Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #475154 in Books
• Published on: 2003-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Even casual French history readers will notice a discrepancy in the numbering of their kings--Louis XVI goes to the guillotine in the French Revolution; Louis XVIII returns after the defeat of Napoleon. What happened to Louis XVII? That's the subject of Deborah Cadbury's The Lost King of France. Louis-Charles, heir to Louis XVI, automatically became king, in the eyes of French royalists, when his father was guillotined in 1793. He was, however, an eight-year-old boy and at the mercy of the Revolutionary government. Cadbury's vivid and sympathetic account of his imprisonment and the appallingly abusive treatment he received makes for painful reading.

In 1795 the boy king died, still in prison. Or did he? For decades afterward pretender after pretender to the throne appeared, claiming that he was the real Louis. He had been rescued and a substitute child had died in the hands of the revolutionaries. Some claimants were ludicrous. (One was a mixed-race Native American from New York.) Others were so convincing that their descendants still have supporters today. "Karl Wilhelm Naundorff" persisted with his claim to his deathbed and beyond. His gravestone boldly states that he was the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette.

In the second half of her book, Cadbury turns from the sad narrative of Louis the Seventeenth's apparently short life to the mystery of his claimed survival. Finally her book becomes a scientific detective story as the tools of modern DNA testing are used to pinpoint the identity of the boy who died in prison and to investigate the genetic make-up of Naundorff. As both the story of a tragic and short life and a record of how science solved one of the greatest puzzles in French history, The Lost King of France works brilliantly. --Nick Rennison

Observer
'A thrilling book'

Daily Telegraph
'Emotionally gripping and beautifully constructed, this is history, science and gothic horror in one.'

Customer Reviews

Reads like a thriller
A superb piece of writing, brilliantly written and thoroughly researched. The central enquiry of the book is what happened to the child Louis XVII after he was imprisoned in the Temple following the French Revolution. Through the use of modern genetics, at the end of the book a conclusion is reached, which puts to an end two centuries of speculation about the royal line.

The book as a whole reads like a thriller, and like all the author's other books, is well worth reading.

The Lost King of France
I was deeply touched by this book. The tragedy and suffering of the little Louise-Charles, Marie Antoinette, Marie-Therese and Louise XVI brought tears to my eyes. It's a history book, describing facts, but the events of that time, described so well in this book, are just heart-breaking.

This is a fantastic book!
Having just visited the Palace of Versailles, I was intrigued by the story of the young Dauphin. I bought this book, thinking it would be a book to work gradually through, and found it gripping.
The first half is about the life of Louis VI and Marie Antoinette, which was incredibly interesting for me because I didn't know so much about the French monarchy. The second of the French Revolution and what happened to the family during this time.
Even when I wasn't reading the book, I was constantly thinking about the horrors they were subjected to. Especially Louis-Charles's innocence about why so many people hated his mother, and the fact that he was subjected to such cruelty. It displayed factual evidence, through diary extracts of Marie-Terese and showed the pains they experienced.
It finishes with the long awaited result of how the young prince died, and is beautifully written throughout.