Madeleine cemetery

Major interments were the 133 victims of the firework celebration of the marriage of the Dauphin (the future Louis XVI) to Marie Antoinette of Habsburg-Lorraine on 30 May 1770 and those of the Swiss Guards who were massacred in the Tuileries, 10 August 1792.

On 3 June 1802, the land in which the bodies lay, was bought by Pierre-Louis Olivier Desclozeaux, a royalist magistrate, who had lived adjacent to the cemetery (now Square Louis XVI)[3] since 1789.

Desclozeaux had taken note of the sites where the King and Queen were buried and reputedly surrounded them with a hedge, two weeping willows, and cypress trees.

When the ossuary was closed, the contents were transferred to the Paris catacombs, which was also the resting place of remains removed from the Errancis Cemetery.

Those killed in the September Massacres of 1792 are alleged to be buried here: The decapitated corpses of the guillotine victims were thrown in specially dug trenches and covered in quicklime to speed up the decomposition process.