Last Updated on December 29, 2025
As someone who lived in Paris for a decade and has been writing about it for many more than that, I have a tendency to believe I know the city so well that there are few new corners, or surprising places, to happen upon out on a random stroll. Despite being proven wrong on this point over and over again, I’m always (pleasantly) taken aback when something interesting or odd meets my path.
On a recent walk around the area that loosely borders the Gare Saint-Lazare train station and the Place de la Madeleine in the 8th arrondissement, we passed what we thought was yet another pleasant, if unassuming, little square and park.
But there was a grand, rather staid neoclassical building dominating the square— one that reminded me of a miniature version of the Pantheon, the Latin-Quarter mausoleum where famous French luminaries from Alexandre Dumas to Pierre and Marie Curie and (recently) Josephine Baker are buried and/or honored.
This had to have some significance. I approached the street-side facade of the building on Rue Pasquier, and noticed that there was a rather long inscription carved into the stone. This is what it says:
“Le Roi Louis XVIII a élevé ce monument pour consacrer le lieu ou les dépouilles mortelles du Roi Louis XVI et de sa Reine Marie Antoinette, transferées le C+XXI Janvier MDCCC XV dans la sepulture royale de St Denis ont reposé pendant XXI ans. Il a été achevé la deuxième année du règne du Roi Charles X, L’an de Grace MDCCCXXVI. “
And my translation:
“King Louis XVIII erected this monument to consecrate the site where the mortal remains of King Louis XVI and his Queen Marie Antoinette, transferred on 21 January 1815 to the royal sepulchre of [the Basilica of] St-Denis, reposed for 21 years. It was completed in the second year of the reign of King Charles X, year of Grace 1826.
I was really interested to stumble on this odd monument of royalist rehabilitation, which is formally called the “Chapelle Expiatoire” (Expiatory Chapel), suggesting that it was erected to atone for the “sins” of the French Revolution of 1789.
Alongside monuments like the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre, which also has royalist and anti-revolutionary associations (see more on that here), the Chapelle Expiatoire is one of the few landmarks in Paris attesting to the messy, wholly non-linear trajectory France took towards becoming a Republic.
What I mean by that is that most people tend to imagine the French Revolution of 1789 as the moment when France became a democratic Republic, throwing off the shackles of absolute monarchy and reigning in a new era of universal human rights, rationalist science and secularist philosophy.
But none of this is correct. As I talk about in this look at the changing meanings of Bastille Day and the fact that it was, at points, celebrated as a holiday commemorating the restoration of monarchy after the Revolution, France’s road to becoming a Republic was jagged, winding and incredibly violent, to say the least.
It was interrupted by several Empires (led by those stubbornly power-hungry Napoleons) and Restoration monarchies, which sought (as the name suggests) to restore the “order” of pre-1789 France— even though they were in fact constitutional monarchies and never returned to the absolutism of past centuries.
It was marked by several bloody revolts after the most famous one of 1789, including the popular uprising known as the “Paris Commune” of 1871.
And of course, many groups of people wouldn’t benefit from the supposedly universal principles of human rights set out by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. (Hmm, could one of those groups to lose out for more than 150 years be women? You guessed right…)
People like Olympe de Gouges (one of the revolutionary “ghosts” I mention above), attempted to get those rights extended to women from the early 1790s, writing a semi-satirical tract called “Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizen”— and was sent to the guillotine as a result.
And not incidentally, her remains were initially buried in the same plot as King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, on the site of the present-day Chapelle Expiatoire.
What point am I trying to make, exactly? I guess I want to push back against the oversimplified ways that we tend to remember the French Revolution and what came after it. To really understand the process that brought France from monarchy to representative democracy, we have to acknowledge that it was an arduous and often incredibly bloody one— and it certainly didn’t end in the mid-1790s.
Visiting the Chapelle Expiatoire
When we were there, the Chapel and its cloister-like covered galleries were closed, but you can visit it for a small fee, taking either an independent tour or a guided tour (in French only). Entry is free for all on every first Sunday of the month, from November 1st through May 31st.
- Location: 29 rue Pasquier – 75008 Paris (8th Arrondissement); Metro Saint-Lazare
- Opening Times: Daily except for Monday, Tuesday and Sunday. Closed on January 1st, May 1st and December 25th.
- See more info for visiting at this page
Courtney Traub is the Founder and Editor of Paris Unlocked. She’s a longtime Paris resident who now divides her time (as well as she can manage) between the French capital and Norwich, UK. Co-author of the 2012 Michelin Green Guide to Northern France & the Paris Region, she has been interviewed as an expert on Paris and France by the BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Le Figaro, Matador Network and other publications. Courtney has also written and reported stories for media outlets including Radio France Internationale, The Christian Science Monitor, Women’s Wear Daily and The Associated Press. In addition to going down various rabbit holes of curiosity when it comes to French culture, history, food and art, Courtney is a scholar of literature and cultural history whose essays and reviews have appeared in various forums.
