The Royal Chapel of Dreux (French: Chapelle royale de Dreux) situated in Dreux, France, is the traditional burial place of members of the House of Orléans. It is an important early building in the French adoption of Gothic Revival architecture, despite being topped by a dome. Starting in 1828, Alexandre Brogniart, director of the Sèvres porcelain manufactory, produced fired-enamel paintings on large panes of plate glass for King Louis-Philippe, an important early French commission in Gothic Revival taste, preceded mainly by some Gothic features in a few jardins paysagers.
Penthièvre died in March 1793, and his body was laid to rest in the crypt beside his parents. On November 21 of that same year, in the midst of the French Revolution, a mob desecrated the crypt and threw the ten bodies into a mass grave in the Chanoines cemetery of the Collégiale Saint-Étienne. In 1816, the Duke of Penthièvre's daughter, the Duchess of Orléans, had a new chapel built on the site of the mass grave of the Chanoines cemetery, as the final resting place for her family. In 1830, Louis Philippe I, King of the French, son of the Duchess of Orléans, embellished and enlarged the chapel which was renamed the Royal Chapel of Dreux, now the necropolis of the Orléans royal family.
^G. Lenotre, Le Château de Rambouillet, six siècles d'histoire, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1930, reprint: Denoël, Paris, 1984, (215 pages), chapter 5: Le prince des pauvres, pp. 78-79
^Not buried in the chapel is the Princess Maria Teresa Luisa of Savoy, Princess de Lamballe, Penthièvre's daughter-in-law, a victim of the September massacres during the French Revolution, killed at the La Force prison in Paris, on 3 September 1792. Buried in the Enfants-Trouvés cemetery, her body could not be identified later on: Michel de Decker, La Princesse de Lamballe, Librairie Académique Perrin, Collection historique dirigée par André Castelot, Paris, 1979, chapter XII: Ils sont blanchis par le malheur, p. 265.
^After Philippe, duc d'Orléans, Philippe Égalité (1747-1793), was executed in November 1793, his body was buried in the Madeleine cemetery in Paris. It was never found.
