It was a large structure located at the top of a small hill near the modern Place du Colonel Fabien in Paris, though during the Middle Ages it was outside the city walls and the surrounding area was mostly not built up, being occupied by institutions like the Hôpital Saint-Louis from 1607, and earlier the Convent of the Filles-Dieu[1] ("Daughters of God"), a home for 200 reformed prostitutes, and the leper colony of St Lazare.

[3] As reconstructed in images by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc it had three sides, and 45 compartments in which people could be both hanged and hung after execution elsewhere.

The English travel writer Thomas Coryat saw it at about the same time and described it as "the fairest gallows that I ever saw, built on a little hillocke ... [with] fourteen pillars of free stone".

[4] The structure was also used for displaying the bodies of those executed elsewhere; in 1416 the remains of Pierre des Essarts [fr] were finally handed back to his family after three years at Montfaucon.

The gibbet was a great favourite of popular historians and historical writers of the 19th century, appearing in historical novels including The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) by Victor Hugo,[6] Crichton (1837) by William Harrison Ainsworth,[7] and La Reine Margot (1845) by Alexandre Dumas; both the last two tales centred on the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.