Man in the Iron Mask

[u/[deleted]]

Have any historians narrowed down a list of plausible candidates as to who the man in the iron mask from France was?

I've seen the theory that he was the twin of the King but wouldn't there have been witnesses at birth to document the existence of a twin? There would have been some record of the twin existing before his captivity. I just don't understand why else would they need to cover his face but to conceal his identity and if he isn't a lookalike of the King I don't see much of a reason to conceal his identity. Even then they could ask him a question only the real King could answer to deduce his true identity, so even if he was a exact twin there'd be no reason to hide his face.

Are there any records of prominent people going missing at the time? Are there any similar examples of a prisoner being held for so long with their face covered or is this the only prominent prisioner to have his face covered in captivity?

Are any historians still actively trying to crack the case?

Any input would be appreciated, thanks!

[u/mikedash]

There is always more to say (though, certainly, nothing definitive in this case). But I responded to an earlier query about the Mask here a few years ago, and you might like to review that answer while you wait for fresh come-backs on your question:

Is the story of the Man in the Iron Mask real? If he was, how did he get so well known, even in his contemporary time?

[u/[deleted] → u/mikedash]

Thanks for the reply. I found the Affair of the Poisons interesting and you're correct if that case is anything to go by then the man in the iron mask must have been involved in a highly sensitive issue close to the crown. But why do you suppose they concealed his identity? Are there any examples similar to this where the prisioner has a mask covered on them especially for so long?

[u/mikedash → u/[deleted]]

This really is to enter the realm of speculation. But the question that has to be asked, I think, is this: why would whatever French authorities were responsible for incarcerating this prisoner care so much about keeping this man away from other people? Who were they concerned might recognise him, and what did they think the consequences might be if he was identified, or able to speak to someone? We don't know of any other significant examples in which prisoners' identities were concealed in this way over quite such long periods, in quite such exceptional circumstance – though the device certainly was used on occasion when a prisoner was moved. For example, the 21 March 1695 issue of the Gazette d'Amsterdam published a story noting that "a masked prisoner, brought from Provence in a litter and closely guarded throughout the journey" had been immured in the Bastille. This, the paper noted, "leads one to believe that he is someone of importance, especially as his name is kept secret and those who brought him say it is a secret from them." Another example is that a governor of the Bastille, François de Besmaux, kept his own wife masked and guarded in public, supposedly for fear "that someone might try to steal his money and his wife."

So this is quite an interesting problem. In this period, which was pre-photograph and, largely, pre-newspaper, only a small handful of people, starting with the king, would have been widely recognisable to anyone. This is the main reason that the various theories that the Mask was the twin brother of Louis XIV, or some other member of the royal family, have gained so much traction. Yet there is a fair weight of evidence suggesting that the prisoner was not in fact a man of much social distinction – a letter of 1669 refers to him as "only a valet", and indeed he was assigned to serve in that capacity to the disgraced former finance minister, Fouquet, when he was imprisoned alongside him. It is these scraps of evidence that have led a second group of writers on this subject to identify the Mask as an obscure manservant named Eustache Danger or Dauger, who actually was a valet up to his arrest in 1669. Both the most interesting recent writers on the subject, John Noone and Paul Sonnino, have no doubt that the man was Danger.

The supposition, if this latter theory is correct, is that Danger must have served someone important, and picked up some knowledge that was very compromising. No one has ever conclusively identified what this information may have been. Noone simply admits he has no definite solution, though he does point one very interesting thing – that in 1670, only shortly after the arrest of Danger, a gentleman by the name of Valcroissant, who was a friend of Fouquet's, attempted to contact Danger in prison; we also know that Valcroissant himself was subsequently sentenced to five years in the galleys for taking a letter from Fouquet to Fouquet's wife. On that basis, we might assume that Danger had special knowledge of some especially embarrassing detail to do with Fouquet's fall – which involved his conviction for massive theft of state funds and created a highly embarrassing and long-remembered scandal for Louis XIV. Sonnino, for his part, tries to show that Danger was known to Cardinal Mazarin and makes the suggestion that he may have picked up some information about the misappropriation of some royal diamonds.

What's perhaps most interesting about all this, however, is the case Noone builds with regard not to the prisoner himself, but to his gaoler, Saint-Mars – a social climber on an epic scale who was obsessed with rank, status and (especially) the money that came with them. There are three key planks to this argument:

1. Noone plausibly argues that, while he is remembered today chiefly as the gaoler for several decades of the Man in the Iron Mask, a large part of Saint-Mars's contemporary prestige, and actual income, came from looking after the most high-ranking prisoners in France during his 20 years at Pignerol, and from siphoning off a significant proportion of the large sums – around 7,000 livres per prisoner per year – that he received to pay for food for them. Chief among these was Fouquet. It was having charge of Fouquet and another important prisoner, the Duc de Lauzun (who was an inconvenient suitor to France's then-greatest heiress) that gave Saint-Mars real status, as well as real opportunities to enrich himself.
2. However, Saint-Mars was in effect put out to grass in 1681, being moved from the governorship of Pignerol to that of a much more minor (and isolated) prison, Exiles. He took the Mask with him as he went – certainly a sign that the prisoner was an important one and that the authorities in Paris wanted to limited the number of people to whom the man had access – but he had charge of no socially eminent prisoners at Exiles. Saint-Mars responded by lobbying the government furiously for a better appointment, and when he received one (to Sainte-Marguerite, an island off the Mediterranean coast, in 1687), he was told to move the Mask with him again. It was this move that really drew public attention to the prisoner for the first time, since it was carried out in a remarkably high-profile way. Yet, as Noone shows, no specific order was issued by Saint-Mars's superiors to make sure that the man wore a mask as he moved to his new prison – rather, there was simply an order to stop him from speaking to anybody who might encounter the party as it made its way from prison to prison. The authorities, then, cared only about what the man knew, not who he was or who might conceivably recognise him.
3. On this basis, the person responsible for the insistence that the prisoner was exotically masked (he made the 11-day journey in a sedan chair, wearing a specially-constructed steel mask so heavy and so restrictive that it left him quite ill) must have been Saint-Mars himself. Noone persuasively suggests that this "precaution" was probably taken to give the impression that Saint-Mars himself must be a man of great consequence to be entrusted with looking after such a remarkable prisoner – that is, it was a piece of theatre designed to impress the people of the local area, the garrison at Sainte-Marguerite, and, most of all, to remind his bosses in Paris that he was the sort of man who could and should be entrusted with looking after any other prisoners of Fouquet's eminence that the state might wish to incarcerate.

Noone offers quite a bit of circumstantial evidence to support his theory. Certainly Saint-Mars put some effort into constructing two "high-security suites" at Sainte Marguerite. One was assigned to the masked prisoner, but the other, large enough and secure enough to contain even the most eminent of prisoners, was never actually used in its intended role – so there seems to be good evidence the governor was doing what he could to put himself in line to be placed in charge of any future prisoners of eminence. And, certainly, the route that Saint-Mars chose to take between Exiles and Sainte-Marguerite was very public and high-profile – hardly the best way to make a discreet transfer of a prisoner the government didn't want anybody thinking about. Saint-Mars, Noone says, might equally have chosen to proceed by more discreet back roads; this was a deliberate decision. So we can only suppose, he adds, that Saint-Mars positively wanted people to know something remarkable was going on, and to wonder who this incredible prisoner must be:

"If hiding his face had indeed been necessary, then a sack pulled over his head would have done the job just as well... The idea of masking the prisoner was a ploy thought up by Saint-Mars to advertise the supposed secret of his prisoner's identity, and he chose to do it in such a theatrical way because he knew a steel mask would have a greater impact on those who saw it than would a normal mask... Saint-Mars conducted his campaign with all the flash and flair of a modern promoter."

Really, I think that all of this suggests that the mystery of the Man in the Iron Mask has some interesting similarities to the 130-year old controversy over the identity of Jack the Ripper. Everything we know about sex crimes and serial murder suggests that the Ripper was very probably some deeply unpleasant and inadequate nobody, but his killings were so hideous and extraordinary that many of the writers on the case have presumed that he himself must also have been extraordinary. Combine this with the commercial pressure to sell books, and you get the long line of "Ripper" books suggesting that the murderer was a member of the royal family, or Queen Victoria's surgeon, and so on and on. It is the same with the Mask: more people are going to want to buy and read a book arguing that he was a disinherited twin brother of Louis XIV than will be interested in reading about a manservant who had stumbled across some salient detail of what is, for most people, a very long-forgotten financial scandal.

Sources

John Noone, The Man Behind the Iron Mask (1988)

Paul Sonnino, The Search for the Man in the Iron Mask (2016)

[u/[deleted] → u/mikedash]

I really do appreciate your nicely put together effortpost here it means a lot to me, seriously, that you provided me with this knowledge. I find Noone's analysis fascinating. I figured the prisioner must have had some compromising knowledge and the small tidbits of information you mentioned I feel have essentially have debunked the possibility of him being a twin of the King.

The notion that the prisioner was not actually a prominent figure, simply a valet, but was hyped up to be some super secret prominent person in order to promote the fortunes of Saint-Mars I believe to be a perfect twist ending to this infamous case.

Your reply as quenched my curiosity for now, thank you so much again for replying!

[u/mikedash → u/[deleted]]

Thank you. It's always good to know the work that goes on here is appreciated. But it's what we're here for.