Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Denis

This guide to the Basilique Cathédrale Saint-Denis outside Paris opens on October 12, 1793, with a soldier cutting a lock of hair from a long-dead king's beard inside an opened coffin. It reaches back to the abbot Suger, who rebuilt this church centuries earlier to flood it with light and in doing so invented the Gothic style, and follows the more than a thousand years of kings who chose to be buried here afterward. Then it turns to the Revolution, when workers began prying open the royal tombs one by one. Listen for how the basilica's own light gives way to that darker chapter.