A mummy would have been buried by mistake with the bodies of revolutionaries under the July column in Paris.

A funeral gallery

The Place de la Bastille hides unexpected secrets from us… Did you know, for example, that the tower which sits in its center is dedicated to the dead of the July 1830 Revolution ? This is also why this tower is called the “Column of July”. But the monument rises above an even more mysterious place: a funeral gallery including… a mummy ! A tower erected in honor of the revolutionaries who died in July 1830 Born in 1840 after 5 years of construction thanks to the architects Alavoine and Duc, the Colonne de Juillet and its Génie de la Liberté were planned from the start to pay tribute to the revolutionaries who died during the July Revolution, also called the Three Glorious Days. However, before welcoming this high tower, the Place de la Bastille already had a monument : a huge elephant in plaster.

A commemorative monument

As a commemorative monument, the tower therefore serves as a tombstone for Parisians who fell on July 27, 28 and 29, 1830. Thus, under its imposing pedestal is a crypt housing the remains of fighters… as well as an Egyptian mummy ! Indeed, in 1840, in front of the colonnades of the Louvre, the municipal employees exhumed 58 bodies, where the police document only counts 57. In the rush, the gravediggers did not pay attention. However, a detail should have surprised them : one of the dead wears strange bandages on his arms and part of his body. And for good reason ! It is a mummy offered a few years earlier by Mehemet Ali to Louis XVIII. The one who is nicknamed the last of the pharaohs has never ceased, since his accession to power in 1804, to win the favors of France. He has, for this reason, flooded successive governments with gifts. After offering a pin that supposedly belonged to Cleopatra, a giraffe to Charles X, the Egyptian head of state sent his French counterpart a new token of his friendship: a millennial mummy !

The sea water penetrated into the transport box

The royal remains transported in 1824 to the Louvre unfortunately suffered a lot from the trip, the sea water penetrated into the transport box and caused the mold of the mummy ! The state of putrefaction of the body is such that it is decided to bury it immediately in the garden of the Louvre. There where the victims of the shootings in the nearby rue de Rivoli, hence the misunderstanding ! Once accessible, the July column can no longer be visited. On the other hand, it is planned to reopen the crypt to visitors soon.