despite the accumulated filth of his surroundings.

Robespierre visited Marie-Thérèse on 11 May, but no one, according to the legend, entered the boy's room for six months until Barras visited the prison after the 9th Thermidor (27 July 1794). Barras's account of the visit describes the child as suffering from extreme neglect, but conveys no idea of the alleged walling-in. It is nevertheless certain that during the first half of 1794 Louis-Charles was very strictly secluded; he had no special guardian, but was under the charge of guards who changed from day to day.

The boy made no complaint to Barras of any ill treatment. He was then cleaned and re-clothed. His room was cleaned, and during the day he was visited by his new attendant, Jean Jacques Christophe Laurent (1770–1807), a creole from Martinique. From 8 November onward, Laurent had assistance from a man named Gomin.

Louis Charles by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun

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. The rare recurrence of the same inspectors would obviously facilitate fraud, if any such was intended. From the end of October onward, the child maintained an obstinate 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 — J. B. Harmand de la Meuse, J. B. C. Mathieu and J. Reverchon — but they failed to get the boy to say anything at all.

Louis XVII

On 31 March 1795, Étienne Lasne was appointed to be the child's guardian in place of Laurent. In May that year the boy was seriously ill, and a doctor, P. J. Desault, who had visited him seven months earlier, was summoned. However, on 1 June, Desault himself died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, and it was some days before doctors Philippe-Jean Pelletan and Jean-Baptiste Dumangin were called.

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 scrofulous infection of long standing. "Scrofula" as it was previously known, is nowadays called Tuberculous cervical lymphadenitis referring to a lymphadenitis (chronic lymph node swelling or infection) of the neck (cervical lymph nodes) lymph nodes associated with tuberculosis.[8][9]

During the autopsy, the physician Dr. Pelletan was shocked to see the countless scars which covered the boy's body, evidently the result of the physical mistreatment which the child had suffered while imprisoned in the Temple.[10]

Louis-Charles was buried on 10 June in the Sainte Marguerite cemetery, but no stone was erected to mark the spot. A skull was found there in 1846 and identified as his, though later re-examination in 1893 showed it to be from a teenager and therefore unlikely to be his.[11]

Heart of Louis-Charles inside the crystal urn.

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.[10]

After the Restoration in 1815, Dr. Pelletan attempted to give the heart to Louis-Charles's uncle, Louis XVIII; the latter refused because he could not bring himself to believe that was the heart of his nephew. Dr. Pelletan then donated the heart to the Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen.

Following the Revolution of 1830, and the plundering of the Archbishop's palace, Pelletan's son found the relic among the ruins and placed it in the crystal urn in which it is still kept today. After the younger Pelletan's death in 1879, it passed to Éduard Dumont.[10] Dumont died in 1895, and the heart came into the possession of Dumont’s cousin, the French historian Paul Cottin (1856-1932).

Cottin offered it to Don Carlos de Bourbon, a pretender to the throne of Spain, nephew of the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este. The offer was accepted and the relic was held near Vienna, Austria at the castle of Frohsdorf. In 1909, Carlos's son, Jaime, Duke of Madrid, inherited the heart, and gave it to his sister, the Infanta Beatriz of Spain.[1][2] It later passed to Jaime’s daughter, the princess Beatrice de Bourbon (1874–1961), wife of Prince Fabrizio Massimo (1868–1944), and in 1938, to the princess Infanta Maria das Neves of Portugal, legitimist heir to the throne of France.[12][13]

Finally two granddaughters of Don Carlos offered the heart to the Duc de Bauffremont, president of the Memorial of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris. He in turn put the heart and its crystal urn in the basilica's necropolis of the Kings of France, the burial place of Louis-Charles's parents and other members of the French royal family.[10]

There it rested undisturbed until December 1999, when public notaries witnessed the removal of a section of the muscle of the heart's aorta removed from the rest of the heart and its transfer into a sealed envelope, and subsequently the opening of the same sealed envelope in the laboratory to be tested.

It was in 2000 that the historian Philippe Delorme arranged for DNA testing of the heart as well as bone samples from one of the many historical claimants to Louis-Charles's identity, namely, Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker (see below). Ernst Brinkmann of Münster University and Belgian genetics professor Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, conducted mitochondrial DNA tests using a strand of the hair of the boy's mother, Marie-Antoinette, and other samples from her sisters Maria Johanna Gabriela and Maria Josepha, their mother, Empress Maria Theresa, and two living direct descendants in the strict maternal line of Maria Theresa, namely Queen Anne of Romania and her brother, Prince André de Bourbon Parme, maternal relatives of Louis XVII. The tests proved both that Naundorff was not the dauphin, and the heart was that of Louis-Charles.

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 Legitimists organised the heart's solemn burial in the St Denis Basilica on 8 June 2004. The burial took place in connection with a Mass and during the ceremony 12-year-old Prince Amaury de Bourbon-Parme carried the heart and placed it in a niche beside the tombs of Louis-Charles' parents, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.[14] It was the first time in over a century that a royal ceremony had taken place in France, complete with the fleur-de-lis standard and a royal crown.[16][17][18]

Karl Wilhelm Naundorff's story rested on a series of complicated intrigues. According to him, 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 Spandau in 1812 as a clockmaker, marrying Johanna Einert in 1818. In 1822 he removed to Brandenburg an der Havel, and in 1828 to Crossen, near Frankfurt (Oder). He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognised as the dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI. Expelled from France in 1836, the day after bringing a suit against the duchess of Angoulême for the restitution of the dauphin's private property, he lived in exile until his death at Delft on 10 August 1845, and his tomb was inscribed "Louis XVII., roi de France et de Navarre (Charles Louis, duc de Normandie)". The Dutch authorities who had inscribed on his death certificate the name of Charles Louis de Bourbon, duc de Normandie (Louis XVII) permitted his son to bear the name de Bourbon, and when the family appealed in 1850–51, and again in 1874, for the restitution of their civil rights as heirs of Louis XVI, no less an advocate than Jules Favre pled their cause.

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, was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1833, he was again arrested, was brought to trial in the following year and condemned to twelve years' imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleizé on 10 August 1853, the name of Louis Charles de France being inscribed on his tomb until the government ordered its removal.

Another pretender was Reverend Eleazar Williams, a Mohawk-born Protestant missionary, and an advocate for land rights of Native Americans. While at the house Francis Vinton, William began shaking and trembling upon seeing a portrait of Antoine Simon, a member of the sans-culottes, saying of the portrait that it had "haunted me, day, and night, as long as I can remember." Simon was rumored to have physically abused the dauphin while he was imprisoned at the Temple.[21] Francis Vinton was convinced by Eleazar William's reaction that Williams was Louis-Charles. Williams claimed he had no recollection of how he escaped his imprisonment at the Temple, or of his early years in France.[21]

He was a missionary to Native Americans when the prince de Joinville, son of Louis-Philippe, met him, and after some conversation asked him to sign a document abdicating his rights in favour of Louis-Philippe, in return for which he, the dauphin (alias Eleazar Williams), was to receive the private inheritance which was his. This Eleazar Williams refused. Williams's story is generally regarded as false. However, other elements published in 1897 provide some grounds for doubt.[19]

The grave supposed to be that of Louis XVII; Église Sainte-Marguerite, Paris

Louis XVII's remains were not interred with ceremony. "At seven o'clock the police commissary ordered the body to be taken up, and that they should proceed to the cemetery. It was the season of the longest days, and therefore the interment did not take place in secrecy and at night, as some misinformed narrators have said or written; it took place in broad daylight, and attracted a great concourse of people before the gates of the Temple palace." Added, "The funeral entered the cemetery of Sainte Marguerite, not by the church, as some accounts assert, but by the old gate of the cemetery. The interment was made in the corner, on the left, at a distance of eight or nine feet from the enclosure wall, and at an equal distance from a small house, which subsequently served as a school. The grave was filled up,—no mound marked its place, and not even a trace remained of the interment! Not till then did the commissaries of police and the municipality withdraw, and enter the house opposite the church to draw up the declaration of interment."[22]

• 1884 – Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ISBN 9780486280615 (a character falsely claiming to be him)
• 1913 – Baroness Emmuska Orczy, Eldorado, ISBN 9780755111121
• 1937 – Rafael Sabatini, The Lost King, ISBN 9780755115440
• 1951 – Dennis Wheatley, The Man Who Killed The King, ISBN 0090031903
• 1953 – Willa Gibbs, Seed of Mischief, ISBN 9780110500645
• 1955 – Carley Dawson, Dragon Run
• 2000 – Deborah Cadbury, The Lost King of France: A true story of revolution, revenge, and DNA, ISBN 9780312283124
• 2003 – Françoise Chandernagor, La Chambre, éditions Gallimard, ISBN 2070314200
• 2003 – Amélie de Bourbon Parme, Le Sacre de Louis XVII, éditions Folio, ISBN 9782070302284
• 2005 – Ann Dukthas, En Mémoire d'un prince, éditions 10/18, Grands Détectives, ISBN 2264037903
• 2007 – Christophe Donner, Un roi sans lendemain, éditions Grasset, ISBN 2246625815
• 2009 – Dominic Lagan, Live Free or Die, ISBN 0956151809
• 2010 – Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution, ISBN 9780385737647
• 2011 – Louis Bayard, The Black Tower, ISBN 9782266188906
• 2011 – Jacques Soppelsa, Louis XVII, la piste argentine, Histoires, A2C Médias, ISBN 9782916831169
• 2011 – Missouri Dalton, The Grave Watchers, ISBN 9781610402842

• 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

• 2014 – Symphony of the Vampire by Kamijo
• 2018 – Sang by Kamijo