Women of the French Revolution at the Conciergerie

The Conciergerie took its name from the concierge who ran the prisons built here after Charles V left the palace in the 14th century. During the Revolution it filled up: the number of prisoners tripled, and most stayed only a few days before their trial.

Political opponents shared the building with common criminals. The poorest slept on straw in dark cells without furniture, while those who could pay bought a little comfort, visits and paper.

The Conciergerie was never a place of execution. The carts left from its courtyard for the guillotine, and today the Hall of Names records who passed through and what became of them.

Each morning the cells were opened and the women were led out into their own yard, separate from the men. This courtyard has remained almost unchanged since the Revolution, and it is on the visitor route today.

Marie-Antoinette’s first cell here looked out onto it. Other women were held in the same prison, from Madame Élisabeth, the king’s sister, to writers and political activists.

Standing in it is the closest you can come to the daily life of the women who were held here.

The Revolution promised rights to citizens, but not to women. As the Terror hardened, women were pushed out of political life, and women’s political clubs were banned in the autumn of 1793.

When Madame Roland was guillotined, the official newspaper Le Moniteur wrote that she, Marie-Antoinette and Olympe de Gouges had been put to death because they had crossed the boundaries of female virtue.

They held very different beliefs. What they shared was that they spoke or acted in public, and were punished as women for it.