Oh. This is really interesting! I didn’t know that when I was at Saint Denis.

“ Anyhoo, two of the other Bourbon tombs contain the remains of two random old royals he brought from elsewhere in France. Now here’s the catch I referred to earlier: other than these Bourbon tombs, all of the others in the church are EMPTY!!

During the French Revolution the revolutionaries got a little carried away in their attempts to destroy anything and everything associated with the monarchy. There was a plan in 1793 to destroy all the royal tombs of St Denis. A level headed art professor intervened, arguing that regardless of political inclinations the tombs themselves were important works of French art and should be preserved. The revolutionaries agreed and left the tombs alone…but they removed all the bodies of the kings and queens and buried them in two giant pits next to the church! Many of the tombs were then moved to museums. After this, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined and buried in a secret location, and their young son—who never really had a chance to rule but technically became Louis XVII upon his father’s death—died in captivity and was buried in an unknown pauper’s grave (but not before his attending physician removed and saved his heart as a souvenir).

So as part of King Louis XVIII’s attempt to restore the dignity of the monarchy, he had all of the bodies dug up. Of course by then they were just a jumble of random bones and no one could tell whose were whose. So all of the bones were sealed inside the walls of a small chapel in the church where two giant plaques list the names of all the people whose bones rest behind them:” 

I hate people who destroy history