At the behest of France's monarch Louis XIV, the mysterious prisoner of state was treated remarkably well until he died in 1703. Was it a royal twin?
"The biggest secret of life is who we really are."
"You have a king's heart."
"I'm wearing the mask, not me."
Three meaningful sentences that lead to the center of the riddle that can be described as one of the greatest in French history: the man with the iron mask!
To this day, the mystery surrounding the real person who may have been taken up in Dunkirk in 1669 under the (probably wrong) name Eustache Dauger and who was a prisoner of state in 1703 until his death in the Bastille in 1703 - has long been an integral part of popular culture.
Voltaire's theory has a catch
Do the sentences quoted at the beginning reflect authenticity? Not at all. They come from the film "The Man in the Iron Mask" from 1998.
The top-class film with stars like Leonardo DiCaprio is so far the last in a long series in which the cinema took on the ominous subject and was almost without exception inspired by a template: Alexandre Dumas' novel "The Vicomte von Bragelonne" from 1847, the last part of the "Musketeer" trilogy, which perhaps had its greatest fan in Robert Louis Stevenson: "What other novel offers such epic diversity, such nobility in the often unlikely expressions, sometimes in the style of an Arabian fairy tale (... )? "
In fact, Dumas' processing of the unusual story has fairytale features. Accordingly, the masked phantom was none other than the twin brother of Louis XIV. After the birth of her two sons in September 1638, Anna of Austria kept her existence as secret as possible in order to prevent possible disputes over the throne. However, Dumas had not invented this incredible twist around the Sun King himself but instead resorted to Voltaire.
During his own detention in the Bastille in 1717, he began to become interested in the former prisoner, of whom Liselotte von der Pfalz had clapped years earlier:
"A person has been in the Bastille for many years, died masked in it (...) It must have been something important because otherwise they treated him very well, accommodated him well, and gave him everything he wanted. He communicated in a masked fashion, was very pious, and read constantly. You couldn't find out who your life was. "
The enlightener Voltaire later gets the whisper about in "The Century Louis XIV." to decorate the twin story. Probably in order to discredit the monarchy in general. Because he does not provide evidence for his conspiracy theory.
To do this, he turns the mask into an iron one. Today, however, one is certain that it was made of velvet. Not least because a person would hardly have survived with an iron run on his face because of the risk of infection.
Nevertheless, Voltaire's twin thesis is still circulating today, and not just because of Dumas. Marcel Pagnol, for example, argued in the book "The Iron Mask" from 1965 that Cardinal Richelieu took the second-born aside and took him to England.
His true lineage was revealed to him there in 1669. His subsequent attempt to enforce the inheritance claims, however, ended in Dunkirk, where he was arrested and locked away immediately after landing. Because of his resemblance to Louis XIV, no one was ever allowed to see him.