The Lost King of France: The Tragic Story of Marie-Antoinette's Favourite Son

Cover

Title Page

Introduction

PART ONE

1 ‘The Finest Kingdom in Europe’

2 ‘Grâce pour Maman’

3 The Tuileries

4 ‘God Himself has Forsaken Me’

5 The Young Sans Culotte

6 The Orphan of the Temple

PART TWO

7 Farce and Fraud

8 Return of the Lilies

9 The Shadow King

10 The Royal Charade

11 Resolution

Acknowledgements

Notes on Sources

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

At certain revolutions all the

Damned are brought and feel

By turns the bitter change

Of fierce extremes

John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667)

From the portrait by Alexandre Kucharski, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie looks out confidently on the world with large blue eyes in a sensitive face framed by fair hair; the perfect storybook prince. His life had begun in 1785, four years before the French revolution, and his early years had been spent safely cocooned in the gilded palace of Versailles near Paris. At the age of four, on the death of his older brother, he had become the royal heir, the Dauphin, in whose small frame was centred all the hopes of the continuing Bourbon dynasty that had sat on the French throne since the sixteenth century. With his good looks and sunny nature he was a much-loved child, Marie-Antoinette’s treasured little chou d’amour.

However, this charmed childhood, played out in the elegantly ornamental but closeted walkways of Versailles, led only to a life of mounting terror as he was, all too soon, encompassed by the fierce extremes of the revolution. When his father, Louis XVI, and then his mother, Marie-Antoinette, were taken from him and executed at the guillotine in 1793, the ‘orphan of the Temple prison’ inherited not only a throne but also the hostility and hatred of a nation. Confused and terrified by events, the ‘wolf-cub’ or ‘son of a tyrant’ – as he was now known – was isolated in solitary confinement, taught to forget his royal past and punished for the errors and extravagances of his ancestors. Forbidden to see his older sister, Marie-Thérèse, the only other surviving member of his immediate family, the boy-king became the victim of brutal physical and emotional abuse in his filthy, rat-infested cell. He was thought to have died in the Temple prison in Paris at the age of ten, unrecognisable as the royal prince, his body covered with scabies and ulcers.

In 1795, when leaders of the French revolution announced his death, rumours immediately began to circulate that he was still alive. Many were convinced that he had been spirited out of the prison by royalist supporters and had escaped to safety abroad, ready to reclaim the throne. After all, there was no tomb to mark his official burial site; his death certificate, drawn up by revolutionary officials, was widely believed to be a forgery; one official’s wife even admitted that she had helped to smuggle him from the prison in a laundry basket, leaving a dying substitute child in his place.

In 1816, after the restoration of the royal line to the throne, when the bodies of his parents, Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, were found and reburied in the royal crypt at Saint Denis in Paris, plans were also made to honour the supposedly dead child-king. A tomb was designed; the inscription for it was even composed:

TO THE MEMORY

OF LOUIS XVII WHO, AFTER HAVING SEEN HIS BELOVED PARENTS REMOVED BY A DEATH WHICH SORROW SHRINKS FROM RECALLING, AND HAVING DRAINED TO THE DREGS THE CUP OF SUFFERING, WAS, WHILE STILL YOUNG AND BUT ON THE THRESHOLD OF LIFE, CUT DOWN BY DEATH. HE DIED ON VIII JUNE MDCCLXXXXV, AGED X YEARS II MONTHS AND XII DAYS.

However, when his body could not be found the official plans were scrapped and his burial place was never built. The following year a communal grave in the ossuary of the royal crypt was constructed to receive the bones of all the French kings and queens, Bourbons, Capetians, Orléans and others, who had been flung from their grand tombs into paupers’ graves during the Terror at the height of the revolution. But the uncrowned king was not among them. Without a body, no one could be completely sure that Louis-Charles was dead.

As in a fairytale, after the revolution the young prince sprang to life. He was sighted in Brittany, Normandy, Alsace and in the Auvergne. Was he the charming and dignified ‘Jean-Marie Hervagault’ who held court so convincingly and attracted a large and faithful following intent on seeing him attain the throne? Could he have been the rough diamond ‘Charles de Navarre’, generous-natured, confident, whose love of parties usually ended in drunken bad manners, accounts of which tallied so neatly with the brutalising treatment meted out to the ‘son of Capet’ in prison? Navarre was popular and resourceful and promised to reduce the price of bread as well as taxes and be in every way like the illustrious Henry IV, the first Bourbon king, a father to his people. Or was Louis-Charles the suave and smooth-talking ‘Baron de Richemont’, who could tell of his childhood in Versailles and the Temple prison in compelling detail and whose epitaph in Gleizé in France acknowledged him as ‘Louis-Charles of France, son of Louis XVI and of Marie-Antoinette’?