From palace to prison
The Conciergerie: from royal palace to revolutionary prison
How a 14th-century royal hall ended up as the Revolution's most feared address.
Check tours and tickets on Viator ↗A capital grows on the island
The Île de la Cité had carried royal power for centuries; at the end of the 10th century, under Hugh Capet, Paris became the kingdom's capital and he built a fortified residence there, the Palais de la Cité. Later kings — Philip II, then Philip the Fair between 1285 and 1314 — expanded it with towers and halls.
A hall for an army of staff
Philip the Fair's Salle des Gens d'Armes, raised in the early 14th century, was the dining hall and gathering place for the palace's guards and servants — reckoned at between one and two thousand — and is described as the largest non-religious Gothic hall in Europe.
The court leaves, the name stays
The palace had long had a concierge, the royal officer in charge of running it — which is where its name comes from. When Charles V moved the royal residence to the Louvre and the Hôtel Saint-Pol in the 1360s, the concierge gained wider judicial powers, and prison cells were gradually added to the lower parts of the building.
The Terror's address
From 1793 the Revolutionary Tribunal sat in the palace's Grand Chamber, and by the time it was abolished on 31 May 1795 it had sentenced some 2,780 people to death — among them Marie-Antoinette, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and, in July 1794, Robespierre.
Prison, then museum
The building stayed a working prison longer than most visitors expect: some sections opened to visitors in 1914, but the prison only closed for good in 1934. Today it's a national monument with a Hall of Names listing more than 4,000 people tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal.