The posthumous history of King Stanislas

Cenotaph of King Stanislas, Église Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours, Nancy

Death and autopsy

It had taken King Stanislas eighteen long days to die.  

Immediately following his death, he was laid out on his bed, with his face and hands uncovered, surrounded by candles.  Six canons from Lunéville sang prayers around the body. The doors to the apartment remained open and people were free to enter.

The following day, Monday 24th February, at six in the morning, the body was transported into the "chambre de la balustrade" (which room was this?  I'm not sure). Here it was exposed on a lit de parade, again surrounded by candles.  The clergy and Court officials were seated nearby with careful attention to rank: on the right was an armchair to accommodate the Cardinal de Choiseul-Beaupré, Stanislas's Grand Almoner, with stools for his confessor Father Louskina and the other palace chaplains; on the left were folding chairs for the First Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and principal officers of the Royal Household.  Beyond the balustrade two altars had been set up, draped in black, where masses could be said. Six members of the regular clergy sang psalms continuously.

Cardinal de Choiseul took up his place at ten in the morning. 

At six in the evening the body was taken into the Guard Room to be autopsied. The procedure was carried out by the Chief Surgeon, Charles Hilaire Perret, in the presence Stanislas's physician Casten Rönnow  and a number of other doctors and surgeons from the town, together with the baron de l'Hôpital as First Gentleman of the Bedchamber.  As was often the custom for sovereigns, the heart and viscera were removed for separate burial.  The heart, which was judged to be "of an extraordinary largeness", was presented on a silver plate to the baron de L'Hôpital, then embalmed and placed in a heart-shaped lead box, which was in turn enclosed in a gilded casket supplied by the goldsmith Mathieu The entrails were also sealed in a lead box, to be placed in a stone urn in the middle of the crypt under the main altar of the parish church of Saint-Jacques. The deposition took place in a solemn service at 9 o'clock that same evening. 

Stone urn for the entrails of King Stanislas, Église Saint-Jacques, Lunéville.
Photos posted in L'Est Républicain, 06.08.2023 

The embalming of the corpse was not completed until the morning of the following day, 25th February. The  Royal apothecary Jean-Gaspard Vockel  provided an assortment of aromatic powders, sponges and bandages for the process, and the whole body was covered by adhesive strips ("sparadrap en bandelettes") [See Pierre Labrude (2007), p.382].  It was then washed by nuns, wrapped in a red dressing gown and placed in a coffin draped in crimson velvet trimmed with gold. The three principal officers of the Household, -  the prince de Beauvau, Grand-Master;  the marquis de Boufflers, commander of the Royal Guard,  and the baron de l'Hôpital - witnessed the closure of the lid.

Death mask and cordon bleu of Stanislas.  

The ribbon was originally held by the abbé Nicolas Alliot during the funeral; 

now among the treasures of the beautiful Château de Fléville, exhibited in 2016.

Photos from: L'Est Républicain, 17.06.2016 

The body now lay in state for eight days in a temporary "chapelle ardente", which had been set up in Stanislas's chambre de parade, so that people could come to pay their respects. The bier was placed on an platform surrounded by twenty-four chandeliers and six flaming torches.  On it were displayed the regalia of Lorraine and Stanislas's cordon bleu of the Order of the Saint-Esprit.  The casket containing the heart, draped in black, was positioned at the foot.  Arrangements were made, similar to those  in place before, for the accommodation of dignitaries, and the observance of religious rites.

The funeral

According to his will, drawn up in 1761 and modified in 1764, Stanislas chose to be buried with his queen, Catherine Opalińska, in the crypt of  Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Nancy, thirty kilometres from Lunéville.  

The King set off on his long final journey on 3rd March at six in the evening, by which time it must already have been dark.  In Nancy the departure of the funeral procession was signalled by a cannon, which was fired at fifteen-minute intervals until the cortege arrived. The bier was carried out by the King's Body Guards. who were accompanied from the courtyard of the palace to the place des Carmes  by the entirety of  Lunéville's regular clergy.  A detachment of Gardes lorraines, under the command of the comte de Cucé, lined the onward route.  The cortege was led by a detachment of the maréchaussée, followed by three draped carriages, each one drawn by six caparisoned horses. These conveyed the Royal valets, the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber and the Grand Écuyer, the comte de Bercheny; another carriage held the Cardinal de Choiseul and the curé of Lunéville.  Finally came the raised open hearse, drawn by eight draped horses and surrounded by guards bearing torches. The coffin was covered by a black drape, its four corners borne ceremonially by four aumôniers du roi mounted on horseback. The Royal Guardsmen and their officers brought up the rear.

Notre-Dame de Bonsecours, Nancy

The journey from Lunéville to Nancy took seven hours; despite the cold and darkness,  the torch-lit cortege was continually joined by mourners to form a lengthy procession.  According to the fulsome published accounts, onlookers showed their grief by crying aloud, tearing their hair or clinging to the wheels of the funeral carriage. 

It was one o'clock in the morning by the time the convoy reached Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours. The church must have been an impressive if eerie sight with the interior illuminated by numerous flickering candles in the dark of the March night.  The body of the King was formally received at the door by Father Bruges, the Provincial of the Minimes. Whilst the entourage arrayed itself outside, the coffin was taken down from its carriage and borne by the Gentlemen of the Court to an illuminated catafalque before the altar.  The Cardinal de Choiseul spoke a few words to remit the body into the Minimes' care. The clergy intoned the Vespers for  the Dead and the Libera. Then the coffin was lowered into the blackness of the crypt below the sanctuary.   The wooden casket was briefly opened  to allow the formal identification of the corpse by the Cardinal de Choiseul in the presence of  the chief dignitaries of Stanislas's household.  It was then placed in a outer lead sarcophagus  (created by the fontainier du roi, Nicolas Krantz) and this sealed.  A procès-verbal was drawn up by Nicolas Durival, the former chief clerk to Stanislas's Council, on the order of the Chancellor La Galaizière, who features in proceeding for the first time.

Louis-Michel Van Loo, Portrait of Cardinal Antoine-Clériadus de Choiseul-Beaupré, 1767.
 Musée Lorrain. (Image from Wikimedia)

On what was effectively that same day, 4th March , at eleven o'clock in the morning, the solemn funeral service took place. The officials of Nancy occupied  the nave, then the nobility and military, whilst the crowds spilled out into the open air. The Cardinal presided and himself said the Mass.  The ceremony finished at a quarter-past midday. 

By the standards of the day, it had been a modest affair.  However,  Louis XV now stepped in to order  public prayers  throughout the diocese of Toul and instigate a series of more pompous ceremonies. The grandiose  services succeeded one another in May and June: at the Cathedral  in Nancy on 10th May, at the parish church of Saint-Roch, and finally in Notre-Dame itself.   It was thus two full months after the burial that the solemn commemorations took place - plenty of time for the orators, and for the architects and decorators, to make their preparations.  There are a number of Relations and published orations -  too much to copy out here, but article by Antoine Beau, published in Le Pays Lorrain for 1966,  supplies all the details (see References). 

"Invitation au service funèbre du 26 mai 1766 en l'église saint-Roch pour le repos de l'âme de Stanislas le Bienfaisant" 
Image from France-Pologne:  Patrimoines partagés

At the Church of Bonsecours, work commenced in 1768 on a permanent cenotaph to Stanislas. This splendid monument, the creation of Louis-Claude Vassé and Félix Lecomte  was finally placed in position in 1775 (See the paper by Alexandra Michaud.)

Two years after Stanislas's death the crypt was opened for a final time to receive the silver coffer containing the heart of Queen Marie Leszczynska.

Revolutionary despoliation

Plaque of 1803 - illustration from Antoine Beau (1966)

Stanislas's twin resting places, at Saint-Jacques and Bonsecours, were both disturbed during the Revolution.  In 1793 at Lunéville, the lead coffer containing his entrails was seized and the contents "thrown on the public highway".  On 3rd January 1794, with formal authorisation from the district of Nancy, the architect Nicolas Grillot arranged for the coffins and urns in the royal crypt at Bonsecours to be opened in order to recoup the lead and other precious metals.  The corpse of Stanislas was found to be surprisingly intact although that of the Queen, and those of the Duke and Duchess Ossolinksi, had been reduced to skeletons. It was later widely reported that one of the workmen   decapitated the King with a spade, exclaiming "Here is one that has not been guillotined!"  

(See Readings; the fontanier Nicolas Krantz,  claimed, probably more convincingly, this act of desecration took place only in 1803.)  Other assistants and eager bystanders appropriated small relics; the 1895 catalogue of Musée lorrain mentions fragments of clothing retrieved at the time of the exhumation.  Accounts differ slightly as to what happened next: the body may, at least initially, have been left in its wooden coffin, but at some point all the remains were buried under the earthen floor of the crypt. [See Pénet (2024)] 

The church and convent buildings were subsequently sold off in parcels and it was not until 1803, under the Consulate, that building work accidentally uncovered the bodies. The remains were identified with the aid of a local charcutier, who had been responsible for their burial in 1794.  The King's corpse, which still showed traces of embalming, was placed, with the other skulls and fragments of bones, in an oaken coffin two metres long.  This was ceremonially placed back in the crypt on 7th March, then entirely walled in, with the inscription that can still be seen today.

Interior of the Église Bonsecours in the early 19th century.
Bibliothèque de Nancy, Limédia Galéries.

A Polish heist?

This was not quite the end of Stanislas's posthumous adventures. In 1814,  after the abdication of Napoleon and the demise of the ephemeral Duchy of Warsaw,  the Polish general Michal Sokolnicki was sent to Paris sent to collect remains of Prince Jozef Pontiatowski who had been killed at the Battle of Leipzig. Leading his troops back through Nancy, the patriotic Sokolnicki drew a ready parallel between the dethroned Leszczynski and the people of Poland who had now lost the support of the French Emperor.

At  Sokolnicki's instigation,  a memorial service was held at the Church of Bonsecours on 11th June 1814; an inscription commemorating the visit of the Polish troops can still be still be seen  today (left).  The General was determined to have something more tangible to return to his beleaguered homeland. In exchange for a commemorative chalice, he was given one of a pair of Stanislas's standards which decorated the mausoleum.  He also acquired a piece of marble from the fatal fireplace, a portion of  burnt dressing-gown, part of a sceptre, and a model tomb.  There were also some actual relics - the curé of Bonsecours supplied part of Stanislas's  jaw,  Nicolas Krantz  provided a finger and a section of stomach and the Mayor of Domèvre-sur-Vezouze some further stomach (yuk!).  On 5th August, during a memorial service held at Poznan, Sokolnicki declared his intention to deposit the entrails in the Cathedral there, alongside the 10th-century Kings of Poland.  The jaw - "instrument of truths" - was to be taken to the Royal Crypt in the Cathedral of Wawel in Krakow, whilst the finger was destined for the Princess Izabella Czartoryska's Temple of the Sybil /Temple of Memory at Pulawy.

In Nancy there was great consternation, since it was falsely reported that the Polish general had made off with the King's body in its entirely.  On 29th August, six months after the Restoration, the crypt was opened and the contents of the coffin verified.  On 17th September, in a solemn act of reparation, the remains were transferred to the present lead sarcophagus, designed by the town architect Louis-Joseph Mique. This was sited in its present position in the middle of the crypt. The sarcophagus  was later surmounted by a lead cushion featuring the Crown, Sceptre and ducal insignia of Lorraine. 

The Royal Crypt at Bonsecours as it is today. Photos posted on X by Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet

In the Polish press,  Sokolnicki defended the authenticity of his spoils. The elderly Nicolas Krantz confirmed that he had acquired his relics in 1803, when the bodies had been rediscovered. (According to his version of events, a "monster" had made off with the head from the corpse , obliging him to go personally to the man's house in order to recover it. [Pénet, p.28])

In the event, Sokolnicki died in an accident in 1816, without distributing his precious relics to Krakow and Pulawy.  In 1828 his nephew gave a "little sacrophagus" to the Society of Friends of Science in Warsaw, subsequently confiscated by the Russians in 1834, when it was confirmed to contain part of a jawbone and a finger.  The reliquary  was deposited in the Church of St. Catherine in Saint-Petersburg, then, in 1923, after Polish independence, secretly transferred to Krakow and hidden a safe in the Wawel Castle. Its presence  was only formally acknowledged in 1938, following complaints about "The King in the cupboard" .  The reliquary has now found a final home in the Crypt of Sigismond in  Wawel Cathedral.  Until recently the casket was encased in a gilded glass urn, but  2017 it was restored to its original 1814 appearance and now stands uncovered in the centre of the crypt.  

So it is that a fragment of Stanislas's mortal remains commands the place he so vainly longed for in life, in the midst of the illustrious rulers of Poland. 

The "little sarcophagus" in Wawel Cathedral before restoration

Photo from L'Est Républicain, 20.10.2013

Photo on Find a grave

The newly restored sacrophagus. Photo posted on X by Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet.
His article, published in Le Pays lorrain, March  2024,  has further pictures of the  sarcophagus as it is now to be seen in situ. 

References

Entry on the Tombes et sépultures website 
https://www.tombes-sepultures.com/crbst_1927.html

Musée Lorrain,  La mort du dernier duc de Lorraine et la réunion à la France (1766-1790) - key items from the 2016 exhibition "La Lorraine pour horizon"

https://musee-lorrain.nancy.fr/les-collections/catalogues-numeriques/la-lorraine-pour-horizon/la-mort-du-dernier-duc-de-lorraine-et-la-reunion-a-la-france-1766-1790

Pierre Labrude, "L'accident et la mort du Roi Stanislas à Lunéville en février 1766. Le traitement médicamenteux de ses brûlures et les produits fournis pour son embaumement", Revue d'histoire de la pharmacie, 94ᵉ année, n°355, 2007. pp. 375-389.
https://www.persee.fr/doc/pharm_0035-2349_2007_num_94_355_6374

Antoine Beau, « La Pompe funèbre du roi Stanislas duc de Lorraine et de Bar », Le Pays lorrain, 1966, no. 3, p. 73-92
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k9769315f/f81.item

Alexandra Michaud, "Le tombeau de Stanislas 1er, roi de Pologne, et le mausolée du coeur de Marie Leszczynska", Paper presented to the Académie de Stanislas, 2023.

https://www.academie-stanislas.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/le_tombeau_de_stanislas_ier-1.pdf

Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet, "Les destins français et polonais de la dépouille du roi Stanislas Leszczynski", Le Pays lorrain, mars 2024, n°1, p. 19-32 [On Academia]

Krzysztof Gombin, "The Posthumous Peregrinations of King Stanisław I Leszczyński. On the History of Views on Royal Remains as a Relic of the Past and a Museum Item", Roczniki Humanistyczne, vol. 48-49, no. 4, 2001, pp. 171–93. Abstract only, unless you read Polish!
https://ojs.tnkul.pl/index.php/rh/article/view/4448

Readings

Note concerning the opening of the crypt of Bonsecours in 1794
... Towards the end of February 1794 the district of Nancy passed an order whereby Citizen Grillot, architect, was charged with removing all the lead and bronze from the national buildings in the town. This operation, which I witnessed, took place at the former houses of the Cordeliers and Minims, and at the Church of Bonsecours in which Stanislas was buried.  The crypt was opened where his mortal remains had been placed, as was the custom, in a double coffin, the first of wood and the second of lead. The lead coffin  was taken, the corpse replaced in the inner wooden  coffin and the crypt resealed...[Stanislas's] body was dressed, a wig covered his head, he was decorated with the cordon bleu and wrapped in a cloak.  A gilded wooden sceptre lay next to him.  

While the lead coffin was being removed, a crowd of old people, women and children, descended into the crypt and threw themselves on the body; it was they who were responsible for despoiling part of the clothing.  The corpse itself, although embalmed, had largely decomposed, due, I think, both to the action of the fire and to Stanislas's  extreme corpulence.  Sgn. Nancy 18th March 1794.  Alnote fils.
Text attached to the embroidered emblem from the cordon-bleu of King Stanislas, preserved in the Musée Lorrain. Quoted Pénet (2024),  p.22. 

Rediscovery of the remains: report by Joseph-Francois-Hubert Thierry,  Deputy Major, 7th March 1803 
Thierry testifies that he had been informed about the remains by Nicolas Krantz. He consulted Citizen Hussenet, charcutier, who was said to have dug   1794.
[Citizen Hussenet] immediately declared that the bodies were those of Stanislas, King of Poland, his wife and the Duke and Duchess Ossolinski, that he had buried in the same ditch in Year II by order of the former district of Nancy.  At that time bones were all that remained of the Duke and Duchess, and Stanislas's wife; but the body of the King was still intact. The coffins of lead and oak, any precious jewels, together with the silver box contained the heart of the Queen of France, had been removed by the same order. 

We immediately had the body indicated to us as that of Stanislas exhumed.  We noticed in the presence of numerous witnesses, that the skull had been detached from the body, was completely without flesh and broken in two. The main body was whole, but the arms, thighs, legs and feet were decayed to bones. When we had removed the other skulls and the bones which were underneath this corpse, we dug to a depth of four feet and found nothing more.  We had washed the body of Stanislas, which was still full of aromatic preservatives, carefully collected together the skulls and other bones and had everything placed in an oaken coffin of about two metres in length. Having sealed the lid, we placed the coffin in the part of the crypt below the choir, near the staircase. To ensure conservation, it was raised up on stones to a height of 10 centimetres. We then enclosed completely with a little wall, with the inscription: Tomb of Stanislas Leszczinski etc.

Reproduced in Henri Lepage, "Les caveaux de Notre-Dame de Bon-Secours. Procès-verbaux de 1803 et 1814 relatifs à la conservation des restes mortels de Stanislas", Journal de la Société d'archéologie lorraine et du Musée historique lorrain (1868) No.9-10, p.169-208: p.177-78.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k33749k/f160.item

Note by Lepage (p.177):  "It is said by honorable and well informed people that the head of Stanislas had been detached during the violation of the Royal crypt in 1793, by a workman who, animated by the spirit of hate of that deplorable time, had used his spade, saying:  Here is one who has not yet been guillotined!"