Chapelle Expiatoire

The Chapelle Expiatoire ("Expiatory Chapel") ["Expiatoire" does not appear in contemporaneous sources; it was added later.] is a chapel located in the eighth arrondissement, of Paris, France. It was designed in 1816 by the French Neo-Classical architect Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, who with his partner Charles Percier had recently figured among the favourite architects of Napoleon. Fontaine's assistant Louis-Hippolyte Lebas oversaw the construction. The chapel was constructed at the behest of King Louis XVIII on the grounds of the former Madeleine Cemetery where King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette had been buried. Three thousand victims of the French Revolution are buried in the chapel grounds.

History

The body of King Louis XVI of France, decapitated on January 21, 1793, was taken to the Madeleine cemetery in Paris and buried in a pit, covered by a layer of quicklime. The body of Queen Marie-Antoinette, executed on October 16, 1793, was also buried in the Madeleine cemetery. On June 3, 1802, the land in which the bodies lay was bought by Pierre-Louis Olivier Desclozeaux, a royalist magistrate, who had lived adjacent to the cemetery (now "Place Louis XVI") since 1789. Desclozeaux had taken note of the sites where the King and Queen were buried and surrounded them with a hedge, two weeping willows, and cypress trees.Under the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the Duchess of Angoulême asked her uncle King Louis XVIII to seek the bodies of her parents, the former King and Queen. Their bones were exhumed on January 18 and 19, 1815, and moved to the French royal mausoleum at Saint-Denis on January 20. Marie Antoinette's remains were identified by an elastic garter and a jaw, which an eyewitness identified as being the queen's based on having seen her smile over thirty years before.

On January 11, 1816, Desclozeaux sold his house and the old cemetery to Louis XVIII, who shared the 3 million livres expense of building the Chapelle Expiatoire with the Duchess of Angoulême. Construction took ten years, and the chapel was inaugurated in 1826. On blessing the corner-stone of the "Chapelle Expiatoire", Hyacinthe-Louis De Quelen, Archbishop of Paris, called in vain for an amnesty for the exiled members of the National Convention.

The "Chapelle Expiatoire" stands on a slight rise, surrounded by an enclosed cloister-like precinct, a peristyle that isolates it from the outside world. The chapel is entered through a pedimented tetrastyle portico, of a sombre Doric order. It contains a domed space at the center of a Greek cross formed by three coffered half-domed apses with oculi that supplement the subdued natural light entering through the lantern of the main dome. The cubic, semicylindrical and hemispheric volumes recall the central planning of High Renaissance churches, as much as they do a Greco-Roman martyrium. White marble sculptures of the king and queen in ecstatic attitudes were executed by François Joseph Bosio and Jean-Pierre Cortot. The crypt contains a black and white marble altar intended to mark the place where the royal remains were found.

The "Chapelle Expiatoire" is without doubt the most uncompromising neoclassical religious building of Paris. Chateaubriand found it "the most remarkable edifice in Paris".

In 1862, the cypresses which surrounded the vault were cut down, and a public park was created, with landscaping that delicately isolates it from the surrounding city and the adjoining Boulevard Hausmann.

Notes

References

* [http://www.monum.fr/visitez/decouvrir/fiche.dml?lang=en&id=72 Monum: Chapelle Expiatoire]
* [http://www.paris.org/Monuments/Chapelle.Expiatoire/info.html Paris Pages: Chapelle Expiatoire]