Dynastic History | Basilica of Saint-Denis — The October They Dug Up the Kings

The decree was dated 1 August 1793 and it was specific: the tombs and mausoleums of the former kings in the church of Saint-Denis were to be destroyed, beginning on the 10th. The stated purpose was the lead. Coffins were lead, lead was munitions, and the Republic was at war on several fronts.

Demolition of the Merovingian and Carolingian monuments began on 6 August. The larger operation came in October, when workmen opened the Bourbon vault — Turenne's monument first, then Marie de' Medici's coffin on the 14th, then twenty-one more over the days that followed. The bodies went into two pits in the monks' cemetery north of the church, under quicklime and earth. The tally kept at the abbey and repeated by the eyewitness Alexandre Lenoir counts more than 170 exhumed: 46 kings, 32 queens, 63 princes of the blood, household officers and abbots. Other counts run lower, and none of them is a census.

Saint-Denis had been the burial church of French kings since the seventh century, and it had been paid for the work — in estates, privileges and the revenue of the Lendit fair, which the abbey controlled and the region's traders paid into. Lenoir removed the marble effigies to what became his Museum of French Monuments, which is the reason the recumbent figures survive at all.

In January 1817 Louis XVIII had the pits reopened. The remains could not be told apart. They were placed together in an ossuary in the crypt, behind marble plates listing names, because names were all that could be given.

📸 Cover: The basilica's exterior from the north-east, Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons — area view; the ossuary is in the crypt.