On the death of Louis XVI in 1793, his son, aged only 8, became King of France under the name of Louis XVII.
For revolutionaries, this little boy is considered both a threat to state security and a precious hostage that must be preserved… In this new episode of the Europe 1 studio podcast “At the heart of history ”, Jean des Cars recounts the life and death surrounded by mysteries of the young king in the prison of the Temple.
Shortly after the execution of his father, the young Louis XVII was separated from his mother, Marie-Antoinette… His death in the Temple prison gave rise to many rumors… In this new episode of the Europe 1 studio podcast "At the heart of History ", Jean des Cars lifts the veil on the enigma of the death of the son of Louis XVI.
Since the terrible insurrection of August 10, 1792, the king has been deposed, the royal family is held in the sinister tower of the Temple prison.
After his trial, Louis XVI was guillotined on January 21, 1793. Marie-Antoinette, henceforth nicknamed the Veuve Capet, and her two children, Marie-Thérèse, known as Madame Royale, her son who became Louis XVII on the death of his father and the sister of the deceased king, Madame Elisabeth are in despair and anguish, not knowing what fate awaits them.
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It should be noted that according to French monarchical tradition, at the moment when Louis XVI lost his life, his little boy, aged 8, the Dauphin, became King of France under the name of Louis XVII. " The king is dead, long live the king ! ". Since his exile in Westphalia, the elder brother of the late king, the count of Provence, recognizes his nephew as the new king of France. He is not the only one. The whole of Europe, England, Portugal, Spain and most of the Germanic states also recognize it and join the coalition against France. Even the United States of America recognizes Louis XVII because they know what they owe to his father. As for Empress Catherine II of Russia, she is not content to recognize the new monarch. She signs a ukase, that is to say a decree: "All the French who refuse to take an oath of loyalty and obedience to Louis XVII will be expelled from Russia ".
At the same time, in France, the western provinces take up arms to install Louis XVII on the throne. It is the beginning of the wars of Vendée. For the recently proclaimed Republic, the political situation, both national and international, is perilous. The new regime considers that this eight-year-old boy is both a threat to the security of the State but also a precious hostage that must be preserved ...
On February 14, 1793, the Montagnards occupied the key positions of the Paris Commune. Prisoners of the Temple are subjected to frequent and humiliating searches. On May 9, Louis XVII suffered from a high fever and headaches. Marie-Antoinette demanded that Doctor Brunyer, the king's former doctor, be sent to her. The Commune refused and ended up sending, three days later, an ordinary prison doctor, Doctor Thierry. The latter will have the honesty to consult Brunyer, who knows the child very well, and gives him the remedies suggested by his colleague. The treatments are having a little effect, but it is the first serious attack of a kind of pleurisy caused by Koch's bacillus, that is to say tuberculosis ...
On June 2, 1793, Robespierre and his Sans-Culottes, a total of 80,000 angry Parisians, took over the Convention. 29 Girondins will be arrested and guillotined. It is the beginning of the second Terror. Robespierre is informed of rumors of attempts to escape by the family imprisoned at the Temple. That's right: the enigmatic Baron de Batz is making plans for the escape of little Louis XVII. On July 1, the Committee of Public Safety decrees: "The young Louis, son of Capet, will be separated from his mother and placed in a separate apartment, the best defended of all the premises of the Temple. He will be handed over to his hands. of a teacher chosen by the General Council of the Municipality ".
Three days later, at 10 o'clock in the evening, municipal officers burst into the room where the Queen and her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth were mending their laundry.
Madame Royale reads.
As for little Louis XVII, he is sleeping.
The Guards come to seize the boy.
Marie-Antoinette lets her pain burst out, saying that she cannot resign herself to this separation, that her son needs her care.
The child sobs and cries out: "Mum! Mum! Don't leave me!"
His sister, Marie-Thérèse, will recount in her Memoirs this abominable moment, an hour of talks that will be useless.
Marie-Antoinette, in tears, ends up handing over her son to the municipal officers.
She will never see him again ...
A little Duke of Normandy, full of cheerfulness and health ...
When he was born on March 27, 1785, in Versailles, Louis-Charles, titled Duke of Normandy, was the third child of the royal couple. We know that the first daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse, was born in July 1778, eight years after their marriage. We also know that the king and queen had difficulty conceiving a child. Marie-Antoinette's brother, Emperor Joseph II, had to explain to his brother-in-law how to behave in bed with his wife ...
After Marie-Thérèse, the arrival of the Dauphin Louis-Joseph, on October 22, 1781, had filled his parents with joy. A second son ensured the offspring. The birth of her three children transformed the queen. Marie-Antoinette is concerned about their health and their education. She is a little less frivolous and a little more a mother of a family, but that the people do not know. At the same time, she is the object of insulting and cruel libels. We blame him for everything!
In June 1786, Louis XVI left for his only trip to the provinces: he went to inspect the fortifications of the harbor of Cherbourg. When he returned from Normandy on June 29, the queen, her daughter and her two sons, awaited his arrival. The king gets out of his car and rushes to embrace his. He received a triumphant welcome throughout this trip. He takes the little Duke of Normandy in his arms, saying to him: "Come on, my little Normand, your name will bring you luck ..."
He will not have answered himself. All misfortunes will overwhelm the royal family. Two months later, the queen gives birth to their last child, little Sophie, of fragile health. She died the following year, at the age of 11 months. The health of the Dolphin is also of concern to his parents. He withers and ends up dying, after terrible suffering, of bone tuberculosis on June 4, 1789, shortly after the opening of the Estates General.
This tragedy made the Duke of Normandy the new Dauphin. He was then 4 years old. He will spend his last summer in Versailles, very often with his mother and sister in the pretty hamlet of Trianon. All this ended with the days of October which forced the royal family to leave Versailles to settle in the Tuileries, unoccupied since the Fronde. The little Dauphin, accustomed to the splendours of Versailles, exclaims: "Oh Maman, how ugly everything is here!". The queen will answer him: "Louis XIV lived there and was well there. We must not be more difficult than him."
In fact, although the political situation is disastrous for the monarchy, at the Tuileries, the royal family will live in a much more intimate and closer way than at Versailles. The new governess of the children of France, Mme de Tourzel, is full of praise for her charming pupil: "It was impossible to see a more endearing child, filled with more intelligence, indeed with so much grace. His cheerfulness and his kindness was the only diversion from the daily sorrows with which the queen was overwhelmed. "
Mme de Tourzel will be part of the disastrous outfit of Varennes in June 1791. We know that the attempted flight of the royal family to join the army loyal to the king will be followed by a tragic and traumatic return, and the little Dauphin will be. very affected. He did not understand anything about this departure and this eventful journey. He only felt that the people were angry with his father and mother. He will question the king about it. We do not know what Louis XVI replied. But the Tuileries will seem like a paradise after the terrible day of August 10 which sees the downfall of the king and the incarceration of the royal family in the horrible dungeon of the Temple.
The Temple, built in the heart of the Marais by the Templars in the 13th century, is a very large complex that belonged to the Comte d'Artois, brother of Louis XVI.
If the great palace has remained magnificent, the tower has become a prison.
The few people who had accompanied the royal family, including Mme de Tourzel and the Princess de Lamballe, were arrested and taken to the Force prison.
The family remains alone in front of its jailers.
It is Louis XVI who organizes the days.
He is concerned with the education of the Dauphin, teaches him geography.
The queen teaches him history and poetry.
Madame Elisabeth takes care of the calculation.
The deposed king also gave his son lessons in French and Latin.
All this takes place in a common room where Marie-Antoinette sews, knits and takes back her stockings.
The Dauphin sleeps in his father's room on the second floor.
He only goes up to the third floor where his mother and aunt are in the afternoon.
During the king's trial, the father is separated from the son and the Dauphin sleeps upstairs.
As I told you at the beginning of this story, a few months after the king's death, on July 1, 1793, the little boy was torn from his mother.
Louis XVII is entrusted to the shoemaker Simon
The guards will not take the child very far, downstairs, where his father's apartment was. The shoemaker Simon and his wife took possession of the premises. It is they who will now take care of the education of Louis XVII. For the little boy, Antoine Simon is no stranger. This former shoemaker, member of the Jacobins then of the General Council of the Municipality, is a supporter of the Montagnards and Robespierre. He had been in charge of fitting out the royal family's apartment at the Temple and sometimes rendered him small services to the point that Marie-Antoinette said: "We are very happy with this good Mr. Simon who gives us everything. that we want ".
He has often been passed off as a torturer, which is undoubtedly excessive. His mission is to transform the royal prince into a good revolutionary and that is what he is going to do. He will teach him to swear, to insult the aristocrats and to sing revolutionary songs. If necessary, he slaps him; if he wants to reward him, he gives him a glass of brandy! As for his wife Marie-Jeanne, married late, she is desperate not to have had children and will take affection for her "little Louis Charles". It will happen to her to save him from the brutalities of her husband. It should be noted that during the period when the child is in the hands of the Simon, it is kept very clean and properly fed.
On August 1, 1793, the Convention decided to send Marie-Antoinette to an extraordinary tribunal and her immediate transfer to the Conciergerie. On August 2, at 2 a.m., in her turn, the queen was torn from her daughter Marie-Thérèse and her sister-in-law Madame Elisabeth. Upstairs, her son doesn't know. It was during the queen's trial and under pressure from Hébert that the Revolutionary Court decided to hear the child. Simon prepared the boy well by explaining what to say and made him drink alcohol to make things easier. This will lead to this terrible indictment against his mother: "Charles Capet further declares that having been surprised several times in his bed by Simon and his wife to commit indecency on him harmful to his health,he confessed to them that he had been instructed in these pernicious habits by his mother and his aunt, and that several times, she had had fun seeing him repeat these practices in front of them, and that very often it happened when they did. sleep between them. "
It is Hébert who will report the content of the words of Louis XVII during the Queen's trial. He concluded: "There was not even to doubt that there was an incestuous act between the mother and the son". Marie-Antoinette remains impassive. When the President of the Tribunal asked him to answer, his sentence became famous: "If I did not answer, it is because nature refuses to answer such an indictment made to a mother. I appeal to all of them. those that can be found here! "
Marie-Antoinette was guillotined on October 16, 1793, at 4 a.m.
Louis-Charles will always ignore the execution of his mother.
As for the shoemaker Simon, he does not seem to have any remorse or any awareness of the monstrosity he made the child in his care perform.
On January 3, 1794, the Municipality forced Simon to attend Council meetings at the Town Hall.
As a result, he was relieved of his duties as Louis-Charles educator.
The child will be left to his own devices when the Simon's final departure on January 19.
The walling of Louis XVII
The little king is in solitary confinement in one of the rooms of the apartment on the second floor of the Temple tower. The communication door to this room is locked and grilled with iron bars. An opening has been made in the grid to pass dishes and various objects. There is no light and Louis XVII will live or rather languish for six months in this hell, almost without contact with the outside.
The child is fed two bowls of soup, a bread and a jug of water every day.
From time to time, in the middle of the night, the commissionaires wake him up to check his presence in the room.
He lies down all day, has nothing to wash himself.
It is repulsively filthy.
His excrement remains in the room, no one takes care of it, the smell is foul.
His health is deteriorating, his bone tuberculosis is wreaking havoc, he has tumors on his knees, festering wounds on his head and neck.
Agony and death
On 9 Thermidor Year II (July 27, 1794), Robespierre and his accomplices, including the shoemaker Simon, were arrested and guillotined the next day. The new master of France, Barras, immediately visits the last two prisoners of the Temple, the children of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Thérèse and Louis XVII. He is horrified by the state of the little boy and names a certain Christophe Laurent, Creole from Martinique, guardian of the two royal children. At the end of October, Gomin was first added to him, who was replaced in March 1795 by Etienne Lasne, house painter, former soldier in the French Guards who had often seen the Dauphin when his battalion was protecting the Tuileries Palace. He immediately recognizes the son of Louis XVI.
If Gomin takes care of the child and if the conditions of his detention are relaxed, his state of health does not improve. He is sad, hardly speaks, and most often remains seated or lying down. His disease is progressing. He is numb and dejected. We dispatch a chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu, Pierre-Joseph Desault. He is appalled by the child's condition and prescribes a restorative diet. He also asks that we ventilate his room.
Thanks to these measures, Louis XVII knew a little better, but Doctor Desault died suddenly on June 1. Doctor Philippe-Jean Pelletan succeeded him with the young patient. He too orders a better diet, has him transported to a sunnier room which has a balcony. The child appears to be in a less worrying state. Despite this, on June 7, 1795, Louis XVII suffered from colic and violent vomiting. Pelletan comes to examine him the next day and considers his condition worrying. The child died the same day, June 8, 1795, aged 10.
On June 9, at 11 am, four practitioners, including Dr. Pelletan, performed the autopsy.
The examination, meticulous, will last four hours.
Taking advantage of a moment of inattention from his colleagues, Pelletan takes the heart of Louis XVII and hides it in his handkerchief.
Back home, he places the organ in a crystal vase filled with wine spirit and hides it behind the books in his library.
In the meantime, on June 10, at 9 o'clock in the evening, the coffin of the little prince was carried with a man's arm to the old Sainte-Marguerite cemetery near the Bastille.
He is put in the mass grave.
The Louis XVII enigma begins.
Bibliographic resources:
Philippe Delorme,
The princes of misfortune
(Perrin, 2008)
Philippe Delorme,
The return of the lost dolphin, in The enigmas of the history of France
, under the direction of Jean-Christian Petitfils
(Perrin / Le Figaro Histoire, 2018)
"At the heart of History" is a Europe 1 Studio podcast
Author and presentation: Jean des Cars
Production: Timothée Magot
Director: Jean-François Bussière
Distribution and editing: Clémence Olivier and Salomé Journo
Graphics: Karelle Villais