This was one of my Half-Price Books finds that had been gathering dust in my to be read pile for several years. I had tried reading it once, got bored, and put it away. But when I picked it up at the end of the semester, I really couldn’t put it down.
The Lost King of France tells the story of the son of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, Louis-Charles, who was imprisoned in the Temple along with his parents and older sister during the Revolution. The tale is similar to what happened to the Romanovs in Russia at the turn of the 20th Century, but was one I had never heard. I knew, of course, that King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been beheaded by Robspierre’s government, but not that their children remained imprisoned for years after their parents’ deaths.
Their daughter, Marie-Therese, was released (and exiled) in 1795, but her brother had been secluded years before, and rumors ran riot that he had been smuggled safely out of the Temple. As with the Romanovs, there were pretenders to the throne, which Marie-Therese never openly acknowledged, due in part to the official record stating that the dauphin had died in the Temple in 1795. But no one was really sure what had happened to him. That is, until 2000, when geneticists analyzed a tissue sample from a child’s heart, reportedly taken from the Orphan in the Tower during the autopsy by the attending physician.
This was a great read, engaging, and combining two of my favorite subjects, history and genetics. Better still, it demonstrates how genetic analysis can be used to answer historical questions, unequivocally.
Tags: Books, genetic-analysis, Genetics, louis-xvi-and-marie-antoinette
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