Following the execution of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette during the French Revolution, their ten-year-old son, Louis XVII, was imprisoned in the Temple Fortress, where he officially died of tuberculosis in 1795. However, rumors immediately swirled that the real dauphin had been smuggled out and replaced with a sick orphan. Enter Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German watchmaker with a mysterious past and detailed knowledge of the royal court.
In 1833, Naundorff presented himself to Parisian society, displaying physical scars matching those of the young prince and recounting intimate childhood memories that astonished former royal household servants. Marie-Thérèse, the real dauphin's surviving sister, refused to meet him, but numerous French aristocrats and former courtiers were utterly convinced of his royal bloodline. Naundorff successfully ran a royal court-in-exile, issuing decrees and adopting the Bourbon coat of arms.
When French authorities banished him to England, the Dutch government granted him asylum under the official name Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie. Upon his death in 1845, his tombstone in Delft was boldly inscribed: 'Here lies Louis XVII, King of France.' Decades later, 1998 DNA testing comparing hair attributed to Naundorff with Marie Antoinette's tissue revealed no genetic link, finally debunking history's most persistent royal pretender.