Madeleine cemetery
Madeleine Cemetery[1] (in French known as Cimetière de la Madeleine) is a former cemetery in the 8th arrondissement of Paris and was one of the four cemeteries (the others being Errancis Cemetery, Picpus Cemetery and the Cemetery of Saint Margaret) used to dispose of the corpses of guillotine victims during the French Revolution. The cemetery was named after Mary Magdalene, known in French as Sainte-Madeleine.
History
In 1720, the parish of
Major interments were the 133 victims of the firework celebration of the marriage of the Dauphin (the future
The day after the execution of the "Hébertists" the cemetery was closed and became private land. The beheaded corpses (victims of the guillotine) were then taken to what was to become the Errancis Cemetery (it remained open for three years but is now also gone).
The land was sold to a stonemason. On 3 June 1802, the land in which the bodies lay, was bought by Pierre-Louis Olivier Desclozeaux, a royalist magistrate, who had lived adjacent to the cemetery (now Square Louis XVI)[1] since 1789. Desclozeaux had taken note of the sites where the King and Queen were buried and reputedly surrounded them with a hedge, two weeping willows, and cypress trees.
On 11 January 1815, Desclozeaux sold his house and the old cemetery to Louis XVIII. One of the first decisions of
In 1844, the cemetery was cleared and the skeletal remains were transferred to the l'Ossuaire de l'Ouest (West Ossuary). When the ossuary was closed, the contents were transferred to the
During the French Revolution
Those killed in the September Massacres of 1792 are alleged to be buried here:
- Princess Marie Louise of Savoy
The decapitated corpses of the guillotine victims were thrown in specially dug trenches and covered in quicklime to speed up the decomposition process. There were no markers.
Among those reputed to have been buried here:[4]
- Louis XVI (21 January 1793); he and Marie Antoinette were reputedly the only victims buried in a coffin.
- Marie Antoinette (16 October 1793)
- Charlotte Corday (18 July 1793)
- 22 Girondists (31 October 1793); among them Jacques Pierre Brissot and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud.
- Olympe de Gouges ( 3 November 1793)
- Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (6 November 1793); also known as Phillipe Égalité.
- Madame Roland (8 November 1793)
- Madame du Barry (8 December 1793)
- Jacques Hébert (24 March 1794) and his supporters.
It is unclear how many corpses were buried: the estimates vary from hundreds up to three thousand.
Location
The cemetery was located on the intersection of rue d’Anjou and the Grand Égout (now Boulevard Haussmann) in Paris. It was part of the land on which the Chapelle expiatoire, built in the memory of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, now stands.
References
- ^ The Last days of Marie Antoinette facsimile on Google
- ^ Hillairet, Jacques, Les 200 cimetières du vieux Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1958, 428p
- ^ Chateaubriand, François-René de, Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, in 42 volumes, published posthumously in 1848. The books have been reprinted, and there is also an abbreviated version. All are in French.
- ISBN 978-2-7491-1350-0
Further reading
- Lenotre, G. (2008). The Last days of Marie Antoinette. Iyer Press. p. 352. ISBN 978-1-4437-1410-5.
48°52′25″N 2°19′22″E / 48.87361°N 2.32278°E
