I had a combined ticket to Sainte-Chapelle and the Conciergerie. I had to have a prearranged appointment time to get into Sainte Chapelle. This was for 2:30pm, so I had plenty of time to tour the Conciergerie and have some lunch before getting into line for Sainte Chapelle. I would have thought that, since it was Easter Sunday, the number of people visiting both places wouldn’t have been large. But I was wrong. The lines for both were quite long.
The Conciergerie is one of the oldest remaining parts of the Palais de la Cité, which was from where the French kings of the Middle Ages lived and ruled. It was transformed from a palace into a prison in the late 14th century and remained so until after the French Revolution.
The Salle des Gens d’Armes is the first room that is entered. It is a very sizeable hall and is part of the original palace (1302). The next room I visited was the kitchens (1350-1364). This had four gigantic fireplaces allowing the cooks to make meals for hundreds of people at a time.
The Salle des Gardes was built around the same time as the Salle des Gens d’Armes. This room originally was an antechamber for the Grand Chamber, where the King would decide on how to dispense his justice. It then became the location of the Parliament of Paris. During the Revolution, it was the location of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
A portion of the Salle des Gens d’Armes was raised and separated from the rest of that hall and given the name of Monsieur de Paris, which was the executioner’s nickname. This connects the Salle des Gardes to what they call the Revolutionary Rooms. A gift shop is now contained in this space.
In the prisoners’ corridor are three tiny rooms. The first contains the desk of the clerk, who was responsible for recording prisoner details. The second was the office of the concierge, who was the prison director. The third was the Grooming Room, where the prisoners would have their hair cut before execution.
Other than during the Great Terror (April to July 1794) about a third of the defendants held in the Conciergerie managed to escape the death penalty between 1793 and 1795. Upstairs in the Salle des Noms the names of over 4,000 people tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal at the Conciergerie are listed. A handful of tiny cells line the short corridor to a rather small room where some of the most significant political trials were held.
Coming back down the stairs I entered the chapel. This was used as both a prisoner’s chapel and as a shared cell. During the Great Terror, sometimes as many as 600 people were crowded together in this room waiting for their names to be called to be transported to their place of execution.
The most important prisoner was Marie Antoinette. She was transferred to the Conciergerie on the night of 2 August 1793 after being incarcerated for ten months in the Temple prison. Her actual cell was located behind the altar of the chapel and was converted in 1815 into an expiatory chapel by order of Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI. The definition of expiatory is as an atonement for a wrongdoing or sin.
When I visited the Conciergerie back in April of 2000, the cell of Marie Antoinette was presented as they thought it might have looked when she was a prisoner there. They even had a mannequin dressed as her seated in a chair with her back to the viewer. The area was roped off. This time, the cell was presented as a memorial and we could walk around in it and view the memorials and paintings on the walls.
The former queen was kept under constant surveillance, day and night. She wasn’t allowed to write most of the time. Her trial began on the morning of 14 October 1793. On 16 October, at 4am, the death verdict was announced, followed by her being transported in a heavily guarded cart to what is now the Place de la Concorde and executed at 12:15pm. The possessions she was said to have left behind at the Conciergerie are contained in display cases at the back of the chapel.
The final place for me to visit in the Conciergerie was the women’s courtyard. This was where the female prisoners were allowed to take their daily walks, surrounded by two floors of dungeons.
The Conciergerie remained a prison after the revolution and was eventually made a part of the Palais de Justice. By 1862, it was classified as a historic monument. Portions could be visited by 1914 and all prison activity ended in 1934.
Next time – Glorious Sainte-Chapelle
