*20.03.1811 Paris, France  -  †22.07.1832 Vienna

Duke of Reichstadt

Joseph Karl Franz was born on March 20, 1811, in Paris as King of Rome and Napoleon II. His father was Napoleon,  his mother was Maria Louise of Austria, a daughter of Emperor Franz II.(I.).

After his father was exiled to St. Helena, he arrived at Schönbrunn on March 21, 1815, accompanied by his mother. 

The emperor's grandson was granted financial security by the court's plan that he should receive the Palatinate-Bavarian estates in Bohemia after his mother's death. Reichstadt, the main town of these possessions, was elevated to a duchy.

On July 13, 1821, he learned of his father's death.  At the age of 21, he fell ill and was treated by the court physician Malfatti for liver damage instead of tuberculosis (which was incurable at the time).

The young prince's distrust of his doctors also aggravated the course of his illness.  The dying Napoleon had ordered that his son be informed of his supposed terminal illness, stomach cancer, since Carlo Bonaparte, his father, had also died of this disease.

The terminally ill man lay in the rooms in Schönbrunn that Napoleon had occupied after his victorious battle at Wagram in 1809.

On December 15, 1940, on the orders of Adolf Hitler, the coffin containing the remains of Napoleon's son was taken to the Invalides in Paris. This transfer was intended as a gift from the Führer to the then President of France, Marshal Philippe Pétain, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the transfer of Napoleon's body from St. Helena to Paris. Three days earlier, the Gestapo had arrested the provincial father of the Capuchin monastery, while members of the SS, the SA, and eight men from the funeral home broke into the crypt and dismantled the 800-kilogram sarcophagus.

Apart from the political background, the transfer to Paris fulfilled the Duke of Reichstadt's last wish to be laid to rest alongside his father – something that was unknown to the German government at the time.

Professor Kurt Stümpfl reported on the transfer to Paris: "My father, Heinrich Stümpfl, was a lieutenant general and city commander of Vienna in 1940. One night, the telephone rang in my parents' apartment. An officer on duty reported the order from the Führer's headquarters in Berlin to have the sarcophagus of the Duke of Reichstadt transferred to Paris immediately with military honors. This action was intended to appease the French government on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the transfer of Napoleon's remains from St. Helena to Paris.

When my mother, who had answered the phone, tried to convey fragments of the order to my father in her sleepy state, the result was that he was to have the body of the Reich Governor brought to Paris. My father was surprised by the sudden death of the Reich Governor, Baldur von Schirach. The following morning, the matter was clarified, and my father set about carrying out the order, for which he had only a few hours.

As an officer, he was understandably unfamiliar with the complicated funeral customs of the former imperial family, and although the body arrived in Paris punctually at 9 a.m. with the escorting officer, Colonel Oskar Schlegelhofer, the urn containing the heart and entrails remained in Vienna.

In Paris, the descendants of the Napoleonic family had been invited to attend the reception. It was a rainy, foggy day."