Prison of the Abbey

The prison of the Abbey was, in France, a prison of State Paris ienne built in 1522, composed of a ground floor and two stages, flanked of two turrets and a watch tower and which was the theater of the one of the most terrible episodes of the French revolution. It was built by Gamard (1631).

Site

It occupied part of the Boulevard Saint-Germain with Paris and was located at the angle of the enclosure of the Abbaye of Saint-Germain-of-Meadows. The aforementioned abbey dated from the first times of the town of Paris when Childebert I {{er}} founded, to the site of a temple dedicated with Isis or Cérès according to the legend, a monastery devoted to the Holy-Cross and Saint Vincent and which will take the name of Germain, the bishop who managed it. The basilica of Saint-Germain where was buried, inter alia, Childebert Ier was “Saint-Denis of Mérovingiens”. This locates it in a very old tradition of the History, and gives a value all the more large symbolic system to the massacres which were perpetrated there in September 1792.

Massacres

During the Revolution, one contained there a crowd of people of all conditions, shown opposition to the republican mode. The 2 and September 3rd 1792, a group of exaggerated, led by Stanislas-Marie Maillard, said Slap hard , massacred there 164 prisoners, including 18 priests. Among the prisoners, were the count Montmorin of St-Hérem, the Lenfant abbot, Cazotte and Sombreuil.

Of all the prisons of Paris which were the framework of the massacres of September 1792, like the prison close to the Carmes, that of the Abbey is, in a certain direction, most outstanding like place of profanation. In this prison more than 300 people were killed under conditions which exceed the understanding, victims of the fatal madness of about fifty rowdy characters led by Stanislas-Marie Maillard, which was however supposed to control them. With the Abbey, one had made massacre a spectacle. One piled up clothing in the middle of the court to make a kind of mattress of it. The victim, impetus of the door in this kind of arena, had passed from saber in saber and fell on the “mattress” soaked and retempered blood. The spectators were interested in the way in which each one ran, shouted and fell. They recorded courage or, on the contrary, the cowardice which had shown such or such vicime, and seemed to judge as experts. The women, especially, took a great pleasure: their first loathing passed, they became spectators terrible, insatiable, like furious of pleasure and curiosity. The massacreurs had installed benches, benches for the Sirs, of the benches for the ladies.

Destruction

The Abbey was then a military prison. It was demolished in 1854.

List of the prisons of Paris at the time of the Revolution
Common List of the massacres
of Paris (1792)
Terror (French revolution)
Prison of the Carmelite friars

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Prison of the Abbey

Site

Massacres

Destruction

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