Carlos MundyThe supposed death of Louis XVII in 1795 at the age of ten was surrounded by controversy during the revolution. Louis XVII was the name of Prince Louis Charles (1785-?), the second son of the French King Louis XVI (1754-1793) and Marie-Antoinette (1755-1793).
According to official records, Louis Charles died of tuberculosis at the Temple (in Paris) on 8 June 1795. There are many indications that this was not the case, which have recently been corroborated.
At the beginning of the 19th century, a hundred people claimed to be the son of Louis XVI. Naundorff, who arrived in Paris in May 1833, is the most famous of these. He provided enough circumstantial evidence to convince former members of the Versailles court, including several ministers and the Secretary of Justice and Private Affairs (and especially Madame de Rambaud, the Dauphin’s maid) of his ancestry. These people had known him well as a child.
Despite this acknowledgement, in July 1836, the French authorities deported Naundorff to England after twenty-six days in prison.
He spent his last years in the Netherlands and was recognised as Louis XVII by the Dutch king, who allowed him to legally use the surname Bourbon. The British also recognised his claim.
Karl Wilhelm Naundorff died in 1845 in Delft (Holland), where he was buried under the name of Louis Charles, Duke of Normandy, Louis XVII on his tomb, which reads: “Ici rest Louis XVII,
Roi de France et de Navarre, né à Versailles le 27 mars 1785, décédé le 10 août 1845″.
Today, the descendants of Naundorff are legally authorised in France to call themselves de Bourbon. (Confirmatory judgment of the Court of the Seine, 26 November 1913) Initially, the decisions of the courts of Bois-le-Duc (12 March 1888) and Maastricht (20 May 1891) agreed to authorise the use of the name “de Bourbon” for members of the Naundorff Family.
Over the years, speculation continued. Thousands of articles and more than five hundred books have been written about this mystery. In early 2000, scientists analysed the DNA of the supposed heart of the boy who died of tuberculosis in his cell and who was supposed to be the French Dauphin. A sample from the heart was compared with a lock of hair taken from Queen Marie Antoinette, born Archduchess of Austria, as a child.
Researchers also compared DNA samples from a bone exhumed from the grave in Delft with DNA samples from living descendants of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, such as Queen Anne of Romania. These tests concluded that Naundorff was not Louis XVII. These results came as a blow to the Naundorffist cause.
The tests were organized with the purpose of settling the debate and preventing any future doubts. Two different scientists independently conducted the tests. Jean-Jacques Cassiman, professor of genetics at the University of Louvain in Belgium, conducted one analysis; Ernst Brinkmann of the German University of Münster conducted the other. There was no doubt. The owner of the heart and the queen shared the same DNA. The Naundorffists justified this result by saying that all the test showed was that the two people were related. It did not prove they were not mother and son – and they were right!
Did they really use samples from the heart of Louis Charles the Dauphin? The heart has an incredible history of its own. It has been going from hand to hand for almost 200 years. The doctor who performed the autopsy, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, hid the heart in his handkerchief, stole it and pickled it in alcohol. In 1815, after the restoration of the monarchy, Dr Pelletan tried to give the heart to King Louis XVIII. Still, he refused because he did not believe it was his nephew’s heart. After the monarch refused, the doctor donated it to the archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, who kept it until the archbishop’s palace was attacked in the revolution of 1830. After the sacking of the archbishop’s palace, the doctor’s son retrieved it from a pile of broken glass, but fortunately, it was intact. After he died in 1979, Edward Dumont kept his heart.
In 1895, Don Carlos de Borbón, the Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne, accepted custody of the heart, which was kept in Frohsdorf Castle near Vienna. His son, Don Jaime de Borbón, Duke of Madrid, inherited the relic, and he, in turn, bequeathed it to his sister, the Infanta Beatriz. Finally, two granddaughters of Don Carlos gave it to the president of the Memorial of the Basilica of Saint-Denis in Paris, the Duke of Bauffremont, who placed it in a glass urn in the necropolis of the kings of France. It remained there until 1999.
That year, before a notary public, a piece of the heart was extracted for DNA testing and theatrically transported to the laboratory. In a hearse, they transported the heart to the laboratory in a theatrical manner. In 2004, the supposed Louis XVII and his heart finally received a state funeral.
About fifteen years after Professor Cassiman excluded Naundorff as Marie Antoinette’s son based on mitochondrial DNA sequences (mtDNA) from his remains compared with sequences obtained from the hair of two of Marie Antoinette’s sisters, Marie Antoinette herself and with sequences obtained from the DNA samples of two living maternal relatives, the case was reopened.
Three years ago, the same laboratory produced the STR profiles of the chromosome and of three different members of the House of Bourbon. The article presented by The International Journal of Science aimed to compare these profiles with those of Hughes de Bourbon, the only son of Charles Edmond de Bourbon, Count of Poitiers, a direct descendant of Naundorff. This was done to elucidate the patrimonial relationships between him and these members of the Bourbon family. Hughes de Bourbon (born 1974) is the fourth generation of living descendants of Karl Naundorff.
The findings could not be more surprising; the results published in the study on comparisons of genetic chromosome markers between Hughes de Bourbon and three male members of the House of Bourbon (Larmuseau et al. 2) state that:
1—Hughes de Bourbon belongs to the same sub-terminal sub-terminal SNP of the current differentiation patrilineal SNP (cladeR1b1a2a1a1, SNPsub-terminal markerS21) as the other Bourbons studied (these Bourbons were tested for S21, but being Z381 +, they are mandatory S21 +).
2—Hughes de Bourbon’s high-resolution profile (in our own 27-STR comparison system) is very similar to that of the other Bourbons, differing from them by six.
3- Based on this criterion of six different mutations, Hughes de Bourbon can be considered a member of the Bourbon family, according to the established rules of genealogical relationships in recent families with identical surnames. It should be noted that this six-mutation difference threshold refers to families of relatively recent origin 19. Thus, since the Bourbon family is very old (going back at least to Henry III of Navarre and the first Bourbon king of France), this criterion of six mutations of difference corresponds to a minimum value.
This keeps the debate open as to whether the descendants of Naundorff, whose remains lie in a grave in Delft, are direct descendants of the ill-fated Louis XVII. According to the latest DNA tests, they are Bourbons, so descent from Louis XVII/Naundorff would be the only logical lineage.
If that is the case, Prince Hugues Charles Guy de Bourbon would be the undisputed head of the French Royal House. However, he has declared that he wants to lead a discreet life. Unlike his father, Charles de Bourbon (Charles XII), and having been born from an extramarital affair, then legitimised by the subsequent marriage of his parents (civil marriage in 1985 and religious marriage in 1986), he does not claim the throne of France. He abandons the Naundorffist pretensions in favour of the Canadian branch of the Naundorfs, represented by Charles-Louis de Bourbon (Charles XIII) (1933).
After these latest DNA tests, which prove without a doubt that the Naundorffs are Bourbons, there is only one logical explanation regarding the famous heart kept in the basilica. It is not that of Louis XVII but that of his elder brother, the Dauphin Louis Joseph, who died when he was nine.
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Carlos Mundy
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