Following the execution of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, their ten-year-old son, Louis XVII, died of tuberculosis while imprisoned in the Temple fortress in 1795. However, rumors immediately swarmed across Europe that the young heir had been secretly rescued and replaced with a sickly orphan double. Dozens of pretenders emerged, but none was as persuasive or persistent as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff.
Arriving in Prussia around 1810, Naundorff claimed to be the escaped Dauphin. He possessed an extraordinary knowledge of royal court etiquette, detailed intimate childhood memories that only the true prince would know, and even exhibited physical scars on his body matching those recorded on the royal child. Remarkably, several former members of the royal household, including the prince's childhood governess, Madame de Rambaud, met Naundorff and publicly recognized him as the legitimate heir to the French throne.
Naundorff sued the French royal family for restitution, but King Louis-Philippe had him arrested and expelled to England. Naundorff spent his final years in the Netherlands, where the Dutch government allowed him to be buried under the name Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. It was not until 1998 that modern DNA testing on the preserved heart of the boy who died in the Temple prison definitively proved the real Louis XVII had indeed died in 1795, exposing Naundorff as an elaborate fraud.