Philippe Charlier is the most publicized of the forensic doctors. The one we call: the man who makes the dead speak is also an anthropologist. He carried out autopsies for cold cases at the request of the courts, but he is best known for his analyzes of the remains of great historical figures. He, for example, established that Louis IX had died of scurvy, reconstructed the face of Henry IV, or even examined the remains of Hitler, particularly his teeth. He presents a series of documentaries on France 5 entitled: History with a scalpel. Two new numbers, Marshal Ney, the American mystery And The strange story of the hearts of kingsare broadcast Thursday November 23 at 9:05 p.m. on France 5.
franceinfo : Haven’t you chosen the wrong profession? Didn’t you want to be a historian?
Philippe Charlier: In reality, I am a historian of diseases, a historian of medical-surgical techniques and then a historian of the human body. It’s a sort of mix of genres.
Why are you fascinated by historical figures?
Because these are the figures that are best documented. This is what lets us know if the story is telling the truth or not. We have a body which is potentially that of a particular historical character. We have chronicles, we have an autopsy report, an embalming report, we have portraits, we have a death mask and from these elements, we try to see if all this goes in the same direction or not .
You are leading two new investigations Thursday evening on France 5. The second concerns Marshal Ney, but we are going to focus on the first which concerns Louis XIII and Louis XIV. It concerns their state of health and the causes of their death. We didn’t know anything about that?
We know it, but there are different versions and then there is also a re-examination of the medical terms of the time which is really useful. For example, we can describe worms, we can also describe a rather frightening state of oral health for poor Louis XIV who had part of his upper jaw that had been torn off. For Louis XIII, we do not know if he had intestinal tuberculosis or if he had Crohn’s disease. This changes a lot of things for the cause of his death and also for the effectiveness of any treatments that we may have given him.
“There is always an interest in returning to these historical cold cases, and re-examining them, but never alone, always with historians.”
Philippe Charlierfranceinfo
All that remains of Louis XIII and Louis XIV are their hearts. How come ?
Well, unfortunately, they were, not desecrated, but really scattered like a puzzle at the time of the French Revolution. In October 1793, the body of what remained of its sovereigns was opened, scattered and then thrown into a mass grave, then recovered a few years later, and returned to an ossuary at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. In the meantime, the viscera had been deposited at Notre-Dame de Paris and during the French Revolution, it was scattered. And the hearts, a legend tells us that these hearts would have been deposited suddenly, with the Jesuits, in Saint-Paul Saint-Louis, in the Marais, in Paris, then sold to two painters, Alexandre Pau de Saint-Martin and Martin Drolling, who then crushed them, transformed them into pigments and put them into two paintings, one in the Louvre and one in the Pontoise museum.
By examining autopsy reports, without having the corpse in front of you, can you trace a life?
So, with the biological elements, with a small fragment of the heart, we have a lot of exams like those you could take for example in a hospital or in a city analysis laboratory. We have a scanner, we have optical or scanning electron microscopy which obviously goes much further. And then we have other examinations such as immunology, biochemistry, toxicology or even proteomics, the identification of all the proteins that make up a sample. When we put all this data next to each other, we not only reconstruct the health record of the individual and sometimes we can even know the cause of their death.
You like working on relics. What is the oldest one you have studied?
The oldest human remains that I was able to study were with Yves Coppens and they were the remains of Lucy. We realized that this Australopithecus Afarensis had perhaps been bitten or devoured by a crocodile and that its body had then been scattered during a fairly large landslide. This is the oldest case.
Why become your forensic pathologist? Why do we want to spend our days with death?
I’m not fascinated by death at all. What interests me are the rituals around death and also making the dead speak, that is to say finding the true cause of death of an individual and trying to have the maximum information about how people lived at that time. That’s what interested me. For me, the dead are not entirely dead. Don’t see any metaphysics in it, there is always a way to pull the worms out of their noses, a way to make them talk and to better understand how we lived at that time. These are patients from the past.
Who are you working on at the moment?
I am in the process of analyzing the results of the archaeological excavations that we carried out at Napoleon’s home in Longwood on the island of Saint Helena. These are the latrines, the trash cans… The toilets are fascinating because you obviously have everything that the individual may have eaten over time, therefore the potential toxicants. And there you see the interest in Napoleon, obviously. And then also everything we lose in the toilets. Napoleon lost buttons, dice to play with, toothpicks. And then sometimes we put things in the toilets that we don’t want people to find… It is possible that Napoleon’s first death mask was thrown into the latrines because it did not correspond to a physical type Perfect.
You are creating a new museum.
“I am leading the project of creating a museum around forensic science in the service of history, which will also be a European research center.”
Philippe Charlierfranceinfo
And all disciplines (scanning, microscopy, analyses, etc.) will be centralized there with a temporary exhibition gallery and a permanent one. It will be in Greater Paris and should open in a few years.
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