Conciergerie, Paris

 While the Conciergerie is best known as a prison during the French Revolution it is, in part anyway, a 14th Century royal palace. The site it stands on was previously the site of the Merovingian palace, known as the Palais de la Cite, from the 10th-14th Century, and was the residence of the Kings of France.  In the 14th Century, King Charles V of France, decided to move his residence to the Louvre, and it was at this point that the Conciergerie began to function as the new parliament and administrative offices.  The king renamed the building, La Conciergerie. 

During the French Revolution, Parliament was removed in 1789, and the Palais de la Cite was placed under the authority of the Mayor of Paris.  The Conciergerie continued to be a place of justice and incarceration, and housed one of the six district courts that made up the local civil justice system.  In the spring of 1793, the Conciergerie became a place of justice and was chosen to host the Revolutionary Tribunal, which was set up to try political crimes.  

Some of the first actions of the insurgents of the French Revolution, were to free what were seen as the victims of monarchical justice.  In June 1789, some of the prisons were forced to release their prisoners.  The state prison, the Bastille, was attacked on the 14th of July, and then demolished. Trials would now be open to the public, and judges were now to be elected.  Prisoners gained the right to be defended free of charge.  Most importantly, the law was reformed in writing, to protect citizens from injustices.

There was a lot of good that was done by the French Revolution. In 1789, the Declaration of Human Rights was created, which guaranteed citizens the right to ‘liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression.’ The law became the cornerstone of the new society, and to be a good citizen one now had to take an oath to the nation, the law and the King.  Protestants and Jews were fully integrated into the citizenship, but this was not the case for everyone. People of colour, women, children, foreigners and servants would remain discriminated against.

The Penal Code of 1791 was a pillar of contemporary law, and is one of the main changes of the Revolution. The Revolutionaries hoped to build a new France, one that was based on law.  The text aimed to both protect and punish those who broke the law, where all citizens must be equal. The crimes were precisely defined, and proportionate punishments were associated with them.  Several crimes were removed, such as blasphemy, sodomy, sacrilege and magic, which, under the old laws, had targeted minorities like non-Catholics, homosexuals, and individuals considered to be marginal. 

In 1789, deputy and physician Joseph Ignace Guillotin, called for equal treatment for those who had been sentenced to death, regardless of their social background.  He proposed that decapitation should avoid unnecessary suffering.  He drew up plans for a wooden machine with a blade to be created, which was used for the first time on the 25th of April 1792.  The machine named after him was called the Guillotine. In France, it would continue to be used until 1977, with the death penalty being abolished in 1981. 

In 1791, King Louis XVI attempted to leave Paris in secret, with his family. They were heading to his fortress in Montmedy, on the northeastern border, where he would join the emigres and be protected by Austria.  King Louis had been busy planning a counter revolution. He and his Queen, Marie Antoinette, who was a Grand Dutchess of Austria, had planned to raise an armed congress, with the assistance of other nations, to recapture France.  It was this very plot that would be his undoing, and what he would eventually be convicted of high treason on. The king and his family were arrested within 24 hours of leaving Paris, they were brought back and placed under house arrest.

During the French Revolution, the open public courts became one of the places where people could go for news, and to see for themselves what was happening.  The court would often have high profile political trials, and the Revolutionary Tribunal of Paris became one of the showcases of the Revolution.  The public attended in large numbers.  The high-profile trials that took place in the Conciergerie, would then hit the headlines.  No other trial though, had quite the impact as that of Marie-Antoinette. 

Queen Marie Antoinette had been highly criticised since the early 1780’s, and she was openly hostile to the Revolution, more so than even King Louis XVI.  She had been locked in the Temple prison with her family since the 13th of August 1792.  On the night of the 2nd of August 1793, she alone was transferred to the Conciergerie, where she would remain for the next 76 days. During this time, she had two guards watching over her day and night, and was given no privacy.  The Carnation Plot for her release failed, and Marie Antoinette was transferred to another cell. Her trial began on the 14th of October 1793, and over forty witnesses were heard. She was accused of having sided with Austria, having lived in luxury at the expense of the state, while French people lived in poverty, and denounced for pushing Louis XVI to refuse the Revolution. She was also accused of having an incestuous relationship with her son and heir to the throne, and while completely untrue, the accusation alone shows what she had become to the people, a monster, whose sacrifice was necessary for the Republic.  She was sentenced to death for high treason on the 16th of October 1793.  She was then escorted by a double line of guards, and transported by cart to Place de la Revolution, where the crowd waited to watch her die. 

Most prisoners did not stay long at the Conciergerie, it was mainly used as holding cells while awaiting trial.  A broad range of prisoners passed through its walls. Political prisoners were kept alongside criminals and murderers.  Prisoners had to finance their detention themselves, and so the poorest were crammed into very small, dark cells, which were devoid of furniture, with only straw on the floor. Wealthy prisoners were able to buy a minimal amount of comfort, had larger cells, and could receive visitors. The Conciergerie was never a place of execution, but the carts that took the condemned prisoners to the guillotine would depart from there. 

The French Revolution tried to change things for the better, but the Republic was not to last.  The Revolution also saw a series of massacres, and numerous public executions, which have come to be known as the Reign of Terror, when over 10,000 people died in prison before their trials, and nearly 20,000 were sentenced to death. The changes the Revolution tried to implement ultimately failed, when the Bourbon Kings were restored to the throne.  The brothers of the executed King Louis XVI came to the throne, with Louis XVIII in 1814, and Charles II in 1824, but the French Revolution had changed things, and the monarchy wouldn’t last. The Conciergerie was classified as a Monument Historique in 1862, it opened to the public in 1914, but continued to serve as a prison until 1934.