For outsiders, the ceremony was little more than bizarre. For seventy-five-year-old Charles de Bourbon, it was a harsh blow. “There is no justice. I am going through difficult times right now,” says de Bourbon. After a solemn mass, the heart of King Louis XVII was interred in the Basilica of Saint-Denis on Tuesday, just outside the French capital, in the presence of thousands of royalists and onlookers.

The festivities were intended to draw a line under the 200-year odyssey of the royal heart and finally establish the legendary death of the young king as a historical fact. Officially, it is now to be accepted that Louis XVII died, having just turned ten years old, on June 8, 1795, in the Temple prison, apparently from tuberculosis.

“All completely wrong,” says Charles de Bourbon. The heart interred last Tuesday in the Basilica of Saint-Denis was by no means that of Louis XVII, but rather the heart of “some Habsburg.” For, de Bourbon claims, the young king survived and even had descendants. He himself, Charles Louis Edmond de Bourbon by full name, is Louis’ direct descendant and thus a claimant to the French throne. “To prevent the ceremony in the Basilica of Saint-Denis, I wrote letters to the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Culture. The Ministry of Interior did not respond, and the Ministry of Culture’s reply was completely non-committal,” says claimant de Bourbon, who worked as a technician for the French aircraft manufacturer Dassault until his retirement.

The struggle for the French throne has a tradition in the de Bourbon family. It began with Charles de Bourbon’s great-grandfather, the watchmaker Karl Wilhelm Naundorff, born in 1795. Nearly a hundred dubious characters claimed to be the escaped Louis XVII at the beginning of the 19th century — including, according to one historian, a Brazilian and an Iroquois Indian. Naundorff was the most convincing in his claim. He played his role so credibly that the Dutch king allowed him to call himself Louis-Charles de Bourbon. Naundorff died of typhus in 1845 in the Dutch city of Delft. His tombstone was inscribed: “Here lies buried Louis XVII of France, also known as Karl Wilhelm Naundorff.”

Almost one hundred and fifty years later, in 1993, Belgian researcher Jean-Jacques Cassiman from the Center for Human Genetics at the Catholic University of Leuven let the genes speak. He compared the DNA extracted from Naundorff’s humerus with the DNA sequences from the hair of Queen Marie Antoinette, the mother of Louis XVII, whom the revolution had sent to the scaffold in September 1793. Cassiman found no kinship whatsoever.

It was also geneticist Cassiman who — in collaboration with Bernd Brinkmann from the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Münster — claimed four years ago to have proven, again by DNA analysis, that the now completely dried-up heart, laid to rest last Tuesday, must have come from a relative of Marie Antoinette. The results were thus “in agreement with official historical traditions, which assume that Louis XVII died in the Paris Temple prison,” Brinkmann wrote four years ago in the “FAZ.” The comparison was made possible because more than two hundred years ago, physician Philippe-Jean Pelletan had set aside the royal heart during the autopsy and preserved it in alcohol, which marked the beginning of an odyssey for the relic that took it across half of Europe.

None of this deters Charles de Bourbon. He demands a new investigation, another exhumation of his great-grandfather. The authorities in Delft are said to have approved this. Only the money is still missing: around 20,000 euros. “But I am a fighter. I will succeed,” says the seventy-five-year-old. He is supported by a handful of companions, “survivantistes,” as they are called in reference to their unwavering thesis of Louis XVII’s survival. They have founded an institute specifically for this purpose, and they have sharp eyes. In an internet forum, a Jeanmarie47 writes: “With the ceremony of June 8, they wanted to close the Louis XVII affair. But the heirs of the Restoration missed their goal. Everywhere beneath their clothes, the devil’s tail could be seen.”