Grand Châtelet

I would have been bronze.

I would have been the guy selling slightly mouldy onions outside the Châtelet who gets accidentally trampled by a Duke's horse in the first act.

Right, let us load into the server.

Part 1, the map.

On the right bank, to the north, was the Ville, the town proper.

This was the commercial engine of Paris.

The great market at Les Halles, the river port at the Place de Greve, the workshops of the guilds, the butcher's quarter near the Grand Châtelet, the merchants' houses, and increasingly, the grand townhouses of the nobility.

When princes and dukes came to Paris, they built or bought massive urban palaces here, known as hotels.

Public viewing in Paris was actually kind of the official identification procedure.

It wasn't an attraction that someone's like, "Hey, this would be a fun little sightseeing thing." Before the famous building that we're gonna talk about existed, unidentified bodies were displayed at a place called the Grand Châtelet Prison.

The Paris Police Ordinance would tell staff, you need to display the body for three days with its clothing nearby.

And these were people that died that no one knew who they were.

So they would display the body, they'd have its clothes nearby, and that way if a member of the public came in and looked at it, they could say, "Oh man, that looks like my Aunt Bertha," or whatever.

Then the person who recognized the body, the deceased, would have to make a declaration to a magistrate or one of the police commissioners, and then the prefect of the police, which I assume would be like the police chief, could then authorize the body's release, and then they would release it to the family or bury it at least under the person's name.

So in 1804, so just four years later, there was a police prefect in Paris named Louis-Nicolas Dubois, and he moved the morgue from the Châtelet to a dedicated building on the Quai du Marché-Neuf.

And there was a new police ordinance, and this ordinance directed that unclaimed bodies found in the Seine or anywhere else in the jurisdiction had to be taken there.