Karl Wilhelm Naundorff
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Karl Wilhelm Naundorff (1785? - August 10, 1845) was a German clock- and-watchmaker who until his death claimed to be Prince Louis-Charles. Naundorff was one of the more stubborn of more than thirty men who claimed to be Louis XVII.
Prince Louis-Charles, the son of Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette, was imprisoned during the French Revolution and believed to have died in prison. However, there were various rumors that monarchist sympathizers had spirited the young dauphin away from the Temple Prison and that he was living elsewhere in secret.
The first records of Karl Wilhelm Naundorff are from 1810 in Spandau, Berlin, where he received the citizenship of Prussia. By 1822 he had moved to live with a family in Brandenburg where he was later accused of arson and 1824 was jailed for three years for counterfeiting and fraud.
When he was released 1827, he moved to Grossen and begun to call himself as Duke of Normandy and even published two books of would-be-memoirs. He claimed that he had been kidnapped from Paris and that his would-be-kidnappers had taken him to America and back. He could not present any proof of all this.
In 1834 Naundorff was invited to Paris where another claimant to the French throne, Duke of Richemont, was on trial. One of the witnesses for the prosecution read out his letter as a counterclaim.
Despite of the fact that Naundorff did not speak French very well, he managed to convince various ex-members of the Louis XVI's court that he was the dauphin. He seemed to know everything about the private life of the royal court, gave right answers to most questions and spoke to courtiers as if he had known them as a child. One of them was Louis' childhood nurse who accepted him.
However, Princess Marie-Thérèse, the sister of Prince Louis, did not acknowledge him. She had seen pictures of him, did not see any resemblance to her brother and refused even to see him.
In 1836, Naundorff sued Marie Thérèse for property that supposedly belonged to him. Instead, the police force of king Louis-Philippe arrested him, seized all his papers and deported him to England. There he first unsuccessfully tried to build a bomb. Then he declared that he would be restored to the throne on January 1, 1840. When that date passed, he lost the majority of his supporters.
Naundorf died on August 10, 1845 in the Netherlands, possibly of poisoning. He still had some supporters because the epitaph on his grave reads "Here lies Louis XVII, King of France".
Naundorff's descendants did not give up. Some of them insisted using the surname "de Bourbon" and they petitioned for recognition to French courts and senates all through the 19th and 20th centuries. Circus director René Charles "de Bourbon", lost his claim in a French court in 1954. However, some of the descendants still press the claim.
In 1950, a strand of hair and two fragments of bone were taken from Naundorf's grave. Geneticists compared their mitochondrial DNA to strand of hair that remained of Marie Antoinette and other members of her family. Five years later they declared that they did not match, thus proving that Naundorff was an impostor.
External link
- Website for Naundorff, whose family is still trying to press through his claim (http://www.louis-XVII.com) (French)fr:Karl-Wilhelm Naundorff