DNA tests have exposed many a fraud but has the romance of history been lost for ever, asks Ben Macintyre ...... More generally, the march of DNA is gradually stamping out those pleasing and often fakes that so enliven the past. One of my favourite historical figure was quietly but clinically destroyed by science last month. He went by the name of Karl Wilheim Naundorff, but until his death in The Netherlands in 1845 he stolidly proclaimed himself to be Charles Louis de Bourbon, the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and thus the rightful king of France, even though according to every reliable account the Dauphin perished in a Paris Prison in 1795.
Naundorff had some 30 rivals as pretenders to the French throne including one, magnificently, who was black, Frizzy- haired, moustachioed and slightly mad. Naundorff spoke not a word of French and spent time in prison for forgery before announcing his royal lineage and being enthusiastically taken up by French legitimists. His was a wonderful, if never very convincing story. Then a Belgian genetic scientist came along. with some lock of hair from Marie Antoinette's sisters and a piece Of Naundorff's exhumed bone and put an end to the fun by declaring what everyone had thought all along: Naundorff was a fake. We will probably never heard of him again.....
Extrait de l'article de Ben MACINTYRE, paru de le journal "THE TIMES" du 18 juillet 1998