For more than a thousand years, from Dagobert I to Louis XVIII, most of the kings and queens of France were buried in the Saint-Denis Basilica. At the instigation of King Louis IX, sculpted stone recumbents were installed in the church above the tombstones. During the Revolution, the Convention ordered the destruction of the symbols of the Ancien Régime. The lead roof of the basilica was melted down to make weapons. The royal tombs were systematically desecrated and the bones thrown into mass graves, under the detached eye of a former monk of Saint-Denis who drew up an exhumation report.