Picpus Cemetery (, ) is the largest private cemetery in Paris, France, and is located in the 12th arrondissement. It was created from land seized from the convent of the Chanoinesses de St-Augustin, during the French Revolution. Just minutes away from where the most active guillotine in Paris was set up, it contains 1,306 victims executed between 14 June and 27 July 1794, during the height and final phase of the Reign of Terror.
Picpus Cemetery is one of only two private cemeteries in Paris. Today, only descendants of the 1,306 victims are eligible to be buried at Picpus Cemetery.
The cemetery is of particular interest to American visitors as it also holds the tomb of the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), over which an American flag always flies.
Origins
The place name, Picpus, is thought to derive from French pique-puce, "flea-bite", because the local monks used to cure skin diseases that caused wounds that resembled fleabites.
During the pre-Revolutionary period, the premises upon which the cemetery is located was a walled garden and a convent. The convent was occupied by the Canonesses of Saint Augustine, but their property was confiscated during the Revolution and they were forced to leave by the Revolutionary government in 1792.
The property was then sold to a commoner, Coignard, who turned it into a maison de santé — a kind of convalescent home that also served as a prison for those fortunate enough to be able to pay the rent. Several aristocrats rented rooms from him during the Terror. The novelist Choderos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade and the philosopher Comte de Volney all spent part of the Terror on the premises.
Reign of Terror
thumb|The place de l'Île de la Réunion abuts what is now the place de la Nation in the [[12th arrondissement of Paris|12th arrondissement. This discreet square behind the barrière du Trône is the location where the guillotine was set up.]]
During the French Revolution, the guillotine was set up behind the barrière du Trône on a small square abutting the Place de la Nation, then called the Place du Trône Renversé. This guillotine operated between 13 June and 28 July 1794, during the height of, but also the final two months of the period known as the Reign of Terror.
The pace of beheading at the Trône Renversé location was rapid. As many as 55 people per day were executed. Of the 2,639 executions carried out in Paris between April 1793 and July 1794, the six weeks of operation of the Trône guillotine accounted for almost half (1306 executions).
The Revolutionary Tribunal needed a quick and relatively unobtrusive way to dispose of the bodies. It was necessary to keep a low profile for the burials because the Terror was already becoming unpopular and the local populations resented having so many dead bodies buried in their neighborhood.
The Picpus garden was only five minutes by foot from the spot where the guillotine was set up next to what is now Place de la Nation. In June 1794, a pit was dug at the end of the garden where the decapitated bodies were thrown in together — noblemen and nuns, grocers and soldiers, labourers and innkeepers. The bodies were brought to the garden by cart and entered the garden via an entryway located at what is now 40, 42 avenue de Saint Mandé. The clothes were removed and inventoried and the bodies were thrown in the pit. The pit was left opened until it was covered and quicklime was spread to counter the odor of decomposing bodies. and the garden closed off.
In the early 1800s, a group of family members (notably, Madame de Lafayette and her sister, Madame de Montagu
In a meeting held in 1802, underwriters designated 11 of them to form a committee to manage the project:
- Madame de Montagu, née L. D. de Noailles, President
- Maurice de Montmorency
- Mr. Aimard de Nicolaï
- Madame Rebours, née Barville
- Madame Freteau widow, née Moreau
- Madame de La Fayette, née Adrienne de Noailles
- Madame Titon, née Benterot
- Madame Faudoas, née de Bernières
- Madame Charton, née Chauchat
- Philippe de Noailles de Poix
- Theodule M. de Grammont
Many of these noble families still use the cemetery as a place of burial. Only people whose ancestors were guillotined and buried at Picpus are eligible to be buried in the cemetery. whose role was to pray and perform other religious services in memory of the victims and for the redemption of the souls of their executioners.
Later, during the Paris Commune, the community was again afflicted by political violence: the Massacre in the Rue Haxo () was a mass execution of priests and gendarmes by communards during the semaine sanglante ("bloody week") at the end of the Paris Commune in May 1871. During this massacre, 110 priests and gendarmes were executed over a period of several days, including the Picpus Fathers Ladislas Radigue, Polycarpe Tuffier, Marcellin Rouchouze and Frézal Tardieu.
The Marquis de Lafayette
thumb|right|The tomb of the [[Marquis de Lafayette and his wife in the Picpus Cemetery]]
thumb|Equestrian Statue of Lafayette, Paris|left
Arguably, Picpus Cemetery's most famous tomb is that of Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the French aristocrat and general who was a close friend of many American Founding Fathers including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, with other friends including John Laurens, and fought in the Continental Army even before France officially entered the American Revolutionary War. He died in 1834 from natural causes (pneumonia) at the age of 76.
An American flag always flies over Lafayette's grave courtesy of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, He is buried next to his wife, Adrienne de Lafayette, whose sister, mother and grandmother were among those beheaded and thrown into the common pit. The soil that covers the grave is soil that Lafayette brought home to France from Bunker Hill in Charlestown, Boston – site of the Battle of Bunker Hill, one of the most prominent early battles of the American Revolutionary War; in 1825, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the battle, Lafayette had laid the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument.thumb|[[John J. Pershing|General Pershing at Lafayette's tomb during Independence Day celebrations, 1917]]
On 4 July 1917, three months after the United States entered World War I on the side of France and her Allies, U.S. Army Colonel Charles E. Stanton visited the General's tomb. Col. Stanton placed an American flag, uttering the famous phrase: "Lafayette, we are here."
World War II and protection of interned Jews
During the German occupation of Paris, the American flag flew continuously over Lafayette's tomb and the German occupiers never entered the cemetery and convent complex.
In 1852, financier James Mayer de Rothschild built, next door to the cemetery, the Rothschild Hospital and hospice for Jewish patients. Under the collusion of Vichy France with Nazi Germany, its patients who survived their illnesses were all deported to concentration camps. The hospital staff managed to save some of their patients from deportation by making false death certificates or false declarations of stillbirth. The patients were then secreted out of the hospital and hidden in the neighborhood, including in the convent located on the Picpus cemetery grounds.