The mysterious Prussian clockmaker who claimed until his dying breath to be Marie-Antoinette’s dead son
Years after Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette met their fates at the guillotine, Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff convinced members of the French aristocracy that he was the royal couple’s long-lost progeny. Some people still believe it.
In a cemetery in the Dutch city of Delft, a simple tombstone bears a puzzling inscription.
“Here Lies Louis XVII. Charles Louis, Duke of Normandy, King of France and of Navarre. Born at Versailles, March 27, 1785. Died at Delft, August 10, 1845.”
Puzzling, because the 10-year-old son of Louis XVI died in prison in Paris in 1795, less than two years after his mother, Marie-Antoinette, was executed at the Place de la Concorde. So why was his grave in the Netherlands? And why was his date of death listed as 1845, which would make the doomed queen's son 60 at the time of his passing?
French journalists and historians often refer to the fate of Louis XVII as one of the “greatest enigmas” in the country’s history. Shadowy circumstances and unanswered questions surrounding the young dauphin’s imprisonment and subsequent death and burial have inspired some 3,000 books. Even now, more than two centuries after the Revolution, the topic is regularly revisited in the French media and kept alive by the great-great grandson of the man buried in the strange grave in Delft.
“Did he really die in 1795, and where is he buried?” a Le Point headline asked several years ago. “Was the Temple child really Louis XVII?” a Europe 1 broadcast demanded.
The Temple in question was an imposing fortress in central Paris constructed by the Knights Templar in the 13th century. Prior to her transfer to the Conciergerie prison, Marie-Antoinette was held in one of its towers with her two surviving children, Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Charles, who became heir to the throne following the death of his older brother from illness.
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After the king’s execution in 1793, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and transferred to another area of the Temple, where he would later die from suspected tuberculosis. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the communal Sainte-Marguerite cemetery that was located on what today is Rue Saint-Bernard in the city’s 11th Arrondissement.
In the days after his death, a rumor began to circulate that Louis-Charles had been ferreted out of his cell and replaced by an anonymous orphan. The myth of the dauphin’s survival grew in the years and decades that followed, and during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, dozens of men claimed to be the heir to the French throne. Among these shady characters was a bankrupt glassworks owner and a teenage criminal.
In the early 1800s, a young Prussian clockmaker announced that he was Louis-Charles and expressed his determination to reclaim his royal title. Named Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff, he had done time for counterfeiting. Unlike many of the ragtag claimants who preceded him, Naundorff appeared charming and refined, and boasted an impressive knowledge of the Court of Versailles and its customs. In 1831, a local newspaper ran his story, which was picked up by the French newspaper Le Constitutionnel.
When Naundorff arrived in Paris in 1833—broke, in shabby clothes, and barely speaking French—the cousin of the executed Louix XVI, Louis-Philippe, was on the throne, and the July Monarchy was in its early years. By then, the story of the “clockmaker from Crossen” had spread in royalist circles and among surviving members of the Court of Versailles.
Agathe de Rambaud, who had worked as a maid to Marie-Antoinette’s children, was among several aging former courtiers who met with the man claiming to be Louis XVII. Even though it had been decades since she had last seen the young Louis-Charles, Naundorff’s curly blond hair, small scar on his lip (supposedly from a rabbit bite), and triangular-shaped inoculation mark convinced her that her long-lost charge had returned. Furthermore, when she showed him a blue coat that had belonged to the young prince, Naundorff correctly stated when and where he had last worn it.
Other members of the Ancien Régime who claimed to recognize the lost dauphin included the monarchy’s last justice minister and the Marquis de Feuillade, Louis XVI’s former page, who remarked that Naundorff strongly resembled the late queen and had the “features and bearing” of his father.
“...based on the convincing evidence I have seen with my own eyes,” de Feuillade wrote in a letter, “I cannot doubt that he is truly the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.”
However, there was one former palace resident who dismissed Naundorff outright as a “skilled imposter.” The prince’s older sister, Marie-Thérèse, had been released from the Temple in late 1795 and was living in exile in Austria. Although she had met with other claimants, she refused to meet with Naundorff and never responded to his multitude of letters. Letters in support of Naundorff from Agathe de Rambaud and others also failed to sway her.
Undaunted, Naundorff brought a lawsuit against Marie-Thérèse and her husband, the Duke of Angoulême, for his share of the royal fortune. At this point, an exasperated Louis-Philippe ordered his arrest and confiscated the more than 200 documents that Naundorff said proved he was Louis XVII. Naundorff was deported from France to England for "disturbing public order,” and the documents vanished. Some historians doubt that they actually existed, while others believe they were stored in government archives before being seized by the Nazis during the Occupation. In any case, they have never been located.
Banishment from France didn’t deter Naundorff. While in England, he continued to claim he was Louis XVII, even publishing another edition of his memoirs in which he detailed his escape from the Temple prison and the series of swashbuckling adventures—travel, dungeons, and an arrest by Napoleon’s forces, among others—that followed. Deviating a bit from earlier memoirs in which a mannequin and a wooden horse assisted in his evasion, he nonetheless maintained that his getaway involved a stranger-than-fiction switcheroo with a poor unknown.
As Naundorff tells it, he was spirited to the top floor of the tower in a clothes hamper, while the other boy was placed in his cell. When the changeling was later poisoned, Naundorff was drugged with opium and put inside the coffin of his unfortunate stand-in.
“While driving to the cemetery, I was placed in a box at the bottom of the carriage and the coffin was filled with wastepaper so that it might not seem too light,” Naundorff wrote. “As soon as the coffin had been placed in the grave, my friends brought me back to Paris.”
Since access to royal riches had proven impossible, Naundorff was compelled to reinvent himself in England, first by founding a new esoteric religion rooted in Catholic mysticism and later as an explosives expert. He ultimately settled in the Netherlands, where he convinced the Dutch government to help fund a new explosive he named “the Bourbon bomb.” Apparently, King William II of the Netherlands also believed Naundorff’s claims, although some historians say he may have been motivated by spite since Franco-Dutch relations were fraught at the time.
Naundorff’s days in Delft would be brief, however. Some six months after his arrival, he became mysteriously sick—many of his supporters suspect he was poisoned—and died several weeks later. In his final hours, he ranted about the Revolution, and the guillotine, and the late king. Indeed, until his literal dying breath, Naundorff claimed he was Louis XVII. His death certificate read Charles-Louis de Bourbon, Duke of Normandy, the name he had officially registered with the Dutch authorities, which was also engraved on his tomb. Curiously, the first name appeared in reverse order of the Dauphin’s given name, Louis-Charles.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Naundorff’s claims is that rather than fading into history after his passing à la the Anatasia Romanov pretenders, they continued for nearly two centuries as his descendants sought formal recognition of their royal lineage.
Supporters of Naundorff and his heirs came to be known as “Naundorffists” and Naundorffism, the belief that the deceased watchmaker was truly Louis XVII, has remained alive for generations. Since his death, there have been petitions for recognition in French courts (all denied), as well as lawsuits, including in the late 1920s when one of Naundorff’s grandsons asked the French courts to grant what he said was his rightful ownership of the Château de Chambord. This, too, was denied.
Major American media outlets, including The New York Times and Time Magazine even covered the decades-long saga, including two exhumations of Naundorff’s remains, once in 1904 when the grave was moved from its original location to make room for a public square and a second time in 1950 to examine them and run tests, including for arsenic. During the tests, the right humerus and a lock of hair were removed from the coffin and kept in Dutch forensic archives.
Nearly a half century later, the relics in question would make headlines again, including one in Le Monde that announced that the alleged dauphin had been “betrayed by his humerus.” Geneticists compared mitochondrial DNA taken from Naundorff’s remains with hair samples from Marie-Antoinette and two of her sisters. Their conclusion? No relationship with Marie-Antoinette or her family.
The test results may have discredited Naundorff’s claims, but questions remained over the young king’s death. His body was never officially identified. The doctor who performed the autopsy removed the heart from the body, as per royal tradition, and absconded with it before storing it in a crystal flask filled with alcohol. The heart changed hands several times over the years before ending up at the royal crypt in Saint Denis about 50 years ago.
Journalist and historian Philippe Delorme had long doubted Naundorff’s claims and believed that Louis-Charles had died in prison. To prove his hunch, he organized genetic tests on the mummified heart, during which the DNA was compared to DNA samples from the royal family, including a lock of Marie-Antoinette’s hair. The test results revealed a genetic link between the heart and the late queen. In 2004, a funeral mass was held at Saint-Denis Basilica, and the tiny organ was placed beside the graves of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.
“The verdict of science therefore confirms that of history,” Delorme writes in his book, Louis XVII, la Biographie. “The little prince, sadly, did not survive the Revolution.”
Most are in agreement regarding the dauphin’s last days. Following months of neglect and physical and psychological abuse, the boy king succumbed to tuberculosis in his cell. Regardless of the country’s suffering under the Ancien Régime, Louis-Charles is widely seen as a tragic figure; an innocent victim of one of history’s particularly turbulent chapters. As for Naundorff, he is viewed as either a delusional fantasist who believed his own lies, or a cunning and charismatic megalomaniac who had the good fortune to strike while France was still reeling from the tumult of the Revolution.
Nevertheless, Naundorffism persists in some circles—Delorme dismisses its adherents as an “ultra-minority even within the royalist microcosm”—and a cursory internet search turns up several books and websites devoted to the survivantiste (survivalist) theory, some of which passionately argue in support of Naundorff and his descendants. The DNA tests can’t be trusted, they assert, because the bone taken from Naundorff was mishandled and possibly contaminated. And the heart didn’t come from Louis-Charles, but from his brother Louis-Joseph, who had died shortly before the Revolution. Historians spurn this argument, pointing out the fact that Louis-Joseph’s heart had been embalmed according to royal tradition, while the heart involved in the tests had not.
Naundorff’s great-great-grandson, Hughes de Bourbon, lives near Tours and works as a rare books and manuscripts dealer. During a conversation in Paris, the 50-year-old says he grew up fielding questions from various historians. Polite, gregarious, and sporting a gray suit jacket and pink tie, de Bourbon explains that he too is skeptical over the DNA tests on Naundorff's remains, and echoes other survivalist claims that the heart interred at Saint Denis actually belonged to Louis-Joseph. But it’s mainly anecdotal evidence that has convinced him that Naundorff was indeed Louis XVII.
“All the people at court who had known him as a child, every single one of them, recognized him,” he says. “Except one person: his sister” who had a conflict of interest.
He believes that French authorities’ handling of Naundorff and his file of documents was suspicious as well.
“Imagine an impostor in the time of Charles X who says, ‘I am the King of France. My sister, the Duchess of Angoulême, is a liar, and Charles X is not the rightful king.’”
“Normally, such a person would be imprisoned; he would not be exiled,” he continues. “You exile people who are inconvenient. Why did the trial not take place, when it had been formally scheduled? Why arrest him, and why make his file disappear?”
The monarchies since the Revolution, he points out, “would therefore have been impostors… So it [recognizing Naundorff] doesn’t suit the French state.”
Naundorff’s descendant admits that even he has some doubt about his origins, and that he is open to additional genetic tests, provided they’re conducted by an “independent and serious” laboratory.
“I’m not sure science can prove to me 100 percent that I’m right or wrong,” he adds. “But I believe in this story. I am convinced that Naundorff was Louis XVII, the child who was locked up in the Temple.”
The Temple prison was demolished by order of Napoleon in the early 19th century to discourage royalist pilgrimages. Today, a small public garden stands in its place, where the shouts and laughter of children can often be heard on warm afternoons. A plaque adorns one of the outer walls of the 3rd Arrondissement’s town hall; the only reminder of the grim walls in which a young child once suffered, and a divisive national mystery was unleashed.
