General Information
The Chapelle Expiatoire (‘Expiatory Chapel’) is a chapel dedicated to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, although they are formally buried in the Basilica of St Denis. Every January 21, a memorial mass is held in the chapel to commemorate the death of Louis XVI.
History: Highlights
King Louis XVIII shared the 3-million-livres expense of building the Chapelle expiatoire. Construction took ten years, and the chapel was inaugurated in 1826 in the presence of Charles X. In May 1871 The Paris Commune demanded the Chapel to be torn down. This was never put into effect but the building was severely damaged by a storm in 2009.
Architecture: Highlights
The Chapelle expiatoire is the most uncompromising late neoclassical religious building in Paris. Its severe geometry is unrelieved by sculptures, as can be seen by the view from rue d’Anjou. The two buildings are separated by a courtyard surrounded by an enclosed precinct, creating a peristyle that isolates the chapel from the outside world.
Architecture: Explained
The chapel was designed in 1816 by the French Neo-Classical architect Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, one of Napoleon’s favourite architects. The chapel was partly constructed on the grounds of the former Madeleine Cemetery, where King Louis XVI and Queen Marie-Antoinette had been buried after they had been guillotined.
In 1862, the cypresses which surrounded the chapel were cut down, and a public park (Square Louis XVI) was created around the complex.
The chapel itself is entered through a pedimented tetrastyle portico, of a sombre Doric order. It contains a domed space at the centre of a Greek cross, formed by three coffered half-domed apses with oculi that supplement the subdued natural light entering through the skylight 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 made by François Joseph Bosio and Jean-Pierre Cortot. There is also a bas-relief by French sculptor François-Antoine Gérard, showing the exhumation and removal of the remains of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the Basilica of St Denis.
In the courtyard are cenotaphs to those who were known to be buried on this site.
The crypt contains a black and white marble altar intended to mark the place where the royal remains were laid.