Louis Joseph Xavier François de Bourbon

Portraits of Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Adolf Ulrik Wertmüller 1784

Portrait of Marie-Antoinette and her children, painted by Vigée-Lebrun , 1787, oil on canvas, (104 × 82 cm), Palace of Versailles: Dauphin Louis Joseph of France standing on the right at the cot.

Louis Joseph Xavier François of France, Dauphin of France (born October 22, 1781 in Versailles , † June 4, 1789 at Meudon Castle ), was the (titular) Duke of Brittany and Crown Prince of France (" Dauphin of France ").

Life

Louis Joseph was the second child and first son of the French royal couple Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette and as such the long-awaited heir to the throne. He weighed 13 pounds at birth, which occurred around a quarter past two, and was 22 inches tall.

The otherwise rather closed king wept for joy and shook hands with everyone in the room. When he showed himself a little later in the anteroom of the bedstead with the freshly dressed child in his arms, the courtiers too, laughing and crying, fell into each other's arms, regardless of strict etiquette.

The king's son was baptized in the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral by Cardinal Louis de Rohan-Guéméné in the name of Louis Joseph Xavier François. One of his godparents was Madame Elisabeth . On the orders of the king, the capital was festively illuminated for three days. After the Dauphin was born, the Queen founded a hospital for women who had recently given birth, the Hôtel-Dieu . The child was first entrusted to a wet nurse named Poitrine. In addition to a multitude of congratulations, anonymous verses of mockery soon appeared in which the king's fatherhood was doubted.

The Dauphin received the title of Duke of Brittany, an annual allowance of 10,000 livres and his own court - including Marie François, Duke of Harcourt as tutor and Gabrielle, Duchess of Polignac , as governess.

At the end of 1786 he fell ill with rickets . Marie Antoinette reported in letters to her brother Joseph at the beginning of 1787 of curvatures of the spine and growth disorders in the limbs - both sequelae of the disease.

Months before his death, the doctors had no hope of saving the child. His joints were bulging and his face puffy. The Dauphin had been entrusted to the Duke and Duchess d'Harcourt and was visited daily by his parents in Meudon. The Queen was with him when he died on June 4, 1789, 45 minutes after midnight.

After the Dauphin's body had been opened and embalmed in the presence of the educator, the Duke and Duchess d'Harcourt had to stay in the morgue with the body laid out for a week. On June 7th, all those brought in at court came and condoled the queen. On June 12, the Dauphin's heart was ceremoniously brought to the Val-de-Grâce Monastery . The body was buried in Saint-Denis .

He was succeeded as Dauphin by his younger brother Charles Louis , who was supposed to outlive his father and died in prison when he was ten years old.

Dauphin County, Pennsylvania

The area of Dauphin County in the US state of Pennsylvania is named after Louis Joseph . The Pennsylvania legislature decided - at a meeting in Philadelphia in 1785 - to thank the French for their help in the War of Independence by naming the conquered area "Dauphin".

literature

• Thea Leitner : Habsburgs forgotten children (= series Piper. 1865). Unabridged paperback edition, 7th edition. Piper, Munich et al. 2000, ISBN 3-492-21865-2 .
• Evelyne Lever: Marie Antoinette. A biography. Weltbild Verlag, Augsburg 1995, ISBN 3-89350-948-8 .
• Victoria Holt : Royal throne and guillotine. The fate of Marie Antoinette. Roman (= Fischer pocket books. 2447). Licensed edition, unabridged edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-596-22447-8 .

Web links

Commons : Louis Joseph Xavier François of France, Dauphin of France  - Collection of images, videos and audio files