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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Louis XVII Biography LOUIS XVII, Charles (1785–95). Titular King of France after the execution of Louis XVI on Jan. 21, 1793. He was born on March 27, 1785, the second son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. After the death of his brother, June 4, 1789, he became heir to the throne, but together with the royal family he was imprisoned in the Temple after Aug. 10, 1792. His fate was a most pitiful one, for he was ultimately delivered over to a brutal shoemaker named Simon, and died from neglect and abuse on June 8, 1795. Though there could be no question of the death of the real Louis XVII, various claimants arose, who had all some followers. After two other claimants had disappeared there appeared in 1828 one François Henri Hébert, "Duke of Richmont," who carried on a propaganda until his death, in 1845. Then a Prussian named Naundorff, who showed indeed a remarkable family likeness to the Bourbons, and his descendants sought, for a time after 1830, to enforce their so-called claims. Naundorff died in Delft, 1845, but his children sued the Comte de Chambord in 1851 and 1874 in the Parisian courts. (Consult Abrégé de l'histoire des infortunes du Dauphin, London, 1836.) About the middle of the nineteenth century many people firmly believed that the lost Dauphin had been found in America in the person of Eleazar Williams, an Episcopal clergyman and missionary to the Indians, of which race his putative great-grandfather was. He seems to have been convinced that he was a Bourbon, and sufficient arguments were brought forward to furnish a book in defense of his claim (Hanson, The Lost Prince, New York, 1854); but some of these arguments were after-ward disproved, and the belief lost ground. No one has explained how the escape could possibly have been effected, and why no one appeared before 1804 to show that the Prince had not died. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XIV (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 395. |