On the île de la Cité, under the towers reflected in the Seine from the quai de l’Horloge, stands the lower part of a palace that was the residence of the kings of France for four centuries. After that it was a court and then a prison, and the Revolution locked up here the people it was sending to the guillotine, Marie Antoinette among them.
What you visit, then, is a building with two biographies laid one over the other, and the second has covered the first: you walk into a fourteenth-century Gothic hall the size of a church and come out along a corridor of cells.
The ticket has a peculiarity worth knowing before you buy it. The Conciergerie on its own costs 13 euros, but the combined ticket with the Sainte-Chapelle, which is in the same complex, has two different prices depending on where you live: 23 euros for citizens of the European Economic Area and for anyone who has legally lived there for more than four months, 30 euros for everybody else. If you are coming from Britain, the United States, Canada or Australia, you are in the second group. The combined ticket is sold only on the Sainte-Chapelle site: I looked for it on the Conciergerie page and it is not on sale there. What you find elsewhere, booking boxes included, is a different thing: a guided visit with tickets included, not the combined ticket of the national monuments.
What is left of the kings’ palace underneath the prison of the Revolution?
Let’s go!
1. The palace the kings walked out of
The palais de la Cité was the centre of Capetian power: the kings lived here, administered justice here and kept the treasury here. The Conciergerie is the lower part of that palace, the service floors, and it survived precisely because it was the least noble part: what you visit are the kitchens and storerooms of a royal residence, not its state rooms.
The turning point came with Charles V, who left the palace in 1364 and moved the royal residence elsewhere in the city. From then on the island remained the seat of justice and administration, the palace passed to the Parlement of Paris, and the lower part began its second life: a prison in the charge of the concierge, the official who kept the building, and it is from him that the name comes.
2. The salle des Gens d’armes, a church without an altar
How did you eat at the court of a fourteenth-century king?
You ate here, which is why the hall is enormous. Built by Philip IV the Fair between 1300 and 1314, it measures 1,785 square metres and is divided into four aisles on piers: between one and two thousand people a day, servants and the king’s soldiers, took their meals here.
Take the people away in your head and the architecture is left: it is the largest surviving civil Gothic hall in Europe, and if it looks like a church that is because of the vaults, not because of the use. In the Middle Ages it was a refectory, and at need a storeroom and a dormitory.
3. The kitchens of John the Good
Next door, towards the Seine, are the kitchens built around 1353 under John II the Good. They have four great corner fireplaces, one at each angle of the room, and they were the cuisines du commun, the ones that cooked for the staff. Stand in the middle and look at all four at once: it is the quickest way to understand how many people ate in here.
The floor above, where the kitchens that cooked for the king himself were, is gone: what you see is half the system. For exceptional banquets the two kitchens worked together. How many people there were to feed you can work out from the fireplaces, sized on a scale we would today call industrial.
4. The rue de Paris, and the executioner’s nickname
Part of the salle des Gens d’armes was walled off and raised to make a passage towards the cells. It is called the rue de Paris, and it is the point where the tone of the building changes.
The name does not come from the city. It comes from «Monsieur de Paris», which was the nickname of the executioner of Paris. It is a turn of phrase that describes the Ancien Régime rather well: the man who carried out the sentences was not named but pointed to with a polite periphrasis, and that periphrasis ended up christening a corridor.
5. Whoever paid got a better cell
Under the Revolution the prisoners were three times as many as under the Ancien Régime, well over five hundred in the worst months. They did not stay long: the Revolutionary Tribunal, which operated from March 1793 to May 1795, judged quickly, and after the verdict you left, one way or the other.
The detail that makes the prison real is that you paid for your imprisonment. The poorest, the pailleux, slept crowded together on straw in small dark cells, with no furniture. Anyone who could afford it bought the pistole, paid accommodation: a larger cell, a bed, the right to receive visitors and even to have a portrait made before the execution. The cells you walk through are reconstructions, but the hierarchy they describe is documented.
Outside is the cour des femmes, the yard where the women prisoners spent their daylight hours, and it has stayed almost as it was.
6. The room of names
One room on the route is given over to nothing but a list: the names of the more than four thousand people tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal between 1793 and 1795.
It is the room that changes the visit, and it is worth not hurrying through it. The Revolution, told through this building, tends to shrink to a queen and a handful of famous names; the list puts the proportions back, and shows that most of those people are known to nobody.
On another wall is a plaque that closes the circle: it says that Maximilien Robespierre spent his last moments here, on 10 Thermidor Year II, which is 28 July 1794. The man who had been the face of the Terror entered this prison by the same door as those he had condemned, almost a year after her, and left it for the guillotine the same day.
7. Marie Antoinette, seventy-six days
Where did the Revolution keep its most closely guarded prisoner?
The queen arrived at the Conciergerie on the night of 1 to 2 August 1793, transferred on her own from the prison of the Temple, and she stayed seventy-six days, until the trial and the execution of 16 October.
During her imprisonment her cell was moved, for security reasons, to the spot where the chapelle expiatoire stands today. In 1816, with the Restoration, the architect Peyre turned that cell into a sacred place: black walls covered in silver tears, an altar set where the queen’s bed is supposed to have been, a stained glass window with her initials and three paintings of the period. It is not a reconstruction: it is the real space, turned into a chapel by people who wanted to make her a Christian martyr.
Marie Antoinette is not the only person remembered in the chapel. A white marble stele, with a profile carved inside a roundel, is dedicated to Madame Élisabeth, the sister of Louis XVI, guillotined in her turn on 10 May 1794: the Restoration used this room to remember the whole family, not a single prisoner.
Of the bodies, there is nothing here. Those executed on place de la Révolution ended up in the cemetery of the Madeleine, and from there, in 1859, their bones were carried to the Catacombes de Paris, where a plaque still says so. Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are the exception: exhumed during the Restoration, they lie in the basilica of Saint-Denis.
8. The mannequin that is no longer there
Now the thing that almost none of the guides in circulation has updated, and which will save you looking for a room that does not exist.
Between 1989 and 2016 the Conciergerie showed a reconstruction of the cell with a mannequin of the queen seen from behind, and it is the image you will still find all over the internet. That scene had two faults: it was a piece of staging that looked authentic, and it was not in the right place, because the real cell had been turned into a chapel a century and a half earlier.
On 14 December 2016 the Conciergerie took it down and opened the present route, with eight rooms restored in augmented reality on the HistoPad, the tablet they hand you at the entrance: you point the screen at the room and see the three-dimensional reconstruction of how it looked laid over it. The cachot, the cell, is what you see this way, and the difference between the bare room of 1793 and the chapel of 1816 takes you two seconds to grasp.
Warning: the tablets are handed out only until 16:15, an hour and a quarter before closing. Anyone who comes in later visits without one, and since half the story goes through it, I would advise against arriving late in the afternoon.
Before you leave, from the quai de l’Horloge look at the square tower on the corner of the boulevard du Palais. It was built in 1350 by John the Good, and in 1371 Charles V had the first public clock in Paris installed in it, the work of Henri de Vic, with a dial that later received the figures carved by Germain Pilon. In a city where time was marked by church bells, that clock imposed the king’s hour.
Practical information
Details checked on 28 September 2026 on the official site paris-conciergerie.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. Admission to the Conciergerie alone costs 13 euros. The combined ticket with the Sainte-Chapelle costs 23 euros for citizens and legal residents of more than four months in a country of the European Economic Area and 30 euros for everybody else, and it is sold only on the Sainte-Chapelle site. Warning: if you are coming from outside Europe you pay seven euros more for the same ticket. It is the same two-tier pricing the Louvre has applied since 2026, and it is worth knowing before you reach the desk. Opening hours. The monument opens every day 9:30-18:00, and the last admission is at 17:30. The HistoPad tablets are handed out only until 16:15. Closing days. It closes on 1 May and 25 December. In 2026 it closes exceptionally all day on Thursday 1 and Friday 2 October, and on 8 October it closes at 14:00. Warning: the official site contradicts itself on that last date, because it writes «mercredi 8 octobre» and 8 October 2026 is a Thursday. If you are passing through in those days, check the page again: the early closing may be on the 7th. Free admission. Free entry goes to under-18s, to 18 to 25 year olds who are citizens of the European Union or legally resident in France, to disabled visitors and their companion, to anyone looking for work with a certificate less than six months old and to holders of a valid pass éducation. Admission is free for everyone on the first Sunday of January, February, March and November. The pass. The Conciergerie is included in the Paris Museum Pass. Getting there. The address is 2 boulevard du Palais. The stops are Cité on line 4, Châtelet on lines 1, 4, 7, 11 and 14, and Saint-Michel on the RER B and C. How long it takes. The visit with the HistoPad asks for an hour and a half; without the tablet, an hour. With the Sainte-Chapelle in the same round, count on half a day.
Where to go from here
In the same courtyard is the Sainte-Chapelle, which Louis IX had built inside the palace to house the crown of thorns, and it is the reason the combined ticket exists. The other place in Paris where the Revolution can be visited in the rooms where it happened is the Panthéon, which has been burying the great men of France since 1791, half an hour’s walk from here. If you want the history of Paris told in full, the Musée Carnavalet in the Marais has one of the richest revolutionary sections in Europe and its permanent collection is free. And the considered list of the city’s masterpieces, museum by museum, is in artworks to see in Paris.
Photo credits: the towers from the pont au Change by IlonaThoumazet (CC BY-SA 4.0); salle des Gens d’armes by @lain G (CC BY-SA 2.0); cour des femmes by Chatsam (CC BY-SA 3.0); Robespierre plaque by Tangopaso (public domain), from Wikimedia Commons.
