Louis XVII

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Louis XVII (1789), painting by Alexander Kucharski

Louis XVII ( Louis Charles ; born March 27, 1785 in Versailles ; † June 8, 1795 in Paris ) was from birth (titular) Duke of Normandy and after the death of his older brother Louis Joseph from 1789 Dauphin de France and thus Crown Prince of France . Monarchists lead him in the ranks of the French kings , as they see him as the legitimate successor of Louis XVI, who was overthrown and executed during the French Revolution . look - but he never ruled.

Life

Louis Charles with his sister Marie Thérèse Charlotte , painted by Ludwig Guttenbrunn

Louis Charles was the second son of Louis XVI. and his wife Marie Antoinette was born. After the death of his older brother in 1789, he became a Dauphin (Crown Prince).

Louis Charles was tortured in the run-up to the trial of his mother in order to force statements to prove that Marie Antoinette had forced her son into sexual fornication.

After the execution of his parents in 1793, the cobbler Antoine Simon , a Jacobin , was commissioned to raise him to be a “good citizen”. After Simon was guillotined on the same day as Maximilien de Robespierre and other Jacobins on July 28, 1794 , the child lived on alone in Temple Prison and died in June 1795 at the age of ten. The cause of his untimely death is not known with certainty; there will be a tuberculosis suspected.

Ludwig's heart

Heart tomb of Louis XVII. in Saint-Denis

After Ludwig died, the loyal doctor Philippe-Jean Pelletan cut out his heart and preserved it in alcohol. In 1975 it reached the chapel of Saint-Denis via Austria , Italy and Spain , where it has since been kept in a crystal urn filled with alcohol. The comparisons made by two researchers in 2000 of genetic material obtained from the heart with the genetic material of Marie-Antoinette , her sisters and two of her descendants living today "clearly substantiate the official version" that the heart was indeed Louis XVII. belonged to. The heart was buried on June 8, 2004 in the Saint-Denis basilica .

successor

After the fall of Napoleon I, Ludwig's uncle climbed in 1814 under the name of Louis XVIII. the throne, although beyond legitimist circles a King Louis XVII. had not been recognized. This was intended to express the continuity of the Bourbons' claim to the throne , who regarded the governments of the First Republic as well as the rule of Napoleon as illegitimate. Following this model, Napoleon Duke von Reichstadt was later referred to as Napoléon II , and his cousin ascended as Napoléon III. the throne.

Impostor

More than 30 men (sometimes up to 100 are given) passed themselves off as Ludwig in the 19th century - often decades after his death. The German watchmaker Karl Wilhelm Naundorff , who even sued Princess Marie Thérèse Charlotte for the surrender of objects allegedly belonging to him, proved to be particularly persistent . Although he spoke hardly any French , Naundorff was able to shine in interviews with a good knowledge of life at court. However, none of the alleged dauphins have been recognized as real by the family or the public. In the novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which was published in 1884 and is set around 1840, an impostor is portrayed who appears as a Dauphin and with his old age excuses for having completely forgotten his French mother tongue. Even Robert Loehr makes the supposedly surviving Dauphin to a central design element of his published in 2007 historical novel The Erl King maneuver , where reality and fiction are mixed.

literature

  • Philippe Delorme: Louis XVII, la vérité. Sa mort au temple confirmée par la science . Edition Pygmalion, Paris 2000, ISBN 2-85704-649-9 .
  • Robert Widl: What world history hides. The embezzled Louis XVII and his Hanna. Stieglitz, Irdning / Styria 2005
Fiction

Web links

Commons : Louis XVII of France  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Sara Sievers : The Last Days of Marie Antoinette , PM History # 10/2012, pp. 14-25
  2. https://www.rundschau-online.de/ein-prinzenherz-findet-endet-ins-grab-11207742
  3. ^ Genetic researcher: Ludwig XVII. died in custody in a fortress in: Der Tagesspiegel from April 19, 2000
predecessor Office successor
Louis XVI France modern.svg
Head of the House of Bourbon
January 21, 1793–8. June 1795
Louis XVIII