Chapelle expiatoire

The Chapelle expiatoire stands on a slight rise in the eighth arrondissement, closed off from the city by a cloister-like precinct. Two buildings face each other across a courtyard, and the gate on Rue Pasquier is the way in. The ground beneath gives the place its meaning: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were buried here after their execution. The chapel above them serves as their memorial.

Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine, a prominent neoclassical architect, drew the design in 1816. His assistant Louis-Hippolyte Lebas oversaw the ten-year construction, funded by Louis XVIII and the Duchess of Angoulême. King Charles X attended the inauguration in 1826. An inscription at the entrance records the transfer of the remains to the royal tomb of Saint-Denis. You enter through a pedimented portico of the Doric order, and a domed space opens at the centre of a Greek cross. The plan recalls the centralised churches of the High Renaissance and the martyriums of Greco-Roman antiquity. White marble statues of the king and queen by François Joseph Bosio and Jean-Pierre Cortot stand inside. A bas-relief by François-Antoine Gérard shows the exhumation and removal of the royal remains.

The severity is deliberate: a neoclassical interior with sculpture kept to a minimum. Chateaubriand ranked it among the significant buildings of Paris. The cypresses around the precinct came down in 1862, making room for the public Square Louis XVI. The building outlasted a demand for its demolition during the Paris Commune of 1871, and the storm damage of 2009. Every 21 January, a memorial mass commemorates the death of Louis XVI. In the crypt below, a black and white marble altar marks the original burial site.