page_title: Paris in the 18th century
section_title: Prisons and the debut of the guillotine
hierarchical_section_title: Paris in the 18th century / Institutions / Prisons and the debut of the guillotine
caption_attribution_description: English: Tour du Temple, circa1795
context_page_description: Paris in the 18th century was the second-largest city in Europe, after London, with a population of about 600,000 people. The century saw the construction of Place Vendôme, the Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the church of Les Invalides, and the Panthéon, and the founding of the Louvre Museum. Paris witnessed the end of the reign of Louis XIV, was the center stage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, saw the first manned flight, and was the birthplace of high fashion and the modern restaurant.
context_section_description: Paris possessed an extraordinary number and variety of prisons, used for different classes of persons and types of crimes. The fortress of the Châtelet was the oldest royal prison, where the office of the Provost of Paris was also located. It had about fifteen large cells; the better cells were on the upper levels, where prisoners could pay a high pension to be comfortable and well-fed, while the lower cells, called de la Fosse, de la Gourdaine, du Puits and de l'Oubliette, were extremely damp and barely lit by the sun coming through a grate at street level. The Bastille and the Château de Vincennes were both used for high-ranking political prisoners, and had relatively luxurious conditions. The last three prisoners at the Chateau de Vincennes, the Marquis de Sade and two elderly and insane noblemen, were transferred to the Bastillle in 1784. The Bastille, begun in 1370, never held more than forty inmates; At the time of the Revolution, the Bastille had just seven prisoners; four counterfeiters, the two elderly noblemen, and a man named Tavernier, half-mad, accused of participation in an attempt to kill Louis XV thirty years earlier. Priests and other religious figures who committed crimes or other offenses were tried by church courts, and each priory and abbey had its own small prison. That of the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Pres was located at 166 boulevard Saint-Germain, and was a square building fifteen meters in diameter, with floors of small cells as deep as ten meters underground. The Abbey prison became a military prison under Louis XIV; in September 1792, it was the scene of a terrible massacre of prisoners, the prelude to the Reign of Terror.
  Two large prisons which also served as hospitals had been established under Louis XIV largely to hold the growing numbers of beggars and the indigent; La Salpêtrière, which held two to three hundred condemned women, largely prostitutes; and Bicêtre, which held five prisoners at the time of the Revolution. Conditions within were notoriously harsh, and there were several mutinies by prisoners there in the 18th century. La Salpêtrière was closed in 1794, and the prisoners moved to a new prison of Saint-Lazare.
  For-l'Evêque on the quai Mégesserie, built in 1222, held prisoners guilty of more serious crimes; it was only 35 meters by nine meters in size, built for two hundred prisoners, but by the time of the Revolution it held as many as five hundred prisoners. It was finally demolished in 1783, and replaced by a new prison, created in 1780 by the transformation of the large town house of the family of La Force on rue de Roi-de-Sicilie, which became known as Grande Force. A smaller prison, called la Petite Force, was opened in 1785 nearby at 22 rue Pavée. A separate prison was created for those prisoners who had been sentenced to the galleys; they were held in the château de la Tournelle at 1 quai de la Tournelle; twice a year these prisoners were transported out of Paris to the ports to serve their sentences on the galleys.
  In addition to the royal and ecclesiastical prisons, there were also a number of privately owned prisons, some for those who were unable to pay debts, and some, called masons de correction, for parents who wanted to discipline their children; the young future revolutionary Louis Antoine de Saint-Just was imprisoned by his mother in one of these for running away and stealing the family silverware.
  During the Reign of Terror of 1793 and 1794, all the prisons were filled, and additional space was needed to hold accused aristocrats and counter-revolutionaries. The King and his family were imprisoned within the tower of the Temple. The Luxembourg Palace and the former convents of Les Carmes (70 rue Vaugirard) and Port-Royal (121-125 boulevard Port-Royal) were turned into prisons. The Conciergerie within the Palace of Justice was used to hold accused criminals during their trial; Marie-Antoinette was held there until her sentence and execution.
  In the first half of the 18th century, under the Old Regime, criminals could be executed either by hanging, decapitation,
caption: The tower of the Temple, where the royal family were held prisoner, in 1795
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