Louis XVII of France did not die in 1795. His descendants live on.

The alleged death of Louis XVII in 1795 at the age of ten was surrounded by controversy during the revolution. Louis XVII was the name of Prince Louis Charles (1785-?), second son of the French King Louis XVI (1754-1793) and Marie Antoinette (1755-1793).

?????According to official records, Louis Charles died of tuberculosis in the Temple (in Paris) on June 8, 1795, but new evidence shows that this was not the case.

????At the beginning of the 19th century, around a hundred people claimed to be the son of Louis XVI. The most famous of them is Naundorff, who arrived in Paris in May 1833. He provided sufficient circumstantial evidence to convince former members of the Versailles court including various ministers and the Secretary for Justice and Private Affairs. (and especially Madame de Rambaud, maid of the Dauphin) of his ancestry.

????Despite this, Naundorff was deported to England by the French authorities, after twenty-six days in prison, in July 1836.

?????He spent his last years in the Netherlands and was recognized as Louis XVII by the Dutch king who allowed him to use the Bourbon surname legally. The British also recognized his demand.

??????Karl Wilhelm Naundorff died in 1845 in Delft (Netherlands), where he was buried under the name of Louis Charles, Duc de Normandie, Louis XVII in his grave, it can be read: ?Ici rest Louis XVII, Roi de France et de Navarre, né à Versailles le 27 mars 1785, décédé le 10 ao?t 1845. ?

?????The descendants of Naundorff are legally today (confirmatory judgment of the Tribunal de la Seine, November 26, 1913) in France named "de Bourbon"; Initially, the judgments of the courts of Bois-le-Duc (March 12, 1888) and Mastricht (May 20, 1891) agreed to authorize the use of the name "de Bourbon" for members of the Naundorff family.

????As the years passed, speculation continued. Thousands of articles and more than five hundred books have been written on this mystery.

H.M King Louis XVII (1785-?) (Source Wikipedia)

Karl Wilhelm Naundorff whom the Dutch government recognized as King Louis XVII (Source Wikipedia)

????In early 2000, scientists tested DNA on the alleged heart of the boy who died of tuberculosis in his prison cell, and who was supposed to be the French Dauphin. A sample of the heart was compared to a lock of hair taken from Queen Marie Antoinette as a child.

?????There was no question. The owner of the heart and the queen shared the same DNA. The Naundffordists justified this result by saying that the only thing that the test showed was that the two people were related, but were not necessarily mother and son.

?????A test of DNA samples taken from Naundorff’s tomb exhumed from Delft was also compared to DNA samples from living descendants of Empress Marie Therese of Austria, mother of Marie Antoinette, including Queen Anne of Romania. These tests concluded that Naundorff was not Louis XVII. These results were devastating for the Naundorffist cause.

????The tests were organized to end the debate once and for all. To avoid future doubt, two different scientists independently performed tests. Jean-Jacques Cassiman, professor of genetics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, carried out an analysis; Ernst Brinkmann of the German University of Münster led the other.

????Were they really using samples from the heart of Louis Charles the Dauphin? The heart has a fascinating story of its own. It has been going from hand to hand for nearly 200 years. The doctor who performed the autopsy, Philippe-Jean Pelletan, hid the heart in his handkerchief, stole it, and pickled it in alcohol. In 1815, after the restoration of the monarchy, Dr Pelletan tried to give the heart to King Louis XVIII but he rejected it because he did not believe it was the heart of his nephew. After the monarch's rejection, the doctor donated the relic to the Archbishop of Paris, Hyacinthe-Louis de Quélen, where it remained until the Archbishop's Palace was attacked in the 1830 Revolution. After the looting of the archbishop's palace, the doctor's son recovered it from a pile of broken glass in the sand, but luckily it was intact. After his death in 1879, the heart was guarded by Edward Dumont.

???????In 1895, Don Carlos de Borbón and Carlist pretender to the Spanish throne accepted the custody of the heart that was kept in the Castle of Frohsdorf, near Vienna. His son Don Jaime de Borbón, Duke of Madrid, inherited the relic, and he, in turn, left it as an inheritance to his sister the Infanta Do?a Beatriz. Finally, two granddaughters of Don Carlos gave it to the president of the Memorial of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris, the Duke of Bauffremont, and placed it in a glass urn in the necropolis of the kings of France. It remained there until 1999.

??????In 1999, before a notary public, a piece of the heart was removed for DNA testing and transported theatrically to the laboratory in a hearse. In 2004, finally, Louis XVII and his heart received a state funeral in the Basilica of Saint-Denis and the mystery was solved. But after the latest DNA tests that prove without a doubt that the Naundorffs are Bourbons, there is only one logical explanation. The heart is not that of Louis XVII but that of his older brother, the Dauphin Louis Joseph, who died when he was nine years old.

???????About fifteen years ago, Professor Cassiman excluded Naundorff as the son of Marie Antoinette based on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from his remains compared to the sequences obtained from the hairs of two sisters of Marie Antoinette, Marie Antoinette herself and with sequences obtained from DNA samples from two living maternal relatives.

Comparison photos of King Henri III of Navarre and IV of France and Prince Hughes father, Charles Edmond de Bourbon, Count of Poitiers (Courtesy Institute Louis XVII)

The striking resemblance between King Louis XVI and Prince Hughes of Bourbon (Courtesy Institute Louis XVII)

?????The incredible thing is that very recently?the same Laboratory produced the STR profiles of the Y chromosome of three different members of the House of Bourbon. The aim of the article presented by The International Journal of Science is to compare these profiles with those of Hughes de Bourbon, the only son of Charles Edmond de Bourbon, Count of Poitiers, a direct descendant of Naundorff. This was done to elucidate the patrilineal relations between him and these members of the Bourbon family. Hughes de Bourbon (born 1974) is the fourth-generation living descendant of Karl Naundorff.

??????The conclusions could not be more surprising; The results reported in the study on comparisons of genetic chromosome markers between Hughes de Bourbon and three recently published test of male members from the House of Bourbon (Larmuseau et al 2) establish that:

1 / Hughes de Bourbon belongs to the same terminal subkey of the patrilinear SNP of the current differentiation (cladeR1b1a2a1a1, SNPsub-terminalmarkerS21) as the other Bourbons studied (these Bourbons were tested for S21 but, being Z381 +, they are mandatory S21 +).

2 / The high-resolution profile (in our own 27-STRs comparison system) of Hughes de Bourbon is very similar to that of the other Bourbons, differing from them in six.

3 / Based on this criterion of six difference mutations, Hughes de Bourbon can be considered as a member of the Bourbon family, according to the established rules of genealogical relationships in recent families with identical last names. It should be noted that this threshold of difference of six mutations refers to families of relatively recent origins 19. So, because the Bourbon family is very old ((traceable to at least Henri IV of Navarre and the first Bourbon king of France), this criterion of six difference mutations corresponds to a minimum value.

?????????This keeps the debate open as to whether the descendants of Naundorff, whose remains lie in a tomb in Delft, are direct descendants of the unfortunate Louis XVII. According to the latest DNA tests, they are Bourbons, so this would be the logical lineage.

If that is the case, Prince Hugues Charles Guy de Bourbon would be the undisputed head of the French Royal House, although he has officially declared that he wants to lead a discreet life out of the limelight and is not a pretender to the French throne like his father was (Charles XII) until his death. He has passed his dynastic rights to the Canadian branch of the family.

Prince Hugues-Charles-Guy de Bourbon (Source Librairie Hugues de Bourbon Facebook)

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