Rumors quickly spread that the boy had miraculously escaped his captors and that the body of another dead child was used in his place. Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker, wrote a series of memoirs that proved so convincing that several surviving members of the royal family took up his cause notably absent was his sole surviving supposed sibling, Marie Therese.
The fate of Louis-Charles even caught the attention of Mark Twain , who included a mention of it in his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. Finally, in , conclusive medical evidence put the theory to rest. It was an unhappy marriage, which was never consummated. The tragedies of her life, unsurprisingly, left Marie Therese a suspicious, somewhat embittered woman.
She despaired over the litany of imposters who demanded that she recognize them as her brother. Marie became queen — until her husband, in turn, abdicated less than half an hour later, in favor of his nephew. She spent the rest of her life in exile, bouncing between royal courts.
She died, aged 72, in October , and was buried next to her husband in what is now Slovenia. Stemming from her own difficult childhood, the British queen and her nine offspring experienced tension and dysfunction from the moment they were born. Her name was changed to Zoe. There were many other children that Marie Antoinette supported financially. Though she may have had many faults, she loved children and went out of her way to help them.
Margo Lestz lives in Nice, France where she likes to bask in the sunshine, study the French language and write. Margo blogs at curiousrambler. Skip to content Facebook. The Good Life France. Queen Marie Antoinette and her adopted children. Below are the stories of four of the children who lived with the Queen: Armand In , when Marie Antoinette was out for a carriage ride, a little boy of four or five years old dashed out in front of the horses and was almost killed. Ernestine In , the first royal baby was born.
Louis Joseph — Died at age seven from tuberculosis at the beginning of the Revolution, before the family was imprisoned. Louis Charles — Died in prison at age ten. Sophie — Died at age one, before the beginning of the Revolution. He was covered in pests and faeces.
Louis Charles died on June 8, at the age of 10, having spent nearly four years in solitary confinement. Until very recently, there have been rumours and speculation that the child who died in the tower was not the real Dauphin. He'd been freed by royalists and another child would have been placed in the tower. This would be the real reason why he was separated from his family and no contact was allowed with him.
Fuelled by these stories many men claimed that they were the real Louis Charles and thus the first in line to the throne of France. These stories started in the years after the French Revolution and there are still people today who say they are the descendants of Louis XVII.
The recent developments in science, particularly the knowledge of DNA, made it possible to reveal the truth in After years the mystery was finally solved. There is a great book about the history of Louis Charles and the huge aftermath after his death, written by Deborah Cadbury, the lost king of France.
It is a fascinating and very sad story. For a greater understanding of the period before and during the French revolution, I can recommend the following books:.
It is not possible to visit the Temple tower where the family was imprisoned. The building became a place of pilgrimage for followers of the Bourbon family. So it was demolished in by order of Napoleon. When you visit Paris you can take a tour that takes you back to days of the French revolution. With a passionate guide you will visit all the important historic sites. She could not contact him.
She is the only one of the children of Marie Antoinette that would survive the French revolution. She did not know what had happened to her mother, aunt and brother until much later. She could hear her brother's cries though, when he was being beaten in another room of the castle. Louis XVI being separated from his family for the last time. At 11pm that evening just before her seventeenth birthday she was removed.
A prisoner exchanged had been arranged and the exchange was to take place the day after Christmas. She arrived safely in Vienna, the birthplace of her mother, on 9 January , twenty-two days after leaving the Temple. You can learn more about this event by clicking here.
Courtesy of Wikipedia. The deposed royal family then relocated to Prague. Later, they moved to the estate of Count Coronini near Gorizia, which was then Austrian but is in Italy today. The House of Bourbon in Her nephew, who now styled himself as the comte de Chambord , and his sister joined her there. Her death happened three days after the fifty-eighth anniversary of the execution of her mother.
Of all the children of Marie Antoinette, perhaps the biggest celebration over a birth happened when Louis-Joseph was born. She went into labor with him just as her husband was preparing to leave to go shooting on 22 October This time instead of an arduous twelve hour delivery, it took just two hours. Everything went well but to ensure that no one knew the sex of the baby before the King, Louis had forbidden anyone from announcing it until he was personally informed. The king was overjoyed with the news and when the baby was given to his mother, she cradled him in her arms.
The birth of the Dauphin was a joyous occasion for France. Frenchmen no longer had to worry about an heir to the throne and the king was so overcome he was practically speechless. Unfortunately for all the joy over the birth Louis-Joseph was not a robust child. He had a short life and lived only about seven years.
His decline began around the age of three when he suffered a series of high fevers. He eventually recovered from them only to have them return in Yet, most people thought he was fine because no one understood at the time that he was showing the first signs of tuberculosis.
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