The Chapel and Famous Statue
The small chapel is called Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix (Our Lady of Peace) or simply the Chapelle de Picpus, a quiet place in a busy city. The chapel dates from 1640. Today it is part of a large cemetery complex with gardens, green lawns, and a graveyard with tombs.
The side transept of the chapel holds a true work of art, a small 15th-century sculpture of the Vierge de la Paix (the Virgin of Peace), reputed to have cured King Louis XIV of a serious illness in 1658. The wooden statue dates from about 1530. It is the creation of an unknown artist from the Languedoc region of France.
The statue is small in size (33 cm). Mary is dressed in a Greek tunic. In her right hand she holds an olive branch. On her left arm rests the Child Jesus, with his arms outstretched, holding the cross in one hand and the world in the other. The statue was crowned in 1906 by the Archbishop of Paris, by order of Pope Pius X.
Mass is offered on the altar in the sanctuary. In 1969 the previous altar was unfortunately removed and replaced when the sanctuary was refurbished with a new altar made in part of "comblanchien," an iconic Burgundy limestone.
Place of Martyrs
One of the reasons this site is so holy and important is because it is the final resting place of martyrs of the Revolution. During the height and last phase of the Reign of Terror, 1,306 victims were executed near here between June 14 - July 27, 1794.
These victims, most of them Catholic, were buried daily and by the cover of darkness for two months in two mass graves behind the chapel on the edge of the property (in the back corner on the right side). To this day the entrance door can be seen along the wall in the back on the left where the carts entered carrying the bodies who were stripped for burial. When the first mass grave filled, a second was dug and filled.
The exact location of the guillotine was the Place de l’Île de la Réunion, a discreet square that abuts the Place de la Nation. Unfortunately, to this day no proper monument has been erected by the government on this spot to honor the dead. The site of the cemetery was chosen due to its close proximity to the place of execution.
Catholic Victims of the Revolution
The Martyrs of Compiègne are among the dead buried here. They were the 16 nuns taken from the Carmel in Compiègne, 72 km north of Paris. The nuns were killed by the guillotine and brought here in a cart for burial along with the rest of the martyrs. The nuns were 11, with 3 lay sisters, and two externs, ranging in age from 29 to 78. They died at the very end of the Reign of Terror on July 17, 1794. As they were led to the scaffold they sang hymns together and each asked first for permission to die, from the superior. In 1906, they were beatified as martyrs of the Faith.
Ten days after their execution, the agitator and main instigator of these horrors met his end. He was the dreaded killer responsible for so many deaths with the help of his accomplices, Maximilien Robespierre, a member of the "Committee of Public Safety." He himself was also executed, effectively ending the Reign of Terror, when he was guillotined at what is now place de la Concorde and was buried elsewhere. The massacre only stopped with his death, when his accomplices finally turned on him for fear of becoming the next victims of his murderous folly.
In truth, countless thousands of Catholics were killed by the guillotine, as well as by mob violence, imprisonment, deportations, stabbings, and other acts of senseless brutality. The French state has yet to reconcile itself with the evils of the Revolution, a direct attack on Catholic life, human decency, and Western civilization.
One of the victims buried in the cemetery was an nun, the Abbess Louise de Montmorency-Laval, who even though she was deaf and blind, was accused of having plotted "deafly and blindly" and was condemned to death by guillotine. The victims were of all social backgrounds and were nearly all condemned on petty, absurd, or imaginary grounds.
In 1790, the French government passed the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, which outlawed religious life. In August 1792, the government ordered all women's monasteries closed. The property of the nuns, who were devoted to teaching, was confiscated by the Revolutionary government and the nuns were forced to leave in 1792.
The cemetery was created during the Revolution from land seized from the convent. After the Revolution the property was sold to a commoner named Coignard, who turned it into a maison de santé — a sort of convalescent home that also served as a prison for those fortunate enough to be able to pay the rent. Several aristocrats rented rooms from him during the Terror where they were forced to live in poverty amidst the putrid vapors of the dead.
It is unthinkable these crimes against humanity took place. The roots of the French Revolution were in the European Enlightenment. Harvard historian Christopher Dawson describes it thus:
"By degrees the Enlightenment became transformed into a kind of counter-religion, and the spiritual forces which were denied their traditional religious expression found their outlet in the new revolutionary cult which was embodied in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and was inspired by an irrational faith in Reason and by boundless hopes for the progress of humanity when liberated from the age-long oppression of priests and kings. Political democracy and economic liberalism were the practical corollaries of these beliefs, and the attempt to realize them by a drastic breach with the past and the introduction of new rational institutions led to the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and the Caesarian imperialism of Napoleon." (Source: Christianity and European Culture by Christopher Dawson, pp. 145-146).
The Years After the Revolution
Some years after the Revolution, in the year 1802, a group of aristocrats that had fled France returned and formed a group of interested parties to buy up the land in order to create a memorial and a private cemetery that would include the mass burial site. They purchased the garden of Picpus by subscription in June 1802.
While originally it was a place where the evil Revolutionary Tribunal sought a quick and relatively anonymous place to dispose of the murdered victims, today it is a place of pilgrimage and meditation and pardon for the excesses of men led astray by materialistic ideologies.
And thanks to the presence of the sisters of the Congregation, who still to this day maintain a small convent on site, with a walled garden, it is a place of perpetual prayer for the salvation of the world with confidence in Our Lady of Peace.
Some Americans also visit here to see the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), a Catholic hero of the Revolutionary War. An American flag flies perpetually over his final resting place. He his buried here because he had relatives on his wife's side killed and buried here (the grandmother, mother and sister of his wife, Adrienne de Noailles). Every 4th of July there is a little ceremony at his graveside, generally with the U.S. Ambassador in attendance.
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| The walk from the metro stop to the Chapel/Cemetery and the Place of Martyrdom |
