LOUIS XVII., CHARLES (1785-1795?), titular king of France, second son of Louis XVI., and Marie Antoinette, was born at Versailles on March 27, 1785, and given the title of duke of Normandy, becoming dauphin on the death of his elder brother on June 4, 1789. In 1792 his parents and the rest of the royal party were imprisoned in the Temple-at first in the smaller tower; on Oct. 27 they were moved to the larger tower, and Louis was separated from his mother and aunt to be put in his father's charge, except for a few hours daily, but he was restored to the women when Louis was finally isolated at his trial.
On Jan. 21, 1793, Louis became, for the royalists, king of France, and the comte de Provence gave himself the title of regent. Plots were engineered for the escape of the prisoners by the Chevalier de Jarjayes, the baron de Batz (q.v.) and Lady Atkyns (q.v.). On July 3 the dauphin was given into the charge of Simon, a cobbler who had been named his guardian by the Committee of General Security. Although the Simons were unfit guardians there is little evidence that the child was actually ill treated. On Oct. 6 Chaumette, Hebert and others visited him, and secured from him admissions of infamous accusations against his mother, and next day he met his sister, Marie Thérèse, for the last time. On Jan. 19 the Simons left the Temple.
Two days after their departure Louis is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room which was barri caded, while food was passed through the bars; and according to the legend nobody entered the room for six months, till Barras visited him after the 9th Thermidor (July 27, The child made no complaint to Barras, probably because he feared to do so. After this his condition improved; he was visited during the day by his new attendant, a creole named Jean Jacques Christophe Laurent (177o-18o7), who had assistance from a man named Gomin after Nov. 8. From about this time the prisoner was inspected by representatives of the civil committee of the 48 sections of Paris, and on Dec. 19, he was visited by three commissioners from the Committee of General Security J. B. Harmand de la Meuse, J. B. C. Mathieu, and J Reverchon -who extracted no word from him. On Laurent's retirement Etienne Lasne was appointed on March 31, 1795, to be the child's guardian. In May 1795 Louis was seriously ill, and a doctor, P. J. Desault, who had visited him seven months earlier, was summoned. Desault died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, on June 1, and it was some days before Doctors Pelletan and Dumangin were called. Then it was stated that on the 8th Louis Charles had died. Next day an autopsy was held, at which it was stated that a child apparently about ten years of age "which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet's son," had died of a scrofulous affection of long standing. He was buried on the loth in the cemetery of Ste. Marguerite, but no stone was erected to mark the grave.
Immediately on the announcement of the dauphin's death there arose a rumour that he had escaped. Simien Despreaux, one of Louis XVIII.'s own authors, stated in 1814 that Louis XVII. was living, and Eckard left among his unpublished papers a state ment that many members of "an assembly of our wise men" named Louis XVII. as the prince whom they wished to have. The
royal family made no serious attempt to ascertain the truth, and the removal of Louis XVII. suited the comte de Provence (now Louis XVIII. for the emigres) as well as it did the RevQ1utionary Government.
The most important of some 4o pretenders under the Restora tion were Karl Wilhelm Naundorff (q.v.) and the comte de Richemont. According to Naundorff, Barras determined to save the dauphin in order to please Josephine Beauharnais, the future empress, having conceived the idea of using the exist ence as a means of dominating the comte de Provence in the event of a restoration. The dauphin was concealed in the fourth storey of the Tower, a wooden figure being substituted for him. Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substi tution, replaced the wooden figure by a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death cer tificate. The deaf mute was also concealed in the Temple. It was not the dead child but the dauphin who left the prison in the coffin, whence he was extracted by his friends on the way to the cemetery. tale is that the woman Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket. Riche mont was in prison in Milan for seven years and began to put forward his claims in Paris in 1828. In 1834, he was condemned to 12 imprisonment. He escaped after a few months and left the country, to return in 1840. He died at Gleize on Aug. ro, 1853.
If the dauphin did escape, it seems probable that he perished shortly afterwards or lived in a safe obscurity. The account of the substitution in the Temple is well substantiated, even to the names of the substituted. Lady Atkyns was trying by every pos sible means to get the dauphin out of his prison when he was apparently already in safe hands, if not outside the Temple walls. A child was in fact delivered to her agents, but he was found to be a deaf mute.
The official version of the dauphin's history as accepted under the Restoration was drawn up by Simien Despreaux in his uncritical Louis XVII. (1817), and is found, fortified by documents, in M. Eckard's Memoires historiques sur Louis XVII. (1817) and in A. de Beauchesne's Louis XVII., sa vie, son agonie, sa mort. Captivite de la famille royale an Temple vols., 1852, and many subsequent editions), contains copies of original documents. L. de la Sicotiere, "Les faux Louis XVII.," in Revue des questions Historiques (vol. xxxii., 1882), deals with the pretenders Jean Marie Hervagault, Mathurin Bruneau and the rest; see also Dr. Cabanes, Les Morts mysterieuses de l'histoire (1905), and revised catalogue of the J. Sanford Saltus collection of Louis XVII. books (New York, '908) ; also T. H. Hanson, The Lost Prince (5854) ; E. R. Buckley, Monsieur Charles, The Tragedy of the true Dauphin (1927).
For De Richemont see Memoires du duc de Normandie, fils de Louis XVI., ecrits et publies par lui-meme (1831), compiled, according to Querard, by E. T. Bourg, called Saint Edme ; Morin de Gueriviere, Quelques souvenirs . . . (1832) ; and J. Suvigny, La Restauration convaincue . . . on preuves de l'existence du fils de Louis XVI. (1851).
Since 1905 a monthly periodical has appeared in Paris on this sub ject, entitled Revue historique de la question Louis XVII.