Capuchin Crypt

Beneath an unassuming church on the Neuer Markt, the Kapuzinergruft has gathered since 1633 almost the entire House of Austria: a hundred and fifty burials, bronze sarcophagi covered with crowned skulls, an accumulation that says better than any treaty what an unbroken dynasty is. It is there, not in Paris or Parma, that Napoleon's family was given back to the Habsburgs.

Marie Louise was laid there after her death at Parma on 17 December 1847. Her coffin bears her Austrian titles: Archduchess of Austria, Duchess of Parma. Nothing recalls that she was Empress of the French for four years, or that she held the regency of the Empire in 1814.

Her son had preceded her by fifteen years. Napoleon II, raised as the Duke of Reichstadt, died of tuberculosis at Schönbrunn on 22 July 1832, aged twenty-one, and joined the crypt beside his grandfather Francis I — the man who had handed over his daughter and then overthrown his son-in-law.

On 15 December 1940, the anniversary of the Return of the Ashes, Hitler had the Duke of Reichstadt's coffin moved to Les Invalides, as a gift to occupied France. The operation, staged for its effect, left the heart and entrails in Vienna, kept by Habsburg custom in two other crypts in the city. The French imperial family thus remains divided between two capitals, and the Eaglet between three churches.