The Grand Châtelet, seen from rue Saint-Denis , 1800

 

History

 

Middle Ages

 In the fourth century, the city, which was still called Lutetia , was concentrated in the island of the City , protected by Roman fortifications consisting of a wall of 2.50 m thick. It appears that at that time no works protected access to wooden bridges, which can be quickly destroyed or burned in the event of an attack. It was in 877 that Charles the Bald had strengthened the fortifications of Paris to protect the city from the incursions of the Normans who multiplied. The Roman ramparts were restored, the fortified bridges and their batteries tightened to prevent the passage of the boats. He also erected wooden towers forming castles to protect the ends of the bridges.

As a result, when the Norman invaders went up the Seine in November 885, they encountered an impassable fortress . The first ferocious offensives were repulsed with determination by the defenders, it followed a long siege of Paris (885-887) to try to reduce the inhabitants to the famine and bring them to capitulate. In February 886, a great flood of the Seine carried the Petit-Pont , isolating the twelve defenders remained in the tower of what will become the little Châtelet . They fought fiercely to the last and were all slaughtered. Charles the Fat ended up arriving with his troops and bought the departure of the Normans who left to ravage Burgundy.

The wooden towers were replaced by stone constructions around 1130 by Louis VI le Gros . The Grand Chatelet formed a solid, almost square fortress, with a courtyard in the middle and diverted gates, surrounded by deep ditches filled with living water, fed by the Seine . Two towers flanked the two angles towards the suburb. It was intended to protect the northern outlet of the Grand-Pont .

The Counts of Paris lived there until the end of the 12th century, until their replacement by the Provost of Paris. From 1190, the construction of the enclosure of Paris by Philippe-Auguste made this fortress useless to the defense of the city. It established the seat of the jurisdiction of the Provost of Paris in charge of police and criminal justice, including prisons and torture rooms where the “question” applied. The provost was divided into four sections: the “civil park hearing”, the “presidential”, the “council chamber” and the “criminal chamber”. After their meeting in a single body, these various jurisdictions took the name of “Cour du Chatelet”.

Under the reign of Saint Louis , from 1250 to 1257, the Grand Châtelet was repaired and considerably enlarged. On May 29, 1418, during the civil war between Armagnacs and Burgundians , thanks to the betrayal of a certain Perrinet Leclerc and the support of artisans and academics, Paris was delivered to Jean de Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, captain a troop of partisans of the Duke of Burgundy. On the 12th of June, 1418, the Burgundian faction, which besieged the great and the small Châtelet, massacred all the Armagnac prisoners who were shut up there; their bodies, thrown from the tops of the towers, were received at the tip of the spears.

By a royal ordinance of January 1318 , the King of France Philip V le Long enjoined the clerk of the Chatelet to ensure “that a candle was maintained during the night at the door, the palace of this court, to thwart companies perpetrators who perpetuated themselves on the square , then the busiest of the capital . “

 

Modern era

By his edict of 1684, Louis XIV gathered at Châtelet all sixteen feudal old justices and six former ecclesiastical justices. The Grand Châtelet was rebuilt. It had been decided that during the reconstruction, the court would sit at the Grand Augustins , but the monks would not give up their convent. It was decided to siege it and seize it by force. There followed several fights and fierce assaults, in which a large number of religious were killed. The victory remained with the party of the court, which settled there provisionally.

After these new reconstructions, only a few obscure and harmless towers remained of the old fortress. In 1756, a marble table containing the words “Tributum Cæsaris” was still visible above the opening of an office under the arcade of the Grand Châtelet. It was there, no doubt, that all the taxes of Gaul were centralized, a custom which seemed to have been perpetuated, since the decree of the council of 1586 mentions the “customary rights of the land to be paid to the Chatelet vineyards. “

 

The massacre of September 1792

At the time of the Revolution , the prisoners incarcerated at the Chatelet had the reputation of being great criminals: when the rioters opened the prison doors to release the prisoners on July 13, 1789, they took care not to attack the Chatelet. There were three hundred and five inmates in May 1783 and three hundred and fifty in May 1790. After having tried the first accused of the crime of lese-nation , the Court of Justice Chatelet was abolished by the law passed on August 25, 1790. His duties ceased January 24, 1791, but the prison remained. During the massacres of the prisons, on September 2nd, 1792 , out of the two hundred and sixty-nine prisoners incarcerated at the Chatelet, two hundred and sixteen prisoners were cut down or slaughtered by the rioters.

“Those prisoners hearing the day before that the prisons would soon be emptied, believing to find their freedom in the public confusion, thinking that on the approach of the enemy the royalists could open the door to them, had, on September 1 , make their preparations for departure; several, the package under his arm, were walking in the courtyards. They went out but otherwise. A frightful storm arrives at 7 o’clock in the evening from the Abbey at Chatelet; an indistinct massacre begins with sabers and rifles. Nowhere were they more pitiless. “

All were formidable criminals, but none of them had been involved in aristocratic plots. After the massacre, the bodies were piled up on the banks of the Change bridge to be transported to the quarries of Montrouge , near Paris.

 

The jails

 Damiens judged at the Chatelet.

The Grand Chatelet was one of the principal prisons of Paris. In its eastern part, the cells were divided into three categories: the common rooms upstairs, those called “secret” and the pits of the bottom. During the occupation of Paris by the English, an order of Henry VI of England , dated May 1425, lists its parts or cells. The first ten were the least horrible, they had for names: The Channels, Beauvoir, La Motte, La Salle, Butchers, Beaumont, Grièche, Beauvais, Barbarie and Gloriette . The following were much more hateful, some names are eloquent: The Well, the Forgetting, Entre-deux-huis, the Gourdaine, the Crib . Finally, the last two were particularly atrocious:

• The pit , also known as Chausse d’hypocras , in which the prisoners were descended by means of a pulley. It looks like it was shaped like an inverted cone. The prisoners were constantly in the water and could not stand or lie down. It usually died after a fortnight of detention.
• End of ease that was filled with garbage and reptiles. In 1377, Honoré Paulard, a Parisian bourgeois, was brought down there, accused of having poisoned his parents, his sisters and three others to inherit it. He died there in one month.

The height was that these imprisonments were priced. Prisoners were required to pay for the night’s jail during their stay and a supplement for bedding. The tariff varied according to his condition: “count, knight banneret, knight, squire, lombard, jew or other. “

Several famous people were imprisoned at the Châtelet:

• John of Montagu (1409)
• Jean Jouvenel of the Ursins (1413)
• François Villon (1448)
• Clément Marot (1526) ^{N 4}
• Michel of Amboise (1530)
• Molière (1645) ^{N 5}
• Louis Dominique Cartridge (1721)
• Thomas de Mahy of Favras (1790)
• Baron de Besenval (1789-1790) .

 

The morgue

In the fifteenth century, morgue has the meaning of face, mine. The prisoners brought into the lower cells of the Chatelet of Paris were “morgués” by their jailers, that is to say, stared with insistence and probably with arrogance and contempt, in order to be able to identify them in the event of escape or recidivism. By extension, the name “morgue” was assigned to these cells. The deposition of the body of the Chatelet is mentioned for the first time by a sentence of the Provost of Paris of December 23, 1371. Another sentence of the Provost of Paris, September 1 , 1734, associates the lower jail of the Chatelet to the identification of corpses .

Subsequently said cells having been transferred to another part of the Châtelet, the “morgue” was affected, in the eighteenth century, the exhibition of bodies found on public roads or drowned in the Seine . About fifteen bodies were found each night in the seventeenth century. The hospitable girls of St. Catherine were required to wash them and have them buried in the cemetery of the Innocents. An opening in the door allowed them to be recognized “by pinching their noses”. In 1804, the police prefect Dubois moved the morgue Quai du Marché-Neuf .

 

Demolition

Because of its dilapidated state and the conditions of detention of the prisoners who were detained there, the demolition of the Grand Châtelet had been envisaged by the old regime as early as 1780. The jails having been decommissioned following the massacres of September 2, 1792, the prosecutor of the commune Pierre Louis Manuel demanded its demolition the 9th of September following. However, this did not actually start until 1802, starting with the dungeons.

Other buildings, still occupied by the courts of first instance and appeal of the second district of Paris, were in their turn demolished only between 1808 and 1810 but the street Trop-Va-Qui-Dure was destroyed only in 1813. Some vestiges still remained in 1857, between the quai de la Mégisserie , the Place du Châtelet and rue Pierre-à-Poisson (now rue de la Saulnerie before disappearing). On the site of the Grand Châtelet was built the Place du Châtelet between 1855 and 1858 and the Théâtre du Châtelet inaugurated in 1862.