Royal Chapel Dreux is a stunning necropolis

This is a 19th century building that houses the remains of royalty and their relatives from the Bourbon-Orleans family. The site itself at Dreux stretches back in time to 1023 though before that it was probably a Gallo-Romain site designed to protect the roads from Paris to Chartres. It was also at the crossroads of Viking incursions and skirmishes between various duchies.

A castle with eight round towers was constructed with a massive circular keep just after 1137 and vestiges of this can still be seen.

The town of Dreux and its region endured terrible suffering during the Hundred Years War and in 1421 it ended up in the hands of King Henry V of England. Over the centuries it was owned by various princes of the Bourbon family and ended up being partly demolished due to neglect. In the 18C the French Revolution had a bad effect here as the revolutionaries dug up and despoiled the graves and bodies of various nobles who had been interred on the site. Bodily remains were thrown in a ditch. In 1794 the great keep was blown up to use the stones for other things.

With the restoration of the Bourbons, the Duchess d'Orléans returned from exile and built a chapel which was completed in 1818 and the first of the coffins to house her family's remains was installed. Her son became Louis-Philippe, King of France in 1830 and he thought the chapel too small. It was radically enlarged and improved to the finest standards and it's this version we can visit to day. It showcases outstanding 19C craftsmanship.

The stained glass windows are, in fact, not your usual sort. The factory of Sèvres was commissioned to supply them but the old techniques had been lost. The director of Sèvres, who happened to be a mineralogist, conducted research and came up with some stunning results for painted glass.  The themes are all religious/political/allegorical.

In a side part of the chapel there is a set of beautifully executed painted glass works which one is not allowed to photograph. The detail is stunning and the lighting effects quite awesome. Mostly they feature depressing religious stories to do with Christ but somehow the light coming through behind the paintings lifts certain parts in an uplifting way.

The chapel was badly damaged during World War Two at the moment of liberation in 1944 when German shells struck several windows. Some windows could never be repaired as those skills have been lost.

The carving of the recumbent stone statues is very fine and different to what you usually see in cathedrals because this site is relatively modern. The sculptors have endeavoured to suggest the types of materials worn by the dead. They have carved to simulate lace, velvet, silk and the effect is impressive, natural and lacks any sense of the macabre.

This is an archaeological site too but with many of the stone coffins broken and ransacked with the contents dismembered and thrown away, most coffins would not hold much these days. The more modern section contains tombs for certain members who aren't actually interred there as their remains cannot be repatriated from sites such as Malta.

The stories behind many members of this family are sad, tragic, full of greed and ambition and some good works but in the end... exile and failure. The other branch of this family which was more directly associated with Louis XVI, Louis XVII and lastly Louis XVIII also failed politically though distant relations are still in existence  - the ones who survived the various revolutions, exile and world wars until the present day.

Tombs of particular note:

• Louise-Marie-Adelaide de Bourbon-Penthievre (1753-1821)The dowager Duchess d'Orléans who built the first chapel
• King Louis-Philippe (1773-1850) and Queen Marie-Amelie

Their brothers and sisters, children, grandchildren, wives and cousins are here. In a lower crypt not open to the public is the heart of Philippe d'Orléans (1674-1723), Regent of France and who was Louis XIV's nephew and thus regent to LouisXVI.

What surprised me me about all this is that it seemed to be common practice to remove organs from royal corpses and inter them in coffins in different places.

For more than a century the Chapel de Saint Louis has remained a necropolis reserved for funerals and memorial services but these days it also welcomes weddings and christenings of the young princes

Henri d’Orléans, Count of Paris and pretender to the defunct French throne, died in January 2019 - exactly 226 years after his distant cousin Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris.
His death, aged 85, was announced on Facebook by his son  Jean-Carl Pierre Marie d’Orléans who was born in 1962. So, the ancient Capetian dynasty lives on.