The project was voted by acclamation.  The tombs were demolished between the 6th and 8th of August, 1793, and the announcement was made for the anniversary of the 10th of August, 1792, of “that grand, just, and retributive destruction, required in order that the coffins should be opened, and the remains of the tyrants be thrown into a ditch filled with quick-time, where they may be forever destroyed.  This operation will shortly take place.”

This was done in the following October.  For some days there was carried on a profanation even more sacrilegious than the demolition of the tombs.  The coffins containing the remains of kings and queens, princes and princesses, were violated.  On Wednesday, the 16th of October, 1798, at the very hour that Marie Antoinette mounted the scaffold,—­she who had so wept for her son, the first Dauphin, who died the 4th of June, 1789, at the beginning of the Revolution,—­the disinterrers of kings violated the grave of this child and threw his bones on the refuse heap.  Iconoclasts, jealous of death, disputed its prey, and they profaned among others the sepulchres of Madame Henrietta of England, of the Princess Palatine, of the Regent, and of Louis XV.

In the midst of these devastations, some men, less insensate than the others, sought at least to rescue from the hands of the destroyers what might be preserved in the interest of art.  Of this number was an artist, Alexandre Lenoir, who had supervised the demolition of the tombs of Saint-Denis.  He could not keep from the foundry, by the terms of the decree, the tombs of lead, copper, and bronze; but he saved the others from complete destruction—­ those that may be seen to-day in the church of Saint-Denis.  He had them placed first in the cemetery of the Valois, near the ditches filled with quicklime, where had been cast the remains of the great ones of the earth, robbed of their sepulchres.  Later, a decree of the Minister of the Interior, Benezech, dated 19 Germinal, An IV., authorizing the citizen Lenoir to have the tombs thus saved from destruction taken to the Museum of French Monuments, of which he was the conservator, and which had been installed at Paris, Rue des Petits Augustins.  From thence they were destined to be returned to the Church of Saint-Denis, under the reign of Louis XVIII.

At the height of his power, Napoleon dreamed of providing for himself the same sepulture as that of the kings, his predecessors.  He had decided that he would be interred in the Church of Saint-Denis, and had arranged for himself a cortege of emperors about the site that he had chosen for the vault of his dynasty.  He directed the construction of a grand monument dedicated to Charlemagne, which was to rise in the “imperialized” church.  The great Carlovingian emperor was to have been represented, erect, upon a column of marble, at the back of which statues in stone of the emperors who succeeded him were to have been placed.  But at the time of Napoleon’s fall, the monument had not been finished.  There had been completed only the statues, which have taken their rank in the crypt.  They represent Charlemagne, Louis le Debonnaire, Charles le Chauve, Louis le Begue, Charles le Gros, and even Louis d’Outremer, who, nevertheless, was only a king.