When his father was executed on 21 January 1793, during the middle period of the French Revolution, he automatically succeeded as King of France, Louis XVII, in the eyes of the royalists.

Louis-Charles' original governess was Yolande de Polastron, Duchess of Polignac, who left France on the night of 16–17 July 1789, at the outbreak of the Revolution, at the urging of Louis XVI.

Alain Decaux wrote: "Madame de Rambaud was officially in charge of the care of the prince from the day of his birth until 10 August 1792; in other words, for seven years.

At the death of his father on 21 January 1793, royalists and foreign powers intent on restoring the monarchy held him to be the new king of France, with the title of Louis XVII.

From his exile in Hamm, in today's North Rhine-Westphalia, his uncle, the Count of Provence and future Louis XVIII, who had emigrated on 21 June 1791, appointed himself Regent for the young imprisoned king.

[7] On 3 July, Louis-Charles was separated from his mother and put in the care of Antoine Simon, a cobbler who had been named his guardian by the Committee of Public Safety.

The foreign secretaries of Britain and Spain also heard accounts from their spies that the boy was raped by prostitutes in order to infect him with venereal diseases to supply the Commune with manufactured "evidence" against the Queen.

[8] However, the scenes related by Alcide de Beauchesne [fr] of the physical torment of the child are not supported by any testimony, though he was at this time seen by a great number of people.

On 6 October, Pache, Chaumette, Jacques Hébert and others visited the boy and secured his signature to charges of sexual molestation against his mother and his aunt.

A large part of the Temple records from that time onward disappeared under the Bourbon Restoration, making ascertaining of the facts impossible.

Two days after the departure of the Simons, Louis-Charles is said by the Restoration historians to have been put in a dark room that was barricaded like the cage of a wild animal.

From the end of October onward, the child maintained silence, explained by Laurent as a determination taken on the day he made his deposition against his mother.

However, on 1 June, Desault himself died suddenly, not without suspicion of poison, and it was some days before doctors Philippe-Jean Pelletan and Jean-Baptiste Dumangin were called.

In the report it was stated that a child apparently about 10 years of age, "which the commissioners told us was the late Louis Capet's son", had died of a scrofulous infection of long standing.

[9][10] During the autopsy, the physician Dr. Pelletan was shocked to see the countless scars which covered the boy's body, evidently the result of the physical mistreatment which the child had suffered while imprisoned in the Temple.

Following the Revolution of 1830, and the plundering of the Archbishop's Palace of Paris, Pelletan's son Philippe-Gabriel found the relic among the ruins and placed it in the crystal urn in which it is still kept today.

It was later offered to Carlos, Duke of Madrid in 1895, a pretender to the throne of France and Spain, nephew (both biological and in-law) of the Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria-Este.

[12][13] Finally Maria della Neve offered the heart to Jacques de Bauffremont, president of the Memorial of the Basilica of St Denis in Paris.

He in turn put the heart and its crystal urn in the basilica's necropolis of the Kings of France, the burial place of Louis-Charles's parents and other members of the French royal family.

It was in 2000 that the historian Philippe Delorme arranged for DNA testing of the heart as well as bone samples from one of the many historical claimants to Louis-Charles's identity, namely Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, a German clockmaker.

[16][17][18] As rumors quickly spread that the body buried was not that of Louis-Charles and that he had been spirited away alive by sympathizers, the legend of the "Lost Dauphin" was born.

Laurent, to protect himself from the consequences of the substitution, replaced the wooden figure with a deaf mute, who was presently exchanged for the scrofulous child of the death certificate.

He was imprisoned from 1825 to 1828 for coining, though apparently on insufficient evidence, and in 1833 came to push his claims in Paris, where he was recognized as the Dauphin by many persons formerly connected with the court of Louis XVI.

[19] Baron de Richemont's tale that Jeanne Simon, who was genuinely attached to him, smuggled him out in a basket, is simple and more credible, and does not necessarily invalidate the story of the subsequent operations with the deaf mute and the scrofulous patient, Laurent in that case being deceived from the beginning, but it renders them extremely unlikely.