Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
Paris's oldest church, consecrated in 558, holding Descartes' bones and Revolution-era scars.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris opens with three kings and a headless philosopher buried beneath the floor, and traces how René Descartes's remains spent more than a century shuttled between graveyards before reaching a side chapel here in 1819, arriving without his skull. It then turns to September 1792, when the abbey's outbuildings held prisoners while a makeshift tribunal judged them one by one during the Revolution's panic. Stand near the eleventh-century columns by the choir, the oldest stonework left in the nave.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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