Just minutes away from where the most active guillotine in Paris was set up, it contains 1,306 victims executed between 14 June and 27 July 1794, during the height and final phase of the Reign of Terror.

The place name, Picpus, is thought to derive from French pique-puce, "flea-bite", because the local monks used to cure skin diseases that caused wounds that resembled fleabites.

[3] The property was then sold to a commoner, Coignard, who turned it into a maison de santé — a kind of convalescent home that also served as a prison[4] for those fortunate enough to be able to pay the rent.

It is part of the cemetery complex and holds a small 15th-century sculpture of the Vierge de la Paix, reputed to have cured King Louis XIV of a serious illness on 16 August 1658.

In June 1794, a pit was dug at the end of the garden where the decapitated bodies were thrown in together — noblemen and nuns, grocers and soldiers, labourers and innkeepers.

These plans were not realized, however — the bloodshed stopped when Robespierre himself was beheaded on 29 July 1794 (at what is now place de la Concorde),[10] and the garden closed off.

Several weeks before the execution of Robespierre (which effectively ended the Terror), the neighbours sent a petition in which they said that they were justly "alarmed by the proximity of these graves, destined for the burials of conspirators who were struck down by the blade of the law".

With the help of a young commoner who had lost her father and brother to the guillotine and who had followed the cart to the burial site, they finally located the mass grave in the garden at Picpus.

[9] On the other hand, since the mass burial of more than 1,300 people in less than 2 months generated a significant olfactory disturbance in the immediate neighborhood,[9] the local population would have quickly provided relevant information to the enquiring aristocrats.

The aristocrats decided to form a group of interested parties to buy up the land in order to create a memorial and a private cemetery next to the mass burial site.

[12] In a meeting held in 1802, underwriters designated 11 of them to form a committee to manage the project: Many of these noble families still use the cemetery as a place of burial.

[7] A religious community led by Mother Henriette Aymer de la Chevalerie and Abbé Pierre Coudrin settled in Picpus and rented the pre-existing convent in 1804.

[12] The new occupants of the convent were the Sisters of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Mary and Jesus of Perpetual Adoration,[13] whose role was to pray and perform other religious services in memory of the victims and for the redemption of the souls of their executioners.

During this massacre, 110 priests and gendarmes were executed over a period of several days, including the Picpus Fathers Ladislas Radigue, Polycarpe Tuffier, Marcellin Rouchouze and Frézal Tardieu.

[14] Arguably, Picpus Cemetery's most famous tomb is that of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat and general who was a close friend of many American Founding Fathers including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, with other friends including John Laurens, and fought in the Continental Army even before France officially entered the American Revolutionary War.