The problems of the Picpus Cemetery

Strange how it is possible to normalise the most extreme and macabre situations!  Here is a translation of two forgotten documents from a 19th-century collection edited by Louis Lazare, which give a glimpse into the world of minor officials and gravediggers at the height of the Terror.  They concern the little Picpus Cemetery which, in the short time between 14th June and 18th July 1794, received the bodies of over 1,300 individuals guillotined on the nearby place du Trône-Renversé (place de la Nation).

The Cimetière des Errancis

To replace the Madeleine Cemetery the Commune of Paris chose a more discreet location, at the far end of the district of Petite-Pologne.  The site selecedwas near the Wall of the Farmers-General at  Monceau, where the rue des Errancis met the  rue de Valois.  The large rectangular space had originally belonged to the chapel serving a miraculous Calvary which stood nearby (demolished at the beginning of 1794). It was now used as a market garden.  Down one side ran the parc de Monceaux.

The trees on the site were removed and, in order to provide an convenient entrance, a section of the Wall was demolished opposite the Customs House. At some point a sign was erected over the gateway: « Dormir, enfin ».

Plaque at 97 rue de Monceau, all that now marks the location
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Errancis_Cemetery#/media/File:Cimetiere_des_Errancis.JPG

The cemetery was to be known as the Cimetière des Errancis or Cimetière de Monceau (more familiarly "Mousseaux".)  The gates opened on 5th March 1794.  At first it received ordinary burials, but on 25th March the order was given to transfer the bodies of those executed and the Madeleine cemetery was closed definitively.  For a time, there was some mystification over the new location and bodies were first taken to the Madeleine, then discreetly removed to Monceau several days later.

The Exhumation of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette

The Cemetery prior to the Exhumation


The Madeleine Cemetery was formally closed on 24th March 1794.

Two years later, on 25th June 1796, the site was sold as a bien national to a carpenter ("marchand-ébéniste") called Isaac Jacob; neighbours complained that he carried out a great deal of excavation in defiance of the ten year moratorium. Subsequently, on 3rd June 1802 the land was bought from Jacob's creditors by the lawyer Pierre-Louis-Olivier Descloseaux (1732-1816), who since 1769 had owned the property immediately adjacent at no.48 rue d'Anjou.

Descloseaux took upon himself the role of custodian of the royal remains, and was to be a pivotal figure in the establishment of the Madeleine as a focus of Royalist fervour. He has sometimes been accused of being a charlatan and profiteer, but his motivation was almost certainly genuine.  Louis Hastier characterises him as one of those men for whom the Revolution had gone too far. A former avocat of the Parlement de Paris, he had been active in local politics in the early part of the Revolution, indeed had been a member of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, but had withdrawn from public life after the abolition of the monarchy.  He had managed to live quietly through the Terror, without being troubled.

With the encouragement of the new proprietor, the Cemetery rapidly became a place of pilgrimage. As early as 1803 two illustrious visitors were authorised  - the duchesse de la Trémouille and the comtesse de Béarne (Pauline de Tourzel). The German writer Kotzebue, in Paris in 1804, learned that the royal graves were already marked by lilies, although access had been prudently restricted for the moment due to the number of visitors.

A visit to the Madeleine Cemetery in 1793

On 18th February 1793, barely three weeks after Louis XVI's execution, an intrepid young woman set out in her carriage for the Madeleine Cemetery to see the King's grave for herself.  She left an extraordinary first-hand account, which was first published by Louis Hastier in the Revue des Deux Mondes for 1951.

 The woman in question was Angélique-Catherine Charton, née Chauchat (1759-1849), wife of Jean Charton, a member of a prominent family of Lyon silk designers.  Her husband served as a Commander of the National Guard and then colonel in a Regiment of the Line, but in June 1796 he too was to fall victim to Revolutionary justice,  guillotined on the place du Trône-Renversé, and consigned to a communal grave in the Picpus cemetery.  Angélique-Catherine herself went on to live a long active life, dying in 1849 at the age of ninety.  She was one of the founder members of the committee which acquired the Picpus Cemetery as a place of memorial and, in the last decade of her life, acted as president of the Picpus Society.

Portrait from "Les guillotinés de la Révolution Française" website
https://www.prospection.net/charton%20jean.htm

Here is an English translation. 

The Dead of the Madeleine

This week the newspapers are full of stories about the discovery of "the remains of 500 guillotine victims" found stashed behind false walls in the Chapelle expiatoire.  It was formerly thought that in 1815, when the bodies of the King and Queen were transferred to Saint-Denis, the remains from the Madeleine Cemetery had been removed to a communal grave in Cimetière des Errancis  and subsequently consigned to the Catacombs.  But in 2018 small medical cameras lowered into the cavities behind the walls of the chapel glimpsed human bones and leather-covered wooden chests containing further bone fragments.  Investigations have been delayed by the demonstrations of the Gilets jaunes, but now a formal request has been made to the Direction régionale des affaires culturelles (DRAC) for an archaeological survey to be carried out.  This is scheduled to take place in 2021.