Louis XVII of France

Louis XVII of France, also Louis VI of Navarre (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 of Austria. From his father's death in 1793 to his own death in 1795, he was considered King of France and Navarre by French royalists.

Before his father's death
Gabrielle de Polastron, duchesse de Polignac was appointed Governess to the Royal Children, including the future Louis XVII and Princess Marie-Thérèse.

Agathe de Rambaud is chosen by the queen to be the Berceuse des Enfants de France of the Duke of Normandy, who becomes the Dauphin, at the death of his elder brother Louis-Joseph, Dauphin of France. Alain Decaux wrote ''Madame de Rambaud was officially in charge of the care of the Dauphin from the day of his birth until 10 août 1792, in other words for seven years. During these seven years, she never left him, she cradled him, took care of him, dressed him, comforted him, scolded him. Ten times, a hundred times, more than Marie Antoinette, she was a true mother for him''.

Her friend, Louise-Elisabeth, Marquise de Tourzel was the last governess to the royal children of King Louis XVI of France and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

After his father's death
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. He was only 10 years old. As a part of his republican re-education, his jailers forced him to drink alcohol between beatings, and was made to sing the "Marseillaise" while wearing the bonnet of a sansculotte. 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 recognised 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's 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 was 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's heart changed hands many times. Pelletan tried to return the heart to Louis XVIII and his brother Charles X, both of whom could not bring themselves to believe the heart to be genuinely that of their long-dead nephew. It is not known if Pelletan tried to approach Marie-Thérèse, Duchess of Angoulême (daughter of Louis XVI) with her brother's heart. Its saga was only beginning. 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 Münster 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 heart of Louis-Joseph would have been removed and embalmed as was customary for all princes of France. The heart tested as part of the DNA experiment had not been embalmed, only preserved in alcohol. This is consistent with Pelletan's story of having left the heart in a jar of alcohol after removing it in 1795 from the body claimed to be that of Louis XVII.

Other material

 * A pedigree of Louis-Charles (not necessarily reliable).
 * Philippe Delorme's website (one page in English).
 * Details about the DNA analysis of the heart believed to be that of Louis-Charles.

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