Md Taqi Yasir
The Duke of Normandy commonly known the second last and 27th heir of France, Prince Louis-Charles Capet survived only 10 years and died at that age tragically. The revolutionists of that time dethroned his father, Louis XVI-the king of France and a member of the Bourborn, the royal family of France. He is known as The Lost King of France, who was executed by guillotine in the year 1793. The 1790s era was the fall of the monarchy of the French kingdom and execution of a Bicameralism, that is establishing a sovereign state as a whole.
After the death of Louis-Charles Capet, who was reported to die from Tuberculosis at the age of 10 in 1795, Dr. Philippe-Jean Pelletan autopsied his body and took out his heart, preserved and mummified it and threw the body to a mass grave. The whole Royal family was dethroned in the same barbaric and brutal fashion. After a failed attempt to the escape plan of Louis XVI in the year 1791, he was captured by the revolutionists and was kept in a Parisian palace.
He was proved guilty in the year 1793, and was sentenced to death. 10 months later, Marie Antoinette, the queen also
lost her head.
The death behind Louis Charles is still a mystery. His elder brother died out of tuberculosis 4 weeks before the revolution. Louis Capet and his elder sister were taken away from their mother before her execution, who survived along with her husband King Louis XVI in the Reign of Terror. During that time, Capet was reported to be locked up, tortured and was exiled. Nobody knew the fact of his real death scenario.
William Doyle, the professor emeritus of history at the University of Bristol, said, “It doesn’t necessarily have to be the Bourbons who come back as long as we’ve got someone in charge, rather Political instability, and the power vacuum created by the death of some of the more powerful revolutionaries, left some nostalgia for the monarchy.”
Coming back to the story of the mummified heart of the Duke of Normandy, it had a rumor that the heart got stolen. Official reports about the death was noted on 8th June, 1795, but it was said that the heart disappeared from the doctor’s reception desk and nobody in the country knew where it was.
The mystery goes on. A few years later, Jean-Marie Hervagault, the son of a tailor, who looked quite alike like the Dauphin, Prince Louis-Charles Capet, won the faith of the majority by setting up a multifarious story about escaping the prison only some days before the original Prince died. Even a cobbler’s son named Mathurin Bruneau claimed himself to be the Dauphin. Eleazer Williams, a half Native American even claimed that, but due to non convincing settlements, none of those logics survived.
The British prominent writer Deborah Cadbury in her book The Lost King of France, stated about this “Many a blue-eyed, fair-haired adventurer suddenly found an overwhelming need to unburden himself and admit to his blue-blooded descent.”
In 1824, a guy named Baron de Richemont was assailing the public and aristocratic appeals to have performed a successful prison break and claiming himself to be the king of France. He even wrote his own memoirs and in the year 1853 after his death, his tombstone and death certificate identified him as the Louis-Charles of France.
A similar occurrence was held in the year of 1845 by another guy named Karl Naundorff leaving behind a family who used to believe that he was the deserving monarch.
Actually the heart was the answer to all these questions. It was in fact stolen by one of the Dr. Pelletan’s students who donated that to an archbishop of a Paris church. The heart survived world war 2 in Madrid and later brought back to France. In the year of 2000, it was proved by DNA testing from the graveyard of Queen Marie Antoinette that the heart belonged to the The Duke of Normandy Prince Louis-Charles Capet.