Multidisciplinary medical identification of a French king's head (Henri IV)

Charlier, Philippe; Huynh-Charlier, Isabelle; Poupon, Joël; Keyser, Christine; Lancelot, Eloïse; Favier, Dominique; Vignal, J. N.; Sorel, Philippe; Chaillot, Pierre F; Boano, Rosa; Grilletto, Renato; Delacourte, Sylvaine; Duriez, J; Loublier, Y.; Campos, Paula F.; Willerslev, Eske; Gilbert, M. Thomas P.; Eisenberg, Leslie E.; Ludes, Bertrand; Grandmaison, Geoffroy Lorin de la

doi:10.1136/bmj.c6805

Cited by 30 publications

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“…As contamination is indeed always possible when dealing with samples with high DNA degradation, 11,12,53 contamination cannot be excluded here, especially for the head as the first attempt to collect DNA from the sample was not successful. 21 Alternatively, they would support the hypothesis that the French kings were not the donors of these biological samples. Y-chromosomal analysis on the already identified heart of Louis XVII, the son of Louis XVI, 4 might further remove all doubts about the identification of the blood sample considered to be of Louis XVI and might also solve any controversy about the paternity of Louis XVI of this child.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 94%

“…Based on 22 scientific and historical arguments, the head was recently identified as belonging to the French King Henri IV. 21 Nevertheless, this identification remains controversial as several historical counter-arguments have been formulated. 22,23 Recently, after an initial failure to find DNA, a second effort to genotype the ancient DNA of the head was more successful.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Genetic genealogy reveals true Y haplogroup of House of Bourbon contradicting recent identification of the presumed remains of two French Kings

et al. 2013

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Genetic analysis strongly increases the opportunity to identify skeletal remains or other biological samples from historical figures. However, validation of this identification is essential and should be done by DNA typing of living relatives. Based on the similarity of a limited set of Y-STRs, a blood sample and a head were recently identified as those belonging respectively to King Louis XVI and his paternal ancestor King Henry IV. Here, we collected DNA samples from three living males of the House of Bourbon to validate the since then controversial identification of these remains. The three living relatives revealed the Bourbon's Y-chromosomal variant on a high phylogenetic resolution for several members of the lineage between Henry IV and Louis XVI. This 'true' Bourbon's variant is different from the published Y-STR profiles of the blood as well as of the head. The earlier identifications of these samples can therefore not be validated. Moreover, matrilineal genealogical data revealed that the published mtDNA sequence of the head was also different from the one of a series of relatives. This therefore leads to the conclusion that the analyzed samples were not from the French kings. Our study once again demonstrated that in order to realize an accurate genetic identification of historical remains DNA typing of living persons, who are paternally or maternally related with the presumed donor of the samples, is required.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 94%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Genetic genealogy reveals true Y haplogroup of House of Bourbon contradicting recent identification of the presumed remains of two French Kings

et al. 2013

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“…15 Recently, forensic scientists and scholars identified a mummified head in private hands as Henri's, removed before his transfer to the trench-a sensational announcement that caused intense debate and has been challenged through study of the DNA. 16 However spontaneous, the crowd's actions in 1793 seem to have drawn upon disparate forms of behavior: empirical scrutiny, religious reverence, violent hostility to power rendered present and vulnerable. What effect did this heterogenous audience have upon those who performed?…”

Section: Suzanne Glover Lindsaymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis, 1793

Lindsay¹

2015

Conversations

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In July 1793, heralding the first anniversary of the French Republic that ousted the Bourbon monarchy, the new government issued a decree that shocked Europe and haunts France still. To punish the vanity of the deposed "tyrants" and to cleanse the nation of their memory, the National Convention ordered the destruction of the ancient royal tombs, 1 most of which were in the basilica of St-Denis, near Paris-for centuries France's royal necropolis, deconsecrated in 1793 and its Benedictine monks disbanded. Operations proceeded in two stages to coincide with programs that symbolically consolidated the new republic.2 For the Festival of Reunion on August 10 that marked its birth, the coffins of the oldest dynasties in the upper church of St.-Denis were emptied, lead removed for recasting, and the remains moved to a trench by the demolished Valois Chapel. The Bourbon crypt was opened as a prelude to Marie-Antoinette's execution on October 16 (Louis was beheaded the prior January 21) and the remains (including hearts and entrails) dumped in a new trench. The bodies of the preceding Valois dynasty followed into a third trench, along with any corpses still left. The transfer dismembered most cadavers before the quicklime deposited on top could corrode them. In 1817, when the restored Bourbon monarchy returned the remains to the basilica, all that survived intact were the lower portions of three corpses. The fragments of about one hundred and fifty-eight once-sacred bodies fit into two large ossuaries in the crypt.Their funerary monuments in the upper church were also symbolically executed. Metal monuments were melted down for arms and marbles removed until the Bourbons returned them to St-Denis twenty years later, greatly damaged and altered.Taking to an extreme what many cultures consider heinous sacrilege, the legislated destruction of the royal burials-for many inseparable from the spontaneous Revolutionary vandalism throughout France-was an especially "obscene" campaign for millennial antinomianism, as historian Bruce Lincoln calls it, 3 an attack on prevailing taboos, as part of the overthrow of the old order, to assert symbolic and psychological dominance. Artist-archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, present at the exhumations while assembling the marbles for transfer to Paris, instead couched the campaign in religious terms. Profanation of the royal tombs, he asserted, fulfilled Jeremiah's warning that God would annihilate an entire race and scatter its buried ancestors if it deviated from divine mandate. 4I pursue the Judeo-Christian idiom that Lenoir used to highlight features of the infamous profanation of St-Denis that relate to the sensory culture of religion. Desecrating the dead consecrated by Catholic rites and burial is, after all, violently somatic for both perpetrator and victim. Detailed reports and memoirs of the exhumations present elements that recall the lived/felt dimensions of belief proposed by historian David Morgan: a confrontation between charged bodies, living and dead, in a charged setting and m...

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“…The Y-chromosome haplotype, determined with the AmpFlSTR Identifiler PCR amplification Kit is unique in a current European database with over 21,000 individuals, suggesting that any matching with other individuals would likely support a paternal relationship between them. The subsequent analysis of the mummified head8 of the king Henri IV (1553–1610)9, separated by seven generations from Louis XVI, provided a partial Y-chromosome profile that with the exception of one genetic marker, was concordant with that found in the gourd's blood. Since one allelic difference is not unexpected in pedigrees of several generations, the results still supported that both remains were paternally related9.…”

mentioning

confidence: 92%

Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754–1793), king of France

Olalde

Sánchez-Quinto

Datta

et al. 2014

Sci Rep

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A pyrographically decorated gourd, dated to the French Revolution period, has been alleged to contain a handkerchief dipped into the blood of the French king Louis XVI (1754–1793) after his beheading but recent analyses of living males from two Bourbon branches cast doubts on its authenticity. We sequenced the complete genome of the DNA contained in the gourd at low coverage (~2.5×) with coding sequences enriched at a higher ~7.3× coverage. We found that the ancestry of the gourd's genome does not seem compatible with Louis XVI's known ancestry. From a functional perspective, we did not find an excess of alleles contributing to height despite being described as the tallest person in Court. In addition, the eye colour prediction supported brown eyes, while Louis XVI had blue eyes. This is the first draft genome generated from a person who lived in a recent historical period; however, our results suggest that this sample may not correspond to the alleged king.

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Multidisciplinary medical identification of a French king's head (Henri IV)

Abstract: Philippe Charlier and a multidisciplinary team explain how they confirmed an embalmed head to be that of the French king Henry IV using a combination of anthropological, paleopathological, radiological, forensic, and genetic techniques

Cited by 30 publications

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Genetic genealogy reveals true Y haplogroup of House of Bourbon contradicting recent identification of the presumed remains of two French Kings

Genetic genealogy reveals true Y haplogroup of House of Bourbon contradicting recent identification of the presumed remains of two French Kings

The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis, 1793

Genomic analysis of the blood attributed to Louis XVI (1754–1793), king of France

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