Pension Belhomme

The Pension Belhomme was a prison and private clinic during the French Revolution in the Rue de Charonne (11e arrondissement, Paris).

In September 1793, when the Reign of Terror began, the députés encouraged the sans-culottes to imprison all suspect individuals: nobles, their wives and children, foreigners, priests, lawyers, the actors of the Comédie Française, rich people in general, in short, all those who had not made clear their allegiance to the Republic.

Belhomme entreated the 12 police chiefs in charge of Paris to send him rich prisoners who would pay high fees to live in his asylum as comfortably as possible.

From then on marquises, bankers, journalists, famous actors, old nobles and army officers, along with other disgraced persons who bribed the doctors and police chiefs to be transferred on the pretext of illness, lived cheek by jowl with the mad.

It was in this setting that there occurred the romance between Jacques-Marie Rouzet, a deputy to the National Convention, and Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, widow of the Duc d’Orléans and mother of the future King Louis-Philippe.