Dynastic History | Chapelle Expiatoire — A Monument to Two, on the Ground That Holds Hundreds

The cemetery of the Madeleine opened in the early 1720s and closed on 25 March 1794. In its last two years it received the dead from the guillotine on the Place de la Révolution, a few streets west: the Swiss Guards killed at the Tuileries in August 1792, Louis XVI in January 1793, Charlotte Corday in July, Marie-Antoinette in October, twenty-two Girondins on the last day of that month, Olympe de Gouges three days after them, Hébert in March 1794. How many were put in the trenches is not known. Estimates run from several hundred to three thousand, and no register survives that would settle it.

A neighbour of the cemetery, the royalist magistrate Pierre-Louis-Olivier Desclozeaux, bought the plot in the years after the Terror — accounts give 1796 and 1802 — and marked the spot where he believed the king and queen lay. The ground passed to Louis XVIII, and in January 1815 the two bodies were dug out and carried to Saint-Denis. The chapel that Louis XVIII and the Duchess of Angoulême then commissioned — Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine designing, Louis-Hippolyte Lebas building — was begun in 1815–16 and finished in 1826, at a cost usually put at around three million francs. It commemorates those two people.

Everyone else stayed where they were. In 2020 the site's administrator, Aymeric Peniguet de Stoutz, found cavities in the walls of the lower gallery; the forensic archaeologist Philippe Charlier put a camera into them and reported four wood-and-leather boxes packed with human bone and earth. Whose they are has not been established, and the attribution to Revolution-era dead remains preliminary.

The Centre des monuments nationaux runs the site. The square around the chapel is the cemetery.

📸 Cover: The chapel seen from the garden, ZeusUpsistos, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.