Human Bones Found in Walls of Paris’ Chapelle Expiatoire

News June 29, 2020

(Wikimedia Commons)
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Paris Chapelle Expiatoire
(Wikimedia Commons)

PARIS, FRANCE—According to a report in The Guardian, human bones have been found in the walls of the Chapelle Expiatoire, a monument dedicated to the memory of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were guillotined in 1793 at the Place de la Révolution and buried in the nearby Madeleine cemetery. Aymeric Peniguet de Stoutz, administrator of the chapel, which was completed in 1826 on the site of the Madeleine cemetery, found anomalies in the walls between the columns of the building’s lower chapel. When archaeologist Philippe Charlier inserted a camera through stones in those walls, he spotted four wood and leather ossuaries, human bones, and earth. It had been previously thought that the remains of as many as 500 aristocrats and out-of-favor revolutionaries beheaded during the French Revolution had been transferred from the Madeleine cemetery to another burial site or to catacombs when construction on the Chapelle Expiatoire began. “Until now, the chapel served only as a monument to the memory of the royal family, but we have just discovered that it is also a necropolis of the revolution,” Peniguet de Stoutz said. To read about a potentially fake relic purported to contain the blood of Louis XVI, go to "French Revolution Forgeries?"

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