The Conciergerie
A UNESCO World Heritage Site that housed both kings and criminals.
The Conciergerie is one of the oldest remains of the Palais de la Cité, where France’s kings resided during the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the 14th century, it transformed into a prison for the Parliament of Paris. It remained a prison during the French Revolution when the Revolutionary Tribunal was established.
Its most famous prisoner was Marie Antoinette.
The Conciergerie got its name because the king appointed a concierge to ensure justice in the palace. The concierge turned parts of the palace into the prison, and it received the name “Conciergerie”. From the 15thc until the Revolution, it was one of the most important prisons in Paris.
History of the Conciergerie
In March 1793, the Revolutionary Tribunal was established in the Grand Chamber of the Parliament of Paris, renamed the Hall of Liberty. In September 1793, France adopted the “Law of Suspects” resulting in the order to arrest of all enemies of Republic, whether confirmed or suspected. All prisoners moved to the Conciergerie. Its reputation led to it being dubbed “the new hell of the living”, a moniker the Bastille held before its demolition. It was the antechamber to death.
Between 1793 and 1795, more than a third of prisoners sentenced to the Conciergerie escaped the death penalty, except during the Reign of Terror (April-July 1794). Prisoners appeared at the Revolutionary Tribunal after only a few days. Those included deputies of the convention, the Girondins; Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry; poet André Chénier; and Danton, the originator of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
The Conciergerie saw many women tried there, including Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Women, and The Female Citizen; Charlotte Corday, who murdered Marat; and Manon Roland, a politician who became the Girondins’ muse.
In the spring of 1794, during the worst point of the repression, the dirty, overcrowded cells held up to 600 men and women.
From a Palace to a Prison
On the night of August 1-2 1793, Marie Antoinette was transferred to the Conciergerie, after being held at the Temple prison for 10 months. Upon her arrival, she went directly to her assigned cell where she stayed in solitary confinement. From palaces to prisons. Her trial started on the morning of October 14th. They charged her with treason, squandering state funds, conspiracy against the security of the state, and incest with her son, Louis XVII. This outraged her and she appealed to all mothers for their compassion.
On October 16th, at 4 a.m., after 20 hours of uninterrupted proceedings, the jury found her guilty and sentenced her to death. Marie Antoinette was executed at 12:15p.m., in the Place de la Révolution (now named Place de la Concorde). She walked onto the scaffold where executioner Charles Henri Sanson awaited her. She accidentally stepped on Sanson’s foot and said, “pardon me sir, I did not do it on purpose.”
Those were her last words. They threw her body into an unmarked grave in Madeleine Cemetery.
After the Revolution
The Conciergerie remained a prison, undergoing several renovations for security reasons, and to improve the prison’s conditions. Its prisoners were famous people and those deemed dangerous threats to the public order.
When Louis XVIII came to power (1815-1824), the Conciergerie became a principal site of royalist memory. He built an expiatory chapel on the site of Marie Antoinette’s former cell in 1816 to right the wrongs done to her.
In 1862, the Conciergerie was classified as an historic monument. Parts of it opened to the public in 1914 and prison activity ended in 1934.
Famous Prisoners
Count of Montgomery
Gabriel de Lorges (1574) captain of the Scots Guard of King Henry II of France. He mortally wounded Henry in a jousting accident when a splinter from his shattered lance pierced Henry’s eye and travelled into his brain. Henry pardoned him on his deathbed. Later, he became a Huguenot – a religious group of French Protestants – and was executed for his actions in the French Wars of Revolution. The most notorious episode of the civil war between Catholics and Protestants was the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre which took place in 1572.
François Ravaillac (1610)
assassinated King Henry IV of France. He’d had a vision which instructed him to convince King Henry to convert the Huguenots to Catholicism, and made three failed attempts to tell the king. When Henry decided to invade the Spanish Netherlands, Ravaillac saw this as a war against the pope and felt the best way to stop him was to kill him.
He lay in wait for the king on Rue de la Ferronnerie. A blockade stopped the king’s carriage so Ravaillac climbed in and stabbed the king to death. He was tortured and interrogated to make him name any accomplices, but insisted he acted alone. At the beginning of the interrogation, he said, “I know very well he is dead; I saw the blood on my knife and the place where I hit him. But I have no regrets at all about dying, because I’ve done what I came to do.” On 27th May, he was taken to the Place de Grève, scaled with burning sulphur, molten lead and boiling oil and resin, his flesh torn by pincers then four horses pulled him apart.
The Marquise de Brinvilliers
Marie-Madeleine d’Aubray (1676) was a French aristocrat who murdered her father and two of her brothers to inherit their estates. After her lover and co-conspirator, Captain Godin de Sainte-Croix died, someone discovered letters between the two of them detailing the poisonings. She placed a man, Gascon, in her father’s house to slowly administer him poison. A week before he died, her father invited Marie-Madeleine and her children to stay with him. She gave him doses of “Glaser’s recipe” which would make his death seem like natural causes. He died on 10th September 1666. His autopsy stated he died of natural causes exacerbated by gout.
She quickly spent all the money she inherited so decided to kill her brothers to get their shares. Her brothers lived together, but she wasn’t close to them, so hired Jean Hamelin, better known as La Chaussée, as a footman, to poison her brothers. Her brother, Antoine, suspected he was a target of poison when he noticed his drink had a metallic taste. Not long after, Antoine fell ill after eating a pie at an Easter feast, and never recovered. The other brother died in September. Their autopsies showed their intestines were suspiciously coloured, which hinted at poison, but their death certificates read “malicious humour”.
On 17th June 1670, Marie-Madeleine was arrested and tortured with the “water cure.” The executioner bound her feet to two rings on a board, and her hands to two rings in the wall then gradually turned a crank, stretching her limbs. Her body rested on a trestle, as though she lay on a wheel. Over four hours, the executioner forced her to drink copious amounts of water. Some reports state it was 16 pints. She was taken to the Place de Grève and beheaded.
Louis Dominique Garthausen
Louis, also known as legendary brigand Cartouche, Louis Lamarre or Louis Bourguignon (1721) was a highwayman reported to steal from the rich to give to the poor. Writers celebrated his exploits in ballads, popular prints and plays. The executioner hung his brother by the arms, which was supposed to be non-fatal, but he died. Louis suffered on the wheel.
The wheel, also known as the execution wheel, the Wheel of Catherine, or the Catherine Wheel, was a large wooden spoked wheel. The wheel’s main purpose was to mutilate the victim’s body. The executioner would tie the condemned to the floor and drop the wheel on their shins to break them. The executioner would then move to the arms. Sometimes, the executioner placed sharp-edged timbers under the condemned’s joints to increase the pain.
Occasionally, the executioner executed the condemned after the ‘first act’ by dropping the wheel on the neck or heart, known as a “coup de grâce.” In the second act, the executioner braided the condemned’s broken body into another wheel, or tied them to the wheel. They then erected the wheel on a mast or pole. The executioner could either decapitate or garrotte the victim, or light a fire under the wheel. Sometimes, they threw the victim straight into the flames.
If the victim fell from the wheel whilst still alive, or the wheel broke or fell, the executioner interpreted it as God intervening. There was literature on how to treat the survivor’s injuries. Death on the wheel wasn’t always swift, and the condemned could survive for days. In 1581, German serial killer Christman Genipperteinga survived for nine days on the wheel before dying.
Robert-François Damiens (1757)
a French domestic servant who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV. He has the dubious honour of being the last person in France executed by dismemberment.
The Countess de la Motte
Jeanne de Valois-Saint Rémy (1786) was a conwoman who had a prominent role in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace, which was one of the scandals that led to the French Revolution. Desperate for money, she regularly visited Versailles to catch the queen’s attention to ask for money as she had royal blood. However, Queen Marie-Antoinette knew of her reputation and refused to meet with her.
Louis XV asked crown jewellers Charles Auguste Böhmer and Paul Bassenge to design a diamond necklace for his mistress, Madam du Barry in 1772. He died before it’s completion and his grandson banished Madam du Barry from the court. Louis XVI offered the necklace to Marie Antoinette in 1778, but she refused it. In 1781, the jewellers offered the necklace to Marie Antoinette again on the birth of her son, Louis Joseph. Again, she refused.
The Affair of the Diamond Necklace
Jeanne saw her chance. Together with her estranged husband and her lover, Rétaux de Villette, a gigolo and master forger, they wrote letters from Marie Antoinette to Cardinal Prince Louis de Rohan, who wanted to regain the queen’s approval. In the letter, the “queen” claimed she wanted the necklace, but due to the country’s poor financial situation, the king was reluctant to buy it, so would the Cardinal be willing to lend her the money. The Cardinal believed the letters were genuine and agreed.
In August 1784, the Cardinal met the “queen” in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles. The queen was actually a prostitute, Nicole le Guay d’Olivia, who resembled her. They contacted the jewellers and asked them to give the necklace to Jeanne, who would pass it to the queen. The deal took place on 1st February 1785. She gave it to her husband, Nicolas, who immediately sold the diamonds in Paris and London.
The Plot Unravels
On 12th July, Böhmer wrote to the queen, requesting the rest of the payment. She burned the letter, as she knew nothing about it. He wrote to her lady-in-waiting, and mentioned not receiving fully payment for the necklace. She showed it to the queen. The king’s men arrested Cardinal Rohan on 15th August in the Hall of Mirrors. They arrested Jeanne and her accomplices three days later. In May 1786, the Cardinal appeared before the Parlement de Paris. They found him innocent.
Despite not being part of the scandal, the king and queen insisted on a public trial to defend their honour. It backfired. The public saw the queen as the guilty party. Nicole le Guay d’Olivia was acquitted. Jeanne’s sentenced was whipping, branded with a v for voleuse (theief) on both shoulders and life imprisonment in the prostitute’s prison at Salpêtrière. She disguised herself as a boy and escaped to London.
In 1789, she published her memoirs, Memoires Justificatifs de La Comtesse de Valois de La Motte, to justify her actions and blame the queen. On 23rd August 1791, she was hiding from debt collectors and fell from her hotel room window, sustaining fatal injuries. The Times reported that she was “terribly mangled, her left eye cut out – one of her arms and both her legs are broken.”
Robespierre
Maximilien Marie Isidore de Robespierre was a lawyer and statesman and one of the most influential people of the French Revolution. He campaigned for all men to have voting rights, and unimpeded admission to the National Guard, the right to petition, the right to bear arms in self-defence, and the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. He praised the revolutionary government and believed that both terror and virtue were necessary, stating, “if the spring of popular government in time of peace is virtue, the springs of popular government in revolution are at once virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is powerless…. To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is barbarity.”
Robespierre supported King Louis XVI’s execution, and insisted Marie Antoinette should be arrested. Nine members of the Committee of General Security and the Committee of Public Safety decided that to stop Robespierre coming for them, he had to die. In July 1794, Robespierre appeared in the Convention to defend himself against charges of dictatorship and tyranny. He warned Committee of Public Safety of a conspiracy against them.
Robespierre’s Downfall
The next day, the Convention ordered Robespierre’s arrest. His brother, Augustin Bon Joseph declared, “I am as guilty as him; I share his virtues, I want to share his fate. I ask also to be charged.” Robespierre’s friends, Georges Couthon, Joseph Le Bas, and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just (nicknamed the Archangel of Terror) agreed. When Robespierre was too upset to speak, either Antoine Marie Charles Garnier or Louis Legendre, asked, “is it the blood of Danton that chokes you?” He responded, “is it Danton you regret?… Cowards! Why didn’t you defend him?”
The Committee of General Security questioned Robespierre and his friends then sent them to different prisons. Convention members ordered François Hanriot’s, (leader of the Sans-Culottes) arrest so he couldn’t protect Robespierre. The Paris Commune summoned forces to free Robespierre and his friends. Theywent to the Hôtel de Ville, where Hanriot joined them. The Convention labelled them outlaws and declared they should be taken dead or alive.
The End is Nigh
The Convention ordered 4,000 troops to the Hôtel, but after waiting for the action to start, most of the troops left, leaving 400 behind. To avoid capture, Augustin Robespierre removed his shoes and jumped from a broad cornice. He landed on some bayonets and a citizen, suffering a fractured pelvis, several head contusions and an “alarming state of weakness and anxiety.” Le Bas gave Robespierre a pistol then killed himself with another. Robespierre fired the pistol at his mouth but the gendarme Charles André Merda stopped him killing himself.
The troops found Couthon lying at the bottom of a staircase. Saint-Just surrendered. Merda claimed Hanriot tried to escape via a concealed staircase to the third floor. Most sources agree Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal threw him out of a window He landed in broken glass in a courtyard but managed to crawl into a drain. He was found 12 hours later. His eye came out of its socket. Robespierre spent the rest of the night at the antechamber of the Committee of General Security, his head on a pine box, his shirt blood stained.
The Reign of Terror ends.
At 5 a.m., Paul Barras ordered Augustin and Couthon to the nearest hospital, but not Robespierre. At 10 a.m., the Convention summoned a military doctor, who removed some of Robespierre’s teeth and fragments of his broken jaw. They took him to the Conciergerie. On 28th July 1794, the Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at noon, and two hours later, they accused Robespierre and 21 ‘Robespierrists”, of counter-revolution, and sentenced them to death without a trial.
At 6 p.m. they transported the condemned to the Place de la Révolution in three carts. Only Saint-Just was able to walk to his death. It took the executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, fifteen minutes to get Couthon (the second to be executed) on the board, due to his paralysis. Couthon screamed in pain. Augustin was the third to be executed, Hanriot the ninth. Hanriot is depicted covering his missing eye. Robespierre was the tenth man to climb the platform. Sanson dislodged the bandage securing Robespierre’s shattered jaw. Robespierre screamed in anguish until he died. They buried the condemned in a mass grave in the Errancis Cemetery, but between 1844-1859, (probably in 1848) they moved everyone interred there to the Catacombs. The Reign of Terror was over.
Read about our visit to the Conciergerie.
Sources
https://www.paris-conciergerie.fr
Wikipedia
https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/key-dates/affair-diamond-necklace-1784-1785