The tombs
A guide to the royal tombs of Saint-Denis
Who is actually buried here, how to read the medieval effigies, and what the Renaissance tombs are showing you.
Check dates on Viator ↗A choir built for burials
Saint-Denis became the burial place of the kings of France: by the monument's own count, 40 kings and 26 queens, together with princes, princesses and servants of the crown, from Dagobert in 639 to Louis XVIII in 1824. The role formally began under Hugh Capet at the end of the 10th century, though several earlier kings already lay here.
Reading the gisants
The oldest tombs are the gisants: effigies carved lying down with hands joined in prayer and eyes open. Louis IX had sixteen of them made in the 13th century, long after the deaths they mark, to honour his predecessors; fourteen survive in the transept. Look for the crowns, the heraldry and the lions and dogs carved at their feet.
The Renaissance arrivals
Rising above the gisants are later, grander monuments built on a new model: the king and queen shown below as naked, lifeless bodies and above as kneeling figures at prayer. Louis XII and Anne of Brittany, François I and Claude de France, and Henri II and Catherine de' Medici in a temple-like tomb designed by Primaticcio together turned the church into a showcase of 16th-century French sculpture.
The crypt and the Revolution
Beneath the choir, plain black-marble slabs installed in 1975 mark where Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were reburied after their remains were found in 1815, with Louis XVIII laid nearby in 1824. An ossuary holds the remains of 158 people gathered in 1817, after revolutionary crowds had thrown the royal bodies into trenches in 1793.