Descartes' Skull: How the Philosopher's Head Ended Up in a Paris Museum

Descartes died in Stockholm on 11 February 1650. He had gone to Sweden after accepting Queen Christina's invitation to join her court (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). He was buried in Stockholm, a Frenchman in a Swedish grave, and there he stayed for the next sixteen years.

That might have been the end of it. Instead, his remains became something France wanted back, and the effort to bring them home is where the skull's separate story begins.

In his book *Descartes' Bones*, the historian Russell Shorto says the French ambassador Hugues de Terlon secretly unearthed Descartes' bones sixteen years after his death and had them carried to France in 1666 (Russell Shorto). The Musée de l'Homme's own account dates the exhumation to 1667, so you will see both years in print (Musée de l'Homme).

What the museum is clear about is the important part: when the remains were exhumed for the transfer to France, the skull was missing. The bones that crossed into France were a skeleton without its head.

The skull now in Paris carries its own account of where it went. An inscription on it attributes its removal to Is. Planström, the Swedish guard captain who supervised the exhumation. The inscription says the skull was taken when the body was about to be sent to France, and that it was then kept in Sweden (Musée de l'Homme).

That is what the inscription claims, not a proven fact. It is a record written on the object, and later scholars have weighed it alongside other accounts that do not settle the theft one way or the other (Wikisource, *Vie et œuvres de Descartes*).

The bone holds more than one line of text. It also bears a Latin verse and a series of names associated with its successive Swedish owners, among them J. Hägerflycht, Anders Anton von Stierneman, Olaus Celsius, Arckenholtz and J. Åhgren (Karsten and Ahlström). In effect, the skull became its own ownership register, handed from collector to collector over more than a century and a half, each keeper adding to the record.

The skull's road back to France ran through a scientist. In 1821 the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius bought it at auction. He had heard that Descartes' remains had arrived in France without the skull, and he wanted the head returned to France as well. Berzelius delivered it to Georges Cuvier in Paris, and it entered the anthropological collections of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle (Musée de l'Homme).

Berzelius's own letter from 1821, describing the auction and the skull, is preserved in the appendix to *Vie et œuvres de Descartes*, a published account of the philosopher's life and works (Wikisource). Online, people sometimes ask who bought the skull at that auction. The buyer is well documented: Berzelius, who wanted it back in France.

The timing is the odd part. By the time the skull reached Paris, the rest of Descartes had already been laid to rest in a church two years earlier.

Descartes' remains were reburied in 1819 at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris, between the tombs of two Benedictine scholars, Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon. The skull was not among the remains placed there (Musée de l'Homme).

It is fair company for a philosopher: two learned monks on either side. Because the skull was separated so early, and because questions hang over both the Paris skull and the church remains, the bones at Saint-Germain-des-Prés are best described the way the careful accounts describe them, as remains attributed to Descartes (Russell Shorto).

The museum identifies the object as Descartes' skull, and it is catalogued as such (Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle). Not everyone agrees. The historian Per Karsten and the archaeologist Anders Ahlström argue that the Paris skull may be a forgery, and that a skull fragment kept at Lund University in Sweden may be the authentic piece (Karsten and Ahlström).

So, the question stands as a dispute with two sides. On one side is a museum object with an inscription, a chain of named owners and a documented arrival in Paris in 1821. On the other is a scholarly argument that the Paris skull may be a forgery, with a fragment in Lund as the possible real one. The identification remains open, and the debate has its own following in France, where forum threads still talk about "le débat autour du crâne de Descartes", the debate over Descartes' skull.

The skull has also been studied with modern imaging. A 2014 CT examination attributed to Philippe Charlier, a French medical anthropologist and forensic expert, identified an osteoma, a benign bone tumour, in the right sinus. The scan also made later virtual modelling possible (The Bones of Descartes, summary).

In 2017, Philippe Charlier, Isabelle Huynh-Charlier, Philippe Froesch, Russell Shorto, Nadia Benmoussa and colleagues published "The brain of René Descartes (1650): A neuro-anatomical analysis". Using CT-based 3D technology, they built a virtual endocast of the cranial cavity and studied its shape, its measurements and its anatomical anomalies (PubMed). An endocast is a model of the inside of the skull. It is not Descartes' preserved brain; it is the shape of the space that once held it.

Facial images of Descartes attributed to Philippe Froesch are approximations based on the skull and on historical portraits. They give a sense of a face, not an exact reconstruction of his. Our story on facial reconstruction has more on how faces are estimated from skulls.

For a famous object, the catalogue entry is short and precise.

The Muséum keeps human remains in its osteological collection, with conditions on access (MNHN). If you hope to see the skull, check with the Musée de l'Homme before your visit whether it is on view, since a collection object is not always on display. The remains attributed to Descartes are at the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

Descartes is in good, if scattered, company. The stories of Goya's skull, Haydn's skull, Schiller's skull and Shakespeare's skull all follow famous heads that took a different road from the rest of the body, and our piece on the Mütter Museum skulls looks at another museum that keeps skulls in its collection.

These are the questions that come up most often.

Descartes died in 1650, and his remains have been on the move for much of the time since: a grave in Stockholm, a secret exhumation, a trip to France without the head, a skull passed from one Swedish owner to the next, an auction, a chemist's gift to Paris and a reburial among Benedictine scholars. Today the skull attributed to him sits in a museum collection and the rest of him rests in a church, both in the same city. Whether the museum's skull is truly his is still argued, which gives the story an ending that suits a philosopher: a question left open.

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