Rue des Guipons

Tucked away in Villejuif, a suburb of Paris, lies the Rue des Guipons. This seemingly ordinary street holds a chilling secret. It leads to the Cimetière de Picpus, a private cemetery with a story deeply intertwined with the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Rue des Guipons itself might not look like much. But its proximity to this historic site gives it a unique significance. The cemetery wasn’t always a place of rest. It began as the garden of a convent, the Chanoinesses de Saint-Augustin, which was later used as a prison hospital. In the turbulent summer of 1794, as the guillotine claimed lives at Place de la Nation, the city faced a grim problem. Where to bury the rapidly mounting number of executed? The convent garden, just a short distance away, became a convenient solution. Over 1,300 bodies were interred in mass graves at the site now known as the Cimetière de Picpus, accessible via Rue des Guipons. Among them lie sixteen Carmelite nuns, the “Martyrs of Compiègne,” who met their fate singing hymns. Their story has been immortalized in books and even in Francis Poulenc’s opera, “Dialogues of the Carmelites.” The poet André Chénier, another victim of the Terror, is also buried here. A plaque on the cemetery wall pays tribute to him. It reads, “served the muses, loved wisdom, and died for the truth.” The Cimetière de Picpus, reached via Rue des Guipons, stands as a sobering reminder of a dark chapter in French history. It’s a place where commoners and aristocrats, men and women, adults and children, share the same grave. Their names, inscribed on the chapel walls, whisper the stories of lives cut short. The cemetery, reachable from Rue des Guipons, isn’t just a place of mourning. It’s a place of reflection, a testament to the human cost of revolution.