John II Casimir Vasa (1609-1672) arrived in France after his abdication in 1668 and was given the title of abbot of one of the oldest monasteries in Paris, Saint-Germain-des-Près. A welcome ceremony at the abbey took place on 17 November 1669. After his death in 1672, his body was buried in Wawel Cathedral and his heart in the abbey's church. The magnificent Parisian monument was commissioned by his widow, Louise Marie Gonzaga (1611-1667), and created by the excellent sculptors Gaspard and Balthazar Marsy, who worked at Versailles, among others. It was their most important work outside of royal patronage. They were court sculptors to the French king and are known for their numerous works found in the Tuileries Palace and Versailles in Paris, among others. The wall-mounted monument with the kneeling figure of the deceased on a sarcophagus, among panoplies, was originally flanked by the figures of two captives. The king is shown laying down the insignia of power, facing the altar (not preserved from the original chapel furnishings). The background is a carved curtain. The design of this monument, which ranks among the masterpieces of French sepulchral sculpture, is sometimes associated with Charles Le Brun, court painter and decorator to Louis XIV, who collaborated with the Marse brothers. Le Brun's drawing shows a composition very close to the executed monument. The author of the large relief in the chapel (about 2 m wide) depicting the royal victory at Beresteczko was the monastery sculptor Jean Thiebaut.

The composition of the monument, contained in a semi-circular niche, the upper part of which is revealed by a gaping curtain of yellowish-brown marble, consists of two parts. The statue of the kneeling king handing over the insignia of power is made of white marble. The lower part of the monument, in the form of a sarcophagus made of black marble, is filled with a bronze bas-relief depicting the Battle of Beresteczko, in which John Casimir was victorious over the Cossack-Tartar troops.

The monument was damaged during the French Revolution, and the sarcophagus with the heart was ransacked then. Two figures of Turkic prisoners of war, located below the sarcophagus, angels holding a curtain, and a plaque depicting the Battle of Beresteczko disappeared. The sarcophagus itself is said to have survived thanks to the intervention of French archaeologist Alexandre Lenoir, who had it moved to the Musée des monuments français, created in the former Augustinian monastery and opened to the public in 1795. The entire chapel, which originally also housed the altarpiece of St Casimir with a painting by Daniel Schultz (1615-1683) from Gdansk (the painter is said to have personally transported the painting to Paris around 1675), was also transformed after reconstruction in 1824. In 1927, a thorough restoration of the monument was carried out on the initiative of Kazimierz Woźnicki of the Polish Embassy in Paris. In 2010-2011, another conservation of the monument took place.

The original appearance of the composition of the monument is captured in engravings by Jean Marot from the late 17th century and by Nicolas Pigné from 1724. In 1912 the monument was painted by the Polish artist Konrad Krzyżanowski (painting lost).