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28 July – 24 August 1669. The Man in the Iron Mask (French: L'Homme au Masque de Fer; died 19 November 1703) was an unidentified prisoner of state during the reign of Louis XIV of France (1643–1715). The strict measures taken to keep his imprisonment secret resulted in a long-lasting legend about his identity.
- The Man Behind The Mask
- The Prisoner’S Days in The Bastille
- Theories About The Man in The Iron Mask
- The Eternal Mystery
While we may never know the true identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, we can make a few guesses based on what we do know. Before taking up residence at the dreaded Bastille, he was held in a small prisonoff the coast of Cannes called Sainte-Marguerite. It was first constructed in 1617, but it didn’t become a state prison until 1685. One of the mos...
The storming of the Bastille — the prison that housed political dissidents of the powerful — is celebrated today on Bastille Day on July 14 in France. But before the Bastille became a symbol of the country’s freedom from hierarchical oppression, it was a hulking symbol of royal power. The Man in the Iron Mask spent his final years here in this Pari...
So, who was the Man in the Iron Mask? The guesses have numbered in the hundreds over the centuries, from the plausible to the far-fetched. Historians point to two men as the most often suspected identities behind the iron mask: Ercole Matthiole and Eustache Dauger. The former was an Italian count who had betrayed Louis XIV politically in the 1670s....
Although the iron (or velvet) mask was meant to condemn the prisoner with lifelong anonymity in his jail cell, it also gave him notoriety that still persists to this day. More than 300 years later, we still want to know the true story of the Man in the Iron Mask. The question has inspired writers, actors, and other creatives to produce artwork illu...
May 6, 2016 · The Man in the Iron Mask was a prisoner arrested in 1669 and held in the Bastille and other French jails for more than three decades, until his death in 1703. His identity has been an enduring ...
Oct 3, 2017 · By the 18th century the number of possible identities kept increasing. Some said the man in the iron mask was a bastard son of Anne of Austria (Louis’s mother) and half brother to the king.
Oct 4, 2021 · In his 1850 epic book, Le Vicomte de Bragelonne, Alexandre Dumas created a captivating image of the man in the iron mask that would go on to inspire countless films and cement the mysterious figure’s place in popular culture. Dumas was inspired by a legend that had emerged almost two centuries earlier. It told the story of a mysterious ...
- Josephine Wilkinson
Jun 28, 2019 · Yes: The Man in the Iron Mask is the title of a 1998 action movie, with Leonardo DiCaprio doubling up to play both Louis XIV and his identical secret twin brother. This Hollywood movie draws on ...
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The legendary writer Voltaire was imprisoned in the Bastille in 1717 and claimed the prisoner wore a mask of iron since 1661. He suggested the man was the illegitimate brother of Louis XIV. However, the claims of Voltaire and Dumas don’t stand up to scrutiny. The earliest accounts of the man in the iron mask date from 1669 when Saint-Mars ...
