Europe's inner demons

As for the Mémoires de Louis XVIII

and the Soirées de S.M. Louis XVIII

, it is thanks to them that one specific, notorious imposture, which would otherwise have been quickly forgotten, has continued to intrigue and deceive some people right down to our times. In the 1830s a deserter from the Prussian army, called Naundorff, appeared in France and claimed to be Louis XVII, i.e. the Dauphin who in reality had died in prison during the Revolution. The man was quickly unmasked and expelled from France. Lamothe-Langon, however, inserted into his spurious memoirs of Louis XVIII various remarks suggesting that the Dauphin had not in fact perished and might well be Naundorff. He also inserted into other spurious memoirs, attributed to other personalities, passages which seemed to corroborate this view of the matter; and so constructed a whole body of self-supporting but completely fictitious evidence which still continues, at intervals, to give rise to further outbursts of argument and to fresh crops of books. One such occasion was around 1910; at that time Dr de Santi, the Toulousain expert on Lamothe-Langon, produced a pamphlet in which he showed that the “proofs” of the pro-Naundorff faction consisted almost wholly of passages culled from books which, whatever their ostensible authors, were really all by Lamothe-Langon. Not that that put an end to the affair — a new pro-Naundorff campaign was launched in 1954!⁽²⁸⁾

Fortified with these insights into the personality and methods of Lamothe-Langon, we may return to his most successful hoax, the imaginary witch-hunt in fourteenth-century Languedoc. Although in the preface to his history he claims to have studied manuscript sources in various archives, he makes no such claim in respect of the confessions of Anne-Marie Georgel and Catherine, wife of Pierre Delort. On the contrary, this text is described in a footnote as “extracted from the archives of the Inquisition of Toulouse, by Father Hyacinthc Sermet, metropolitan bishop of the South”. Now, Antoine-Pascal-Hyacinthe Sermet really existed.⁽²⁹⁾

Born at Toulouse in 1732, he started as a Carmelite monk and rose to be provincial of his order. He was a man of some erudition, and at one time concerned himself with the history of the Inquisition of Toulouse. Nevertheless, it is highly improbable that he ever made any extracts from the archives of the Inquisition. In the single, twelve-page article which was all that he ever published on the subject, he makes it plain that he had not discovered any unpublished sources.⁽³⁰⁾ That was in 1790, when Sermet was already fifty-eight and had reached the end of his career as a scholar. For with the coming of the Revolution he became deeply involved in politics. He was one of the clerics who accepted appointments from the revolutionary government — in 1791 he took office as the metropolitan bishop of the Haute-Garonne, in defiance of his superiors. “Le Père Sermet”, as he popularly was called, became a most controversial figure, denounced by his archbishop, pouring out political pamphlets in Provençal, taking part in ecclesiastical councils sponsored by the government and even — having conferred on himself the title of “metropolitan bishop of the South” — holding a provincial council of his own at Carcassonne. He continued in this style until 1801, when the changing political climate induced him to retire on a pension; after which he spent his last few years in obscurity and died in Paris. So it is hard to see when or how Sermet could have carried out the labours which Lamothe-Lagon attributes to him. On the other hand, by the time the attribution was made he was in no position to comment, for he had been dead for twenty-one years.

But all this is beside the point. We have already demonstrated, from internal evidence, that the whole passage containing the confessions is spurious. It remains to consider what models Lamothe-Langon had before him when he concocted it.