In 1610, Two sisters of the Shoeless Carmelites (so -called because they wore sandals as a symbol of their vow of poverty) traveled from Rome to Paris to found a convent.

The church was consecrated on 21 December 1625 by Leonor d'Étampes de Valencay, Bishop of Chartres and close collaborator with Cardinal Richelieu.

One famous resident was Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection, whose writings later became part of the classic Christian text, The Practice of the Presence of God.

[8] In 1789, after the outbreak of the French Revolution, the new revolutionary National Assembly voted to nationalise all the property of the church and clergy.

On 10 August 1792, a mob captured the Tuileries Palace and the King and his family were imprisoned, the "Refractaires" were considered suspects.

The Revolutionary leader Georges Danton called on the Sans Culottes to put to death anyone who did not take up arms against the Prussians.

They were given a last chance to take the oath to the government, then taken down the stairs to the garden before the crowd of Sans-Culottes, who were armed with axes, pikes and swords.

188 priests and three bishops were massacred in particularly violent conditions under commissioner Stanislas-Marie Maillard, who executed orders from the surveillance committee.

They included the Count of Soyecourt, and Alexandre de Beauharnais, the first husband of Empress Joséphine, Josephine herself was also held prisoner there, but survived to become the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte,[9] In 1797 a Carmelite supporter, Madamoiselle de Soyecourt, bought the abandoned church and cloister and made it the home of a community of Carmelite sisters.

In the 18th century, the Carmelites found a new source of income in building private houses for rental along Rue du Regard.

It uses the elements of ancient Roman architecture; with three levels diminishing in size going upwards, and is and crowned by a classical triangular fronton, with a statue of the Virgin Mary, the patron saint of the Carmelites.

[19] While the exterior of the church is rather formal and austere, the interior is very Baroque, full of color, illusionist effects and a sense of movement given by the architecture and the art.

[17] The interior shows the influence of the Council of Trent, a Papal doctrine which called for churches to be more decorated and more designed to appeal to lay churchgoers.

[20] The interior of the cupola feature a painting of Elijah riding a chariot of fire to heaven, surrounded by angels.

The altarpiece was given to the convent of the Discalced Carmelites by Queen Anne of Austria in 1624; it was painted by Quentin Varin and depicts the Presentation of Christ in the Temple.

[21] The retable of the main altar displays one of the major works of art in the church, "The Presentation of Jesus in the Temple", painted by Quentin Varin (1570-1634).

[21] On the front of the main altar is a remarkable bas-relief of the Last Supper from the 14th century, vividly depicting the faces of Christ and the Apostles.

It is attributed to Evrard d'Orleans (1292-1357).It originally belonged to the Abbey of Maubuisson,but was moved to Paris after the French Revolution.

It illustrates his vision of a modern Apocalypse, "The Martyrs of the Grand Test", a reference to the priests killed at the church for their beliefs during the French Revolution.

It was built under the patronage of Pierre Brûlard de Sillery, a wealthy nobleman who was Minister of War and Foreign Affairs of King Louis XIII.

The central painting over the altar, attributed to Michel Corneille, depicts "The Education of the Virgin surrounded by her parents, Anne and Joachim."

Its central element is a marble statue of the Virgin Mary by the Italian sculptor Antonio Raggi (1624–66), a pupil of Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

[24] It was offered to the church by Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the brother of Pope Urban VIII, and the Papal envoy to Paris in 1656.

[27] The paintings of floral bouquets on the arches over the chapel, by Claude Deruet (1588-1660), from between 1630 and 1640, are some earliest original decor of the church.

Other early work on the ceiling includes paintings of the crowing of the Holy Virgin by the Trinity, and figures of the archangels Michael, Gabriel, and Raphael, and painting our contains the only example of the original interior decoration from the early church, depicts Angel-Musicians, as well as a more recent scene, "The Virgin appears to the priests massacred in September 1792", an event that took place at the church during the September Massacre in 1792, during the French Revolution.

[26] The Chapel of Thérèse of Lisieux, a modern Saint (1873-1897) canonized 1925, is located at the right of the transept, the crossing point between the nave and choir.

In the 1860s, during the construction of a new street as part of Napoleon III's reconstruction of Paris, several mass graves were found in trenches close to the church; the bones showed injuries from the massacre.

These included Jean Marie du Lau-d'Allemans, the Archbishop of Arles, two bishops, 127 priests, and fifty-six other religious and laical figures.

[24] The Crypt also contains several additional chambers, including the tomb of Frederic Ozanam, the founder of the Society of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, who was beatified in 1997.