Marie Antoinette’s Lost Remains: The Secret Burial of a Queen

The Secret Burial and Rediscovery of Marie Antoinette’s Remains

As is well known, Queen Marie Antoinette was executed on October 16, 1793, to the ecstatic cheers of the revolutionary crowd. At that moment, even in their worst nightmares, the revolutionaries could not have imagined that just over 20 years later, the Bourbon dynasty would be restored to the French throne.

Because of this, the measures taken to secretly dispose of the queen’s remains were rather superficial. Marie Antoinette was buried in a simple coffin in an unmarked grave at the Madeleine Cemetery in Paris. The burial took place in broad daylight, in front of numerous onlookers, and the cemetery workers did little to conceal whose body they were laying to rest.

This fact did not go unnoticed by a devoted royalist, Pierre-Louis Desclozeaux. He sketched a map of Madeleine Cemetery and marked the exact location of the queen’s grave.

At this point in history, Madame Tussaud makes an appearance. She claimed to have witnessed the former queen’s final walk to the scaffold, though she admitted to fainting before the execution itself. Later, however, she was reportedly ordered to bring a bag of sculpting tools to Madeleine Cemetery, where—under the watchful eye of the National Assembly—she allegedly made a death mask of the beheaded queen.

The Search for the Queen’s Remains
In 1815, after the fall of Napoleon I, the new Bourbon king, Louis XVIII (the younger brother of Louis XVI), formed a special commission to locate the remains of his brother, Marie Antoinette, and their son, Louis-Charles, the lost Dauphin of France.

It was then that Pierre-Louis Desclozeaux stepped forward, claiming to know the exact burial site of the executed king and queen.

Thanks to his testimony, the commission quickly located the presumed grave of Marie Antoinette. Desclozeaux had stated that her coffin had been covered with quicklime, and indeed, when the grave was opened, a thick layer of hardened lime was found. However, it had failed to completely destroy the remains.

Inside the coffin, the investigators discovered a female skeleton with the skull placed at the feet. The presence of well-preserved strands of light-colored hair and fragments of decayed white fabric (Marie Antoinette had been executed in a white dress) strongly suggested that these were indeed the remains of the ill-fated queen.

Also found in the grave were intact silk stockings, though for some reason, her shoes were missing—likely taken by the executioner to sell as macabre souvenirs.

The Uncertainty Around Louis XVI’s Remains
The search for Louis XVI’s body proved far more difficult. The commission spent considerable time looking for his remains, and while they were eventually found, the official records from this part of the investigation are incomplete or possibly even deliberately altered. Even in the 19th century, there were doubts about whether the bones truly belonged to the executed king.

As for the Dauphin, Louis-Charles, his body was never found, fueling numerous conspiracy theories that persist to this day.

A Solemn Reburial
Despite these uncertainties, Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI were solemnly reburied in the restored Basilica of Saint-Denis in January 1815, in a grand ceremony attended by thousands.

Contemporary memoirists and foreign diplomats reported that ordinary Parisians openly wept at the sight of the funeral procession carrying the remains of the unfortunate royal couple—many of whom, just over 20 years earlier, had just as sincerely celebrated their deaths.