Unlike the American Revolution, the French one turned out to be a bloody mess and led to Napoleon sacking all of Europe. Because the French hated the British, they then instituted a French clock with 100,000 seconds per day (ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds), a French calendar (three décades of 10 days per month - which meant each day of rest was after 9 working days, you can imagine how the French workers loved that) and even a new measurement system, the meter, which like most things French they calculated incorrectly but still caught on, even in Britain.
After King Louis XVI lost his head, supposedly the crowd rushed the scaffold to dip handkerchiefs into his blood as souvenirs. One of those handkerchiefs was reputedly inside an ornate gunpowder gourd and scientists wanted to see if it was truly the king. It was a male having some of his traits but, to be sure, they needed some DNA in common with the King to know for sure.
The problem? Freedom-loving French revolutionaries had poisoned his son, Louis-Charles the Dauphin, as well. Journalist Dave Mosher at Wired has the scoop on the forensic mystery.
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