The martyrs were a group of priests, seminarians, bishops, and, most famously, the Archbishop of Arles. They were rounded up by a mob of ans-culottes and imprisoned in the convent near St. Joseph’s after refusing to take an oath that undermined papal authority. The mob’s punishment for this transgression was quick and especially brutal. They began killing their prisoners on September 2, 1792, when they bashed in the Archbishop’s head, stabbed him, and trampled the body.
The following day the mob set up a kangaroo court to try the remaining prisoners. Martyrologist John Foxe described them as soaked in blood up to the elbows with executioners and judges freely subbing in for one another without bothering to wipe the gore off their hands.
Unsurprisingly, nearly all the clergy members were found guilty. But instead of condemning them from the bench, the judges simply told them they were free to leave. Each defendant left down the same stairway and at the bottom there were plenty of people waiting to hack their bodies apart. British ambassador, Earl Gower, described the wake the mob left behind:
“After [the killings] their dead bodies were dragged by the arms or legs to the Abbaye… here they were laid up in heaps till carts could carry them away. The kennel was swimming with blood, and a bloody track was traced from the prison to the Abbaye door where they had dragged these unfortunate people.”
When it was over, 190 people were killed at the convent in just two days. Their bodies were thrown in a pit and covered in quicklime.
We visited the site in 2011 – the account is here. I didn’t know, at the time, that there were times to take scheduled tours. I I wish I had. The Atlas Obscura site has photos from inside.
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What happened here, in this courtyard on the Left Bank in Paris? What happened in this place, so simply marked?
It happened on September 2, 1792.
The story is that of the September Martyrs, beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1926. Go to Elena Maria Vidal’s post to learn more.
Essentially, these religious who had refused to sign the Constitution of the Clergy had been imprisoned in this former Carmelite monastery and elsewhere around Paris. On September 2, the dam broke and they were slaughtered.
I knew about this, and had found the church – St. Joseph des Carmes – a couple of weeks ago. We stood at the gate and looked at the church, but couldn’t figure out how to get in.
As we were standing there, and older man stopped, peered through the gate, and asked me (in French), “Is that a church in there?”
I told him yes.
He looked through the bars again and shook his head ruefully. “I’ve lived here all my life, and I never knew there was a church,” he said as he walked away.
Today, we had the opportunity to see it up close – Jim Brown, head of institutional relations for the Institut Catholique, within the grounds of which the church sits, invited us and the Drehers to take a tour.
The parish wasn’t blocked off or inaccessible to the public – it’s just that it’s within the grounds of the Institute, and I just didn’t take the time to figure out where the main entrance was that day.
This plaque at the head of this post isn’t in the church – it’s around the back, in the seminary garden. It’s simple, stark and direct.
This stood in another part of the garden:
….marking the first to be struck down.
Here they fell.
Charlotte was Both 