Conciergerie

Historic · Île de la Cité (1st)Paris,France

The ground floor of the old royal palace of Paris, holding Europe's largest surviving Gothic hall and the cells of the Revolution's condemned.

The Conciergerie is the ground floor of the palace where the kings of France once lived, and its great hall is what you come for. The vaults rise eight and a half metres over nearly 1,800 square metres, usually called the largest surviving Gothic hall in Europe built for a royal court rather than a church. None of its medieval furniture survives, so the size of the room is the exhibit. Past it come the prison rooms: a corridor of cells, the room where the condemned had their hair cut, and the yard where women were let out. The hall fed up to two thousand palace servants and soldiers a day. Philip the Fair vaulted it early in the fourteenth century. In 1358 rebels led by the merchants' provost Étienne Marcel broke into the palace and killed two of the dauphin's marshals in front of him, and the kings stopped living here after that. The officer left in charge was the concierge, and the building still carries his title. He turned part of it into a prison, and during the Revolution it held the accused waiting for the court upstairs.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look up at the capital on the central pillar of the Hall of the Guards — The carving is said to show Héloïse and Abélard, the Paris teacher and pupil whose love letters are still read.
Save this for the hottest afternoon you get — Thick stone and no sun keep the great hall cold right through summer, and you will want sleeves while the street outside bakes.
Walk the river side before you go in — Three round towers with conical roofs and one square clock tower stand straight off the quay, and that is the palace's medieval face.
Give the medieval rooms most of your attention — The revolutionary half is largely panels and screens to read, while the old halls and the kitchen are rooms you simply stand in and look at.

Things to do

1
Turn slowly in the middle of the great hall
Walk to the centre of the great hall and turn all the way round on the spot. Every few degrees the rows of pillars line up differently and the room seems to change shape. Then look at the floor. During the Revolution the hall was divided up with wooden partitions, and prisoners who could not pay for a bed slept on straw on this stone.
2
Find the office where every prisoner's name went into the register
Leave the great hall for the prisoners' corridor. The clerk's office is where each new arrival was entered in the register by name. A few steps on is the room they called the Toilette, where hair was cut short before execution. It is low, plain and empty.
3
Stand in the yard where the women prisoners were let out
Find the women's courtyard, the one patch of open air on the visitor route and the part of the prison least changed since the 1790s. Women held here spent their days in it. Stand in a corner and look up at the walls rising on all four sides. That square of sky was all the daylight they got.
4
Stand between the four corner fireplaces of the palace kitchen
Walk into the surviving kitchen, a square room with a huge fireplace built into each of its four corners. This fed the palace staff; the king's own kitchen sat on the floor above and has gone. Two windows light the room today. There were eight when the cooks worked here.