Memory of Louis XVII in France, rumours of his escape and the false Louis claimants

Monarchist sentiment in France remains strong to this day, and the view of Louis XVII as an innocent victim has taken hold of many minds. Thus there is well-founded talk that a monument ought to be raised to Louis-Charles, Louis XVII, dedicated also to all infant and child martyrs. And in the church of Sainte-Élisabeth-de-Hongrie, three houses from the Temple, a service in his memory is held every June; in the same church they remember all the child martyrs of that republic, whose sufferings will stand for ever as a reflection of the cruelty and bloodthirstiness of the Revolution. It is dreadful that the child was not merely kept in a dungeon with a brute set over him, the cobbler Simon, who tormented him day and night, but that lies were also spread ceaselessly about him and in his name. For example, it was said that the boy sang revolutionary songs with relish, songs so primitive and witless that he could not, no doubt, even have understood them. And the more dreadful the circumstances of the malevolent death of a ten-year-old child in a state prison appear, the greater the faith in his miraculous rescue: indeed, hard on the news of Louis's death came reports that he had in fact been saved, and that another boy had died (which is no less tragic). The king, it was said, had been saved by secret accomplices who carried him out of the prison in a laundry basket. It is no accident that in the following years more than one false Louis would appear, each of them proving, with varying degrees of persuasiveness, that his person was identical with that of the royal scion; some even passed this conviction on to their children, who went on defending their royal descent in the twentieth century. Whether the young prisoner survived or not, one would have to be not a revolutionary but a Luciferian to subject a child to such torments and waste him away in a dungeon.