The Man in the Iron Mask appeared during the 1680s. Rumors of the existence of a mysterious prisoner began to spread throughout France. While the details remain unclear, the story is gripping: a man of unknown identity was locked up on the orders of King Louis XIV. In addition to his anonymity, he was forced to wear an iron mask, shielding his face from view.

According to a 1687 gazette, the prisoner was transferred to the citadel of Sainte-Marguerite, a tiny Mediterranean island off the coast of Cannes, under the guard of a former musketeer, Bénigne de Saint-Mars. Both guard and prisoner would have lived in the fortresses of Pignerol and Exilles, located in the Alps, now Italian territory, then part of France.

In 1698, the pair were transferred again when Saint-Mars was appointed governor of the Bastille in Paris. The mysterious prisoner’s attire had not changed: in his memoirs, a Bastille agent describes his surprise at the arrival of his new charge in the company of a man “always masked and whose name was never spoken”.

In 1703, the remains of a man in his fifties were buried under the name Marchiali or Marchioly, in the Saint-Paul cemetery in Paris, while his personal effects and clothes were burned at dawn. The walls of his cell were even scraped and whitewashed.

Who was behind the mask?

This prisoner of the second half of the 17th century is one of the most famous in French history. The mystery surrounding his identity, as well as the various films and novels about him, have never ceased to fuel the imagination.

He made his first public appearance on the island of Sainte-Marguerite, off the coast of Cannes, on April 30, 1687. A Jansenist gazette of the time contains the following description of his arrival: “Monsieur de Saint-Mars has transported, by order of the King, a state prisoner from Pignerol to the islands of Sainte-Marguerite. No one knows who he is; he is forbidden to say his name, and ordered to be killed if he does. He was locked in a sedan chair, with a steel mask over his face, and all that could be known from Saint-Mars was that this prisoner had been at Pignerol for many years, and that all the people the public believe [sic] to be dead are not.”

The affair gained momentum when this particular prisoner arrived at the Bastille on September 18, 1698. According to the king’s lieutenant, Du Junca, this was the famous masked prisoner from Sainte-Marguerite. The identity of this prisoner was for a long time an important topic of conversation at Court, right up to the reign of Louis XVI – and even Napoleon 1st.

A few questions about this mask

Wearing an “iron” mask constantly for decades raises a few questions: how did the prisoner eat? Voltaire had imagined a mask with “spring” openings. On the other hand, it would have led to illnesses such as septicemia and the like.

The mask was first mentioned as being made of black velvet. The “iron” mask didn’t really appear in print until 1698, when the prisoner was transferred to the Bastille. In an account (published in l’Année littéraire on June 30, 1778) of Saint-Mars’ stopover at his château de Palteau (in Burgundy), by his grand-nephew:

“In 1698,” writes M. de Palteau, ”M. de Saint-Mars passed from the government of the Isles Sainte-Marguerite to that of the Bastille. When he came to take possession of the Bastille, he stayed with his prisoner on his land at Palteau. The man in the mask arrived in a litter preceding that of M. de Saint-Mars, accompanied by several horsemen. The peasants went to meet their lord; M. de Saint-Mars ate with his prisoner, who had his back to the dining room windows overlooking the courtyard; the peasants I interviewed could not see if he was eating with his mask on; but they did observe that M. de Saint-Mars, who was sitting at the table opposite him, had two pistols next to his plate. They were served by a single valet-de-chambre, who fetched the dishes brought to him in the antechamber, carefully closing the dining room door on him. When the prisoner crossed the courtyard, he still had his black mask over his face; the peasants noticed that his teeth and lips were visible, and that he was tall and white-haired. M. de Saint-Mars slept in a bed set up for him next to that of the man in the mask.”

Was King Louis XV the last to know the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask?

Louis XIV knew his identity, of course. But after him? According to Émile Laloy, author of Le Masque de fer: Jacques Stuart de la Cloche, l’Abbe Prignani Roux de Marsilly(1913), his successor Louis XV was the last king to know the secret.

“Louis XIV was the last king to whom legend attributes the knowledge of this great secret: Louis XVI was completely unaware of it, and his prime minister, Malesherbes, had the Bastille archives searched to elucidate it. Chevalier, the prison’s major, sent the minister the results on November 19, 1775: he had found nothing beyond what was already known.”

According to a tradition communicated by Mme d’Abrantès to Paul Lacroix, Napoleon was eager to know the secret of the enigma. He ordered research, but to no avail; it was in vain that for several years M. de Talleyrand’s secretary pored over the archives of the Foreign Office, and that M. le Duc de Bassano applied all the light of his judicious mind to unraveling the edges of this tenebrous historical mystery.”

According to historian Emmanuel Pénicaut in his biography of Michel Chamillart (Faveur et pouvoir au tournant du Grand Siècle : Michel Chamillart, ministre et secrétaire d’État de la guerre de Louis XIV), “a family tradition has it that the secret was passed down from father to son in the Chamillart family until the death of the last bearer of the name, Lionel Chamillart, in 1926”.

The Man in the Iron Mask: over fifty hypotheses formulated

As time goes by, imaginations run riot. The result is a wide range of hypotheses, from the serious to the far-fetched.

The Duc de Beaufort ?

François de Vendôme, Duc de Beaufort, captured (not killed) at the siege of Candie in 1669, is said to have been secretly delivered by the Turks at the request of Louis XIV. The duke, of royal blood through Henri IV, was said in 1637 to have compensated for Louis XIII’s inability to provide an heir to the French throne. Many historians dispute Louis XIII’s sexuality. According to this hypothesis, Beaufort was Louis XIV’s real father. After learning of the affair following the death of his mother Anne of Austria, the Sun King would have had his probable progenitor incommunicado in order to hush up the scandal and avoid any challenge to his legitimacy, while at the same time not daring to contemplate the possibility of patricide. Beaufort, who was very well known and popular, would have been obliged to wear a mask to avoid being recognized and the fable of his death in front of Candie collapsing.

Louis XIV’s twin brother?

This is the thesis of the writer Voltaire. The Man in the Iron Mask is said to have been a twin brother of Louis XIV and, to make the story even more interesting, an elder brother. He is said to have been concealed to avoid any dispute as to who held the throne. But Louis XIV’s birth took place in public, with several hundred eyewitnesses: royal births were in fact open to all, the first step in establishing the future child’s legitimacy.

The writer Marcel Pagnol, based on the circumstances of Louis XIV’s birth, asserts that the Masque de fer (Iron Mask) was indeed a twin, but born second, i.e. the youngest, and concealed to avoid any dispute as to who held the throne. According to Pagnol, just after the birth of the future Louis XIV, Louis XIII took the entire court to the chapel of the Château de Saint-Germain to celebrate a Te Deum with great pomp – without waiting for the arrival of a second child!

According to Marcel Pagnol, Dauger was Louis XIV’s twin brother. He allegedly conspired against Louis XIV alongside Claude Roux de Marcilly, then was arrested in 1669 following the execution of Roux, who denounced his accomplice under torture. According to Pagnol, Dauger was in England during the first part of his life, calling himself James de La Cloche. It was only when he landed in France, in Calais, that he was arrested and became the Man in the Iron Mask.

Nicolas Fouquet, the superintendent?

When the man in the Iron Mask arrived in Pignerol, Nicolas Fouquet had been staying there since 1665. According to Voltaire, he was arrested in 1661. But the first appearance of the Man in the Iron Mask on the Ile de Sainte Marguerite (near Cannes) was on April 30, 1687. He was on his way from Pignerol prison.

In March 1680, Fouquet’s release seemed imminent when news of his sudden death reached Paris. According to Pierre-Jacques Arrèse, based on the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death to this day, and the absence of any death certificate, the announcement was a lie. Ministers Louvois and Colbert, who feared Fouquet’s imminent release, took advantage of the death of one of Fouquet’s valets, Eustache Danger, and his burial under the name of “Eustache d’Angers”, to make people believe that Fouquet had disappeared.

According to Pierre-Jacques Arrèse, it was Fouquet who appeared six years later, in 1687, on Sainte-Marguerite Island wearing a steel mask.

Fouquet was born on January 27, 1615. Officially, he died on March 23, 1680, aged 65. The Man in the Iron Mask died on November 19, 1703. If Fouquet were the Man in the Iron Mask, he would have been 88: a very advanced age for his time.

Lieutenant-General de Bulonde?

In 1890, a commandant studying the campaigns of Nicolas de Catinat de La Fauconnerie, seigneur de Saint-Gratien, entrusted Commandant Étienne Bazeries, an expert in cryptanalysis for the French army, with a set of encrypted papers that took him three years to “crack”.

In one of the documents, a letter from Louvois to Catinat dated July 8, 1691, the key to the enigma of the Iron Mask had been discovered: “It is not necessary for me to explain to you how displeased His Majesty was to learn of the disorder with which, against your orders and without necessity, Monsieur de Bulonde took the decision to raise the siege of Cuneo (in Italy), since His Majesty knows better than anyone the consequences, and also how great the prejudice will be if we do not take this place, which we must try to control during the winter. She desires that you have Monsieur de Bulonde arrested and taken to the citadel of Pignerol, where Her Majesty wishes him to be kept locked up during the night in a room of the said citadel, and during the day to be free to walk the ramparts with a 330 309.”

For Bazeries, who translates the sequence “330 309” as “masque”, the famous prisoner would therefore have been Vivien l’Abbé de Bulonde, lieutenant-general of the French army. But this hypothesis is hotly debated, as the date on which Bulonde was imprisoned postdates the presence in Pignerol of his presumed jailer, Governor de Saint-Mars.

Queen’s lover?

In 1978, Pierre-Marie Dijol put forward the following thesis: Queen Marie-Thérèse (wife of Louis XIV) had an adulterous daughter with a black slave, the dwarf Nabo. This daughter was said to be the Mauresse de Moret, a Benedictine nun who became convinced late in life that she was of royal blood, having been visited for years by members of the royal family. Saint-Simon, in his memoirs of the Mauresse de Moret, gives no explanation for these royal visits, but they were frequent at the time in convents close to the Louvre.

The Nabo dwarf subsequently disappeared from the royal court. But when “his” daughter was born, he was only 12 or 13 years old. La Mauresse de Moret has also been credited with being an adulterous daughter of Louis XIV with a black servant or actress. What is to be believed in all this?

The Man in the Iron Mask: a simple valet?

There are several versions of the simple valet: the prisoner named Dauger was in fact a certain Martin – valet to Huguenot Claude Roux de Marcilly, who was arrested and sentenced to the wheel in 1669 – who was supposedly held incommunicado because he knew too much about his master’s conspiracy.

Another version (by John Noone and historian Jean-Christian Petitfils) is that the Iron Mask was in fact a simple valet whom Saint-Mars masked to make his troops believe he was looking after an important prisoner.

According to Jean-Christian Petitfils’ theory in his book Le Masque de Fer, entre histoire et légende, he was imprisoned because he knew of the dealings between Louis XIV and Charles II of England, in which the King of England wanted to return to Catholicism. Negotiations were undertaken to this end. Eustache Dauger was entrusted with the transmission of the correspondence between the two kings and became aware of it. Louis XIV was informed and ordered his arrest and incommunicado detention. The idea for the iron mask came from the prison governor, M. de Saint-Mars: having lost his two best-known prisoners, Antoine Nompar de Caumont, first Duke of Lauzun, (released in 1681) and M. Fouquet (deceased in 1680), he sought to enhance his status by giving prominence to one of his remaining prisoners.

This thesis is corroborated by the small amount of money spent on the prisoner’s upkeep, far less than that spent on high-profile prisoners such as Fouquet, which seems to imply that the prisoner was not a nobleman but a mere valet.

More candidates behind the iron mask?

Yes, there have been others. There has been talk of Henri II de Guise, a descendant of the Lorraine-Guise line, who is said to have been the suitor of a secret group advocating a return to the Carolingian dynasty. There was also Molière, according to writer Anatole Loquin. He puts forward the implausible hypothesis that the man in the iron mask was in fact Molière, who did not die following the performance of Le Malade imaginaire, but was arrested at the request of the Jesuits, who had not forgiven him for the Tartuffe play.

According to English historian Roger MacDonald (The Man in the Iron Mask, 2005), the Iron Mask is the musketeer d’Artagnan. Wounded in Maastricht in 1673, he was sent to Pignerol, where his iron mask prevented him from being recognized by the musketeers guarding the prisons.

Visit the island of Sainte-Marguerite

The “hard” remains today of the story of the Man in the Iron Mask is the island of Sainte-Marguerite. It is the larger of the two Lérins islands, opposite Cannes. It served as a prison for the famous Man in the Iron Mask. Today, it’s one of the most popular hiking trails in the Mediterranean islands, but it still skirts the royal fort where the Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned from 1687 to 1698. This fort houses the Museum of the Iron Mask and the Royal Fort. Officially founded in the spring of 1977, it presents the historical cell as well as archaeological remains from land and underwater excavations and explanatory models. Rooms opening onto a vast terrace are reserved for temporary exhibitions. The island is separated from Cap de la Croisette, in the commune of Cannes, by a shallow strait 1,300 m wide. It extends 3.2 km from west to east, with a maximum width of around 900 m. The island boasts some of Europe’s oldest eucalyptus and pine forests. Most of the island is covered by forest.

The Man in the Iron Mask in historical and filmic representation

From the first half of the 18th century to the end of the 20th, the Man in the Iron Mask has been the subject of several thousand books and press articles, including two hundred books or feature articles, and three international symposia, not to mention some twenty novels, seven plays and sixteen cloak-and-dagger films.

Alexandre Dumas’ novel Le Vicomte de Bragelonne (1848-1850) portrays the man in the iron mask as the twin brother of Louis XIV. Aramis plots to replace the real monarch with his brother. Le Masque de fer, 1965, by Marcel Pagnol, reworked in 1973 as Le Secret du Masque de fer. Finally, Philippe Collas, in Les Enfants de Dieu (Plon 2004), defends the Eustache Dauger thesis and the secret surrounding the birth of Louis XIV. Alfred de Vigny wrote a poem, La Prison, 1823, about the Man in the Iron Mask.

Several films have been based on the story of the Iron Mask, all exploiting the hypothesis of a twin brother to Louis XIV, and most adapted very loosely from Le Vicomte de Bragelonne. The latest is 1998’s The Man in the Iron Mask, directed by Randall Wallace and starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jeremy Irons, John Malkovich, Gérard Depardieu and Gabriel Byrne.

Conclusion

The mystery remains unsolved. The hundreds of researchers and historians who have studied the problem have failed to solve it. Out of charity, spare a thought for this man who remained locked up for 30 to 40 years in the jails of Louis XIV, for no apparent reason.