Chapelle Expiatoire
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Chapelle Expiatoire is a chapel located in Paris, France. It was designed by the French Neo-Classical architects Pierre François Léonard Fontaine and Charles Percier in 1816. It was constructed at the behest of King Louis XVIII on the grounds of the former Madeleine Cemetery where King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette had once been buried. In the grounds of the chapel are buried 3,000 victims of the French Revolution.
[edit] History
The body of King Louis XVI of France, decapitated on the scaffold on January 21, 1793, was taken to the Madeleine Cemetery in Paris and buried in a pit, covered by a layer of quicklime. The body of Queen Marie-Antoinette, executed on October 16, 1793, was also buried in the Madeleine cemetery. On June 3, 1802, the land in which the bodies lay was bought by Pierre-Louis Olivier Desclozeaux, a royalist magistrate, who had lived at the side of the cemetery (now Square Louis XVI) since 1789. Desclozeaux had taken note of the sites where the King and Queen had been buried and surrounded them with a hedge, two weeping willows, and cypress trees.
Under the Restoration of the Bourbon Monarchy, the Duchess of Angouleme asked her uncle King Louis XVIII to seek the bodies of her parents, the former King and Queen. Their bones were exhumed on the 18 and 19 of January 1815, and moved to the French royal necropolis of Saint-Denis on January 20. Marie Antoinette's remains were identified by an elastic garter and a jaw, which an eyewitness identified as being the queen's based on having seen her smile over thirty years before.
On January 11, 1816, Desclozeaux sold his house and the old cemetery to Louis XVIII who met the 3 million livres expense of building the Chapelle Exapitoire with the Duchess of Angouleme. Construction took 10 years, and the Vault Expiatoire was inaugurated in 1826.
The Chapelle Exapiatoire contains a hall, two gantries and a vault, stylized after a Greco-Roman necropolis. Nine arched arcades within the hall commemorate the Swiss Guards massacred at Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792, whilst defending the Royal family. In 1862, the cypresses which surrounded the vault were cut down, and a public garden was created, with landscaping that delicately isolates it from the surrounding city, and the adjoining Boulevard Hausmann.
