Memories of bygone horrors
During the summer of the Great Terror - in June and July of 1794 - the guillotine on what is now Place de l'Île de la Réunion, worked almost day and night. More than 1300 'enemies of the Revolution' were beheaded. At the time, the fates of the headless corpses were kept secret to avoid outcry, but a brave woman dared to follow the cart, which was transporting her father's body and she found out it passed through a gate into a walled-in, secluded convent garden just a few hundred meters from the guillotine. Here the bodies, men and women, adults and children, aristocrats and commoners, all alike, were dumped together into two vast mass graves. A few years later the convent garden was bought by grieving relatives and you can to this day walk inside, even though so few people visit that we actually startled the woman, who is guarding the place. While all traces of horror is long gone from the busy Place de l'Île de la Réunion, here in the Picpus cemetery, you can st...