Experts believe the remains of up to 500 people guillotined during the French Revolution might be buried in the walls of a listed monument in Paris.
The discovery blows apart the accepted historical account, which suggests the bodies of famous people guillotined, including Louis XV’s mistress Madame du Barry, Olympe de Gouges and Maximilien Robespierre, revolutionary architect of the Reign of Terror, were moved to the network of catacombs under the city.
Researchers are to examine the walls of the Chapelle Expiatoire, a classified monument near the Grands Boulevards dedicated to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, after the discovery of bones in the wall cavities.
Chapel administrator Aymeric Peniguet de Stoutz turned historical detective after he noticed curious anomalies in the walls between the columns of the lower chapel.
Anxious not to damage the building’s foundations, the French authorities called in an archeologist, who inserted a camera through the stones in the walls.
In his report, archeologist Philippe Charlier confirmed Peniguet de Stoutz’s hypothesis.
“The lower chapel contains four ossuaries made of wooden boxes, probably stretched out with leather, filled with human bones,” he wrote. “There is earth mixed with fragments of bones.”
The Chapelle Expiatoire was built in the early 19th century at the site of the old Madeleine cemetery, not far from the Place de la Revolution,where the guillotine was frequently used.
The cemetery, closed in 1794, was one of four established in Paris to dispose of the victims of the guillotine.
When Louis XVIII became king in 1814, he ordered the remains of his brother, Louis XVI, and Marie Antoinette to be removed and interred at the Saint-Denis Basilica and commissioned the chapel in their memory.
His orders were that “no earth saturated with victims [of the revolution] be moved from the place for the building of the work.”
Even so, historians believed the remains of 500 mostly aristocratic victims of the revolution, and out-of-favor revolutionaries like Robespierre, were transferred to another cemetery, then to the catacombs, where a plaque marks their reburial.
“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 told Le Parisien. “I cried when the forensic pathologist assured me he had seen human phalange [feet and hand] bones in the photographs.”
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
RSS