The Dungeons of Old Paris / Being the Story and Romance of the Most Celebrated Prisons of the Monarchy and the Revolution

A historical survey examines Paris's most notorious detention sites, describing their architecture, routines, and the legal and social mechanisms—feudal, seigneurial, ecclesiastical, and royal—that sustained them. Individual chapters detail the Conciergerie, Vincennes, the Great and Little Châtelet, the Temple, Bicêtre, Sainte-Pélagie, the Abbaye, the Luxembourg in 1793, the Bastille, prisons associated with Aspasia, and La Roquette, combining architectural description, accounts of cells and oubliettes, and anecdotes about notable detainees. The narrative emphasizes the punitive logic of vengeance embodied in lettres de cachet and other instruments, and traces how these institutions reflected and shaped French justice leading up to and during the Revolution.