Paris: Memories of bygone horrors

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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 still see the gate through which the cart was driven and the patches of earth, which cover the many headless bodies. Next to the mass graves you also find a few normal graves - descendants of the victims of the guillotine are allowed to be buried at Picpus.



When you walk the secluded garden, now mostly visited by a flock of curious hens and some shy, huge rats, it is a place, where history really seems to overwhelm you. 


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By coincidence, the same day we happened to pass another somber memorial of bygone horrors. 

Even though we had walked the Île de la Cité numerous times, we had never descended into the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation, which is dug deep into the ground on the southeastern tip of the island.

Inside the narrow, claustrophobic crypt you can commemorate the French, who died in nazi concentration camps during World War II. The hall of Remembrance is lined with 200.000 shining glass crystals, each light symbolizing one of the victims. 

The narrow hall - with its myriad of faint lights - seems to stretch into infinity!

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