From ruin to restoration
Sainte-Chapelle's restoration: 19th century to today
The French Revolution left it a grain store with a smashed spire. A 28-year restoration gave it back almost everything you see now.
Check tour dates on Viator ↗What the Revolution did
The chapel was turned into a store for grain, its exterior sculpture and royal emblems were smashed, and its spire was pulled down. The relics it was built to hold were dispersed, and the silver Grand-Châsse that displayed them was melted down.
The 19th-century campaign
Restoration began in 1840 and ran for twenty-eight years, led first by Félix Duban and then by Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Émile Boeswillwald, with the young Eugène Viollet-le-Duc assisting. The stained glass itself was restored between 1846 and 1855.
What's original and what's not
The restoration followed the surviving drawings and descriptions of the chapel closely. Nearly two-thirds of today's glass is the original thirteenth-century work, with the rest made to match it.
Recent conservation
The glass was taken out and stored during the Second World War. In 2008 a seven-year programme began to clean and protect all the stained glass, adding an outer protective glazing layer, and to clean the façade and repair sculpture; it finished with the rose window in 2015, in time for the 800th anniversary of Louis IX's birth.