Louis XVII of France

Louis XVII of France (March 27 1785 – June 8 1795), from birth to 1789 known as Louis-Charles, Duke of Normandy; then from 1789 to 1791 as Louis-Charles, Dauphin of Viennois; and from 1791 to 1793 as Louis-Charles, Prince Royal of France, was the son of King Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette. He never reigned as King of France.

During the French Revolution, the young Louis-Charles was imprisoned with his parents. As the eldest living son of King Louis XVI, he was proclaimed King of France on January 28 1793 by his uncle, Monsieur Louis-Stanislas-Xavier, the Comte de Provence, in a declaration issued from exile in the city of Hamm, near Dortmund, Westphalia. At the time, the declaration was without authority, as France was a republic; however, when France and the other European powers later accepted Louis-Stanislas-Xavier as King Louis XVIII of France, his numbering tacitly recognized Louis XVII's right to the throne.

In 1793, while the royal family was being held at the Temple prison in Paris, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and sister in order to dissuade any monarchist bids to free him. He remained imprisoned alone, a floor below his sister Marie-Thérèse, until his death in June 1795. His captors referred to him by the family name "Capet", after Hugh Capet, the original founder of the royal dynasty. This use of a surname was a deliberate insult, since royalty do not normally use surnames.

Louis-Charles was set to work as a cobbler's assistant and taught to curse his parents. He was officially reported to have died in the prison from what is today recognized as tuberculosis. Reportedly, his body was ravaged by tumors and scabies. An autopsy was carried out at the prison and, following a tradition of preserving royal hearts, his heart was smuggled out and preserved by the examining physician, Philippe-Jean Pelletan. Louis-Charles' body was buried in a mass grave.

"Lost Dauphin" claimants

Rumours quickly spread, however, that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers. Thus born the legend of the "Lost Dauphin". When the Bourbon monarchy was restored in 1814, hundreds of claimants came forward. Would-be royal heirs continued to appear across Europe for decades afterward and some of their descendants still have small but loyal retinues of followers today. Popular candidates for the Lost Dauphin included John James Audubon, the naturalist; Eleazer Williams, a missionary from Wisconsin of Mohawk Native American descent; and Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker. Mark Twain satirized the host of claimants in the characters of the Duke and the Dauphin, the con men in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As many as 100 "false dauphins" appeared over the years, all were exposed and their real identities discovered.

Testing the heart

Louis-Charles' heart changed hands many times. First it was stolen by one of Pelletan's students, who confessed to the theft on his deathbed and asked his wife to return the heart to Pelletan. Instead, she sent it to the Archbishop of Paris, where it stayed until the Revolution of 1830. It also spent some time in Spain. By 1975, it was being kept in a crystal vase at the royal crypt in the Saint Denis Basilica outside Paris, the burial place of Louis-Charles' parents and of many other members of France's royal families.

In the 1990s, Philippe Delorme, the contemporary authority on the subject, arranged for DNA testing of the heart. Ernst Brinkmann of Germany's Muenster University and a Belgian genetics professor, Jean-Jacques Cassiman of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, conducted the two independent tests. In 2000, comparison with DNA reclaimed from the hair of Marie Antoinette confirmed the heart as royal and it was finally buried in the Basilica on June 8 2004.

It should be noted, however, that the DNA tested was mitochondrial DNA. This DNA is inherited only from the mother and allows tracing of a direct maternal genetic line. Assuming there was no tampering with the test's samples, therefore, the comparison only proved that the two samples shared the same maternal ancestry. It does not prove that the heart belonged to a particular individual. Since there was this tradition of removing royal hearts after death, it is possible that the heart may have been that of another young royal, for instance that of Louis XVI's first son, Louis-Joseph-Xavier-François, who died in 1789. However, the historical evidence from the time makes it extremely likely that the heart belonged to the Lost Dauphin, and no one else.

External links

The official DVD of the royal funeral celebration for Louis XVII in Saint-Denis.
A pedigree of Louis-Charles (not necessarily reliable).
Philippe Delorme's website (one page in English).
MSN Forum on Louis XVII for French "survivantists".
Details about the DNA analysis of the heart believed to be that of Louis-Charles.

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Louis XVII of France

"Lost Dauphin" claimants

Testing the heart

External links