Stones Tell Stories
Inconveniently Dead
Fontaine des Innocents
The Catacombs
Following long spring rains in 1780, a retaining wall of the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents (Holy Innocents Cemetery) collapsed, and putrefying corpses spilled into the basement of an adjacent building. The cemetery, which was located near the city’s main food market, was ordered closed. Human remains were exhumed and moved.
The shocking event provided a windfall, though a grisly one: pools of adipocere (“corpse wax”) that had oozed from decaying fatty tissue. Parisians collected it, rendered it into soap and candles and then washed their clothes and illuminated their evenings by the fat of their forebears.
The closing of the cemetery, the city’s largest necropolis, was followed by the shuttering of all parish cemeteries within city limits. This marked a major step in the urbanization of Paris. A growing, modern city simply could not host the health hazard of over-stuffed cemeteries that stunk to high hell.
Today, the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents—along with a brisk business in prostitution that once flourished there—is gone except for one vestige. A 16th century fountain that once stood next to the cemetery was relocated to the center of the square, now known as Place Joachim-du-Bellay. Now, the square if filled with pigeons, bag-laden shoppers from the nearby Forum des Halles schlep through, and teens who buzz through on motorized scooters. In the daily lives of Parisians who live or work nearby, there is little notice of the 2 million Parisians who were interred here over six centuries.
The burial ground, which had an accompanying church, dates from the 12th century, when it was called Champeaux. Initially, there were individual tombs, but around 1200 the mural ground was refitted for mass burials and enclosed with a wall three meters high. Renamed Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, it was open to all, and corpses were taken in from 22 other parishes. Also accepted were corpses fished from the Seine, discarded by Hotel-Dieu (hospital) or found at the Court of Miracles, a beggar’s hideout. Throughout plagues, famines and normal city life, business was brisk, and the church profited considerably from burial fees.
Burials were done in an open pit that held 1500 bodies. When it was full, earth was heaped atop over the bodies, and another pit was opened. In practice, burial was only temporary: Once the flesh of bodies in the mass grave had decomposed, the remains were exhumed, remaining flesh burned off, and bones were laid up in large charnel houses that ringed the edge of the cemetery.
Over centuries of mass burials, however, the decomposing human flesh had “fattened” the soil in the burial ground to the point where decaying flesh no longer could be absorbed. The bodies just laid under a thin layer of earth, generating foul emanations that sickened those living nearby and purifyied their food.
By the 18th century, Paris recognized that its overstuffed cemeteries posed a threat to the health of its residents, particularly those who lived nearby and were sickened by the odors. A cemetery reform movement took shape. In 1737, the Parlement de Paris commissioned a study of the situation. Doctors were appointed to assess the effect of the cemeteries on the spread of disease. In 1763, Parlement issued a report confirming that these urban cemeteries were causing a dangerous situation. In 1765, Parliament issued decrees for churches to close their cemeteries, but the clergy ignored them, despite warnings of an impending “sanitary catastrophe.”
That catastrophe occurred.
"Exhumation of Bones in the Cemetery des Innocents" by Jean-Nicolas Sobre, 1787
Removal of the Remains
The cemetery was closed for good in 1780, and other cemetery closings followed at Chausée-d’Antin, Saint-Joseph, Saint Sulpice, and Ile Saint-Louis. As for handling the offending remains of the…inconveniently dead? Paris came up with an ingenious idea: storing their bones in abandoned mining tunnels that ran beneath the city.
The tunnels, which dated as early as the 14th century and which had provided much of the limestone of which Paris was constructed, had been ordered closed in 1776 following several surface collapses that had swallowed up homes and streets.
In 1786, the city began exhuming remains from Cimetière des Saints-Innocents and removing bones and skulls from its charnel houses. In the burial ground, workers dug down 10 feet and exhumed 15,000 to 20,000 bodies. This exposed pools of the aforementioned adipocere (“corpse wax”), formed by a bacterial hydrolysis of body fat in the oxygen-free environment (and which can exist underground for centuries). Coffin wood was piled up and bonfires lit to burn residual flesh off the remains, and the remaining bones were relocated to the tunnels.
Thus began an enormous municipal ossuary called the Catacombs.
The removal and transporting of these human remains was done under cover of night. Horse-drawn catafalques (funeral wagons), were loaded with bones then driven out of the city to the entrance point of Tombe Issoire (now Place Denfert Rochereau in the 14th Arrondissement). There, the bones were poured down a chute, and workers below stacked them throughout 11,000 square meters of tunnels. The removal process then was repeated at other cemeteries and charnel houses.
We can visualize this horrid night scene courtesy of several paintings and drawing on display in the Musée Carnavalet. In particular: “The Exhuming of Bodies in the Cimetière des Saints-Innocents” painted by Jean-Nicolas Sobre in 1787. Also shown is a rendering of the frieze (now lost) of “Dance of the Macabre,” that had been painted on the side of a charnel house. It was based on a poem “Le Dit de trois Morts et des trios vifs” (The Tales of the Three Dead and the Three Living) that concludes that all people, rich and poor, are eventually equalized by death.
Charles Baudelaire, in the middle of the 19th century, penned words that may have referred to the grim sight of this caravan of human remains:
Burial
If on some woebegone night
A generous Christian soul
Behind an old garbage-dump, might
Drop your proud corpse in a hole
—Les Fleurs du Mal
A Moveable Thirst
As for the collapsed cemetery wall that prompted this series of events, we only can imagine it. Remnants of the wall may lay below the square; or perhaps stones from the wall were put into city streets when the church, charnel houses and cemetery were destroyed in 1787.
The fountain is the only vestige of the square’s past. It was constructed in 1549 at the side of the square at rue St. Denis and was called Fontaine des Nymphs or Fountain of the Nymphs. The architect was Pierre Lescot, who also designed a wing of the Louvre named for him. The sculptor Jean Goujon, who also worked with Lescot on the Louvre, contributed the six nymphs that adorn the fountain, in an Italian Renaissance style.
With the destruction of the church and cemetery, the fountain, or a recreation of it, was moved to the center of the square. It was given a fourth side (since it had abutted a wall, it had only three sides) and a frieze was added.
The square was reassigned as Marché des Innocents, where herbs and vegetables were sold. The square was renamed for the poet Joachim-du-Bellay (1522-1560). In 1858, the market was removed when the pavilions of Les Halles were constructed there.
The four basins of the fountain had provided water to the market. When the flow of water to the fountain was increased under Napoleon in 1810, bas reliefs at the fountain base were removed and sent to the Louvre.
In 1858, under Napoleon III, the fountain was moved to its present location, placed on a new pedestal, and six water basins were placed in a vertical formation.
The name Innocents refers to the Massacre of the Innocents, told in the Gospel of Matthew. In the New Testament story, the young male children of Bethlehem are murdered on orders from King Herod, vengeful at being outwitted by the Magi who had sought out the newborn Christ. The event may have been mythical, but the Catholic Church holds the massacred children to have been the first Christian martyrs.
Fontaine des Innocents, Place Joachim du Bellay
Municipal Ossuary, the Catacombs
Catacombs: From Quarry to Ossuary
Over a period of nearly three-decades, from 1787 to 1814, the remains of 4 million deceased Parisians were transferred from city cemeteries to former mining tunnels that became the city’s ossuary known as The Catacombs. Another 2 million skeletons were brought here later in the 19th century, for a total of 6 million.
The Catacombs can be seen today; in fact, touring them is a hot ticket made well in advance. The name was derived from the Catacombs of Rome, and it marked a new era in the relationship between the living and the dead of Paris.
The Catacombs, consecrated in 1786, were reorganized, reinforced and opened to visitors in 1809, and they became a prime attraction.
This, despite the strenuous task of descending and ascending stairs. Also, lighting was limited to candles, and following a black stripe on the ceiling was essential, lest you wander into eternal darkness and oblivion. While the tunnels with human remains are vast, they occupy only 1/800th the area of the underground quarries beneath Paris.
The Catacombs reached a height of popularity during the Paris Exhibitions held in the latter 19th century. The introduction of electricity in 1908 (an upgrade from candlelight) boosted interest further. In recent years, visiting the Catacombs has reemerged as a popular “bucket list” experience that attracts 1 million visitors a year. There is a bizarre sense of revelry in the crowds that line up to descend to the “Empire of the Dead.”
Touring the Catacombs provides an experience of unsettling intensity that varies with expectation and preparation. You are physically and possibly spiritually connecting with 6 million Parisians of past eras whose bones surround you and call out to be touched and explored. History—and a visceral sense of historical simultaneity—gets real.
The Catacombs are no place for the timid nor infirm. It involves descending 131 steps on a winding staircase to a reach caves 20 meters (equal to a five-story building) below Paris streets, then hiking a few hundred meters to reach the official point of entry to the Catacombs. Here, a doorway bears a foreboding inscription: “Arrète! C’est ici l’empire de la mort.” (Stop: Here is the Empire of the Dead).
Beyond the doorway, you encounter walls of bones called hagues. Skulls and leg and thigh bones, are stacked in oddly neat rows. There also are recesses where bones are heaped.
There are more bones on display that one can easily process, and the experience is made weirder by eerie lighting and a suffocating sense that comes from being in dark, low-ceilinged tunnels far below the earth.
Along the row are names of the cemeteries and street locations from which bones were contributed: Sainte-Innocents, St. Eustache, St. Nicholas des Champs, l’Eglise St. Jean, l’Eglise St. Laurent, l’Hopital de la Trinité, la Place Maubert, l”eglise de St. André des Arts, de la Madeleine, l’Eglise et du Cloitre des Cupicins St. Honoré.
The tour stretches 1.5 kilometers, and it concludes with a climb of 112 steps to exit into a brightly lit gift shop (talk about a jarring transition). There one can purchase macabre, skull-themed knick-knacks, apparel, and some good historical books in English and French.
When you come out on the street, there is a further layer of disorientation, as you now are about six blocks away from the point of entry. Also, given what you have just witnessed, you may be forever changed in your perception of cities and the masses who have dwelled in them.
Encountering Geological Time
The quarry story coincides with the cemetery story. The tunnels you travel through are part of an extensive quarry system (in total 250 kilometers of tunnels) dating to the 14th century—when they replaced open-pit queries from the first century. In geological time, you travel back 45-48 million years to the creation of the limestone (the quarry of the quarries) from the dissipation of a tropical sea that existed where Paris now lies. Here, as the website explains, sediment of marine animals and mud formed limestone, the very “Lutetian limestone” aka “Paris stone” with which the city is largely built. On close examination, fossils of crustaceans are easily visible in stone walls and buildings all over the city. In an odd sense, the bones of Parisians past are again merging with soil in the cauldron that formed the materials that made Paris possible.
Musée des Egouts de Paris, Museum of the Sewers of Paris
Sanitation and Urbanization
The closing of church-run cemeteries in the center of Paris and the creation of a municipal ossuary was a critical step in the urbanization of Paris. First, it made a huge improvement in sanitation. This would be followed with the establishment of modern sewers during the mid-century renovation of Paris in the Second Empire (creating another tourist attraction, the Sewer Tour).
The closing of cemeteries also caused a clash of narratives between state and church, which for years had disregarded calls to close their overcrowded churchyards. First, closing the cemeteries represented a state intrusion into a church-run, profit-making enterprise. Second, it severed parish-based cemeteries from the narrative that the deceased should remain in proximity to the living, whose prayers for the dead would prompt a resurrection and community of souls in the hereafter. Further, frequent family visits of graves in a churchyard cemented the church’s central role in nurturing the relationship between deceased and bereaved.
The church had always asserted authority over who is buried in their cemetery—and who is excluded due to ethnic identity, profligate sinning or lapses of faith, as defined by the church. The churchyard was a pillar of church power. However, the anti-clerical juggernaut that rolled over Paris with the Revolution in 1789 would render all of these points moot. The iron grip of the church was about to be severely defanged, its vast properties seized by the state and church doors closed.
In the Revolutionary spirit, great debate was had over the issued of the egalitarianism of death and burial. Should private burials and gaudy mausoleums be allowed? Should all religious symbols be excised from the burial process? This came at a time when church burial yards were being obsoleted in favor of cemeteries, “places of rest” rather than adjuncts to church doctrine.
In terms of cemetery design, Paris would lead Europe and the New World with the concept of a “landscape garden” or “country garden” cemetery, as exemplified by Pere Lachaise.
As for the new municipal ossuary, it includes 11,000 square meters, of which 800 meters of galleries can be visited. The entire network of quarry tunnels measures 250 kilometers beneath city streets—where cave-ins still occur. in recent years, a house and several graves were swallowed up in separate events.
Timelines
Cimetière des Saints-Innocents
12C Cimetière des Sainte Innocentes (Holy Innocents Cemetery) opens
14-15C Charnel houses built to relieve overcrowding of cemetery
1669 Danse of the Macabre mural destroyed
1765. Parlement de Paris orders cemeteries in city closed; decrees ignored
1780. Wall collapses, bodies spill out; cemetery and is closed
1785 Remains begin to be removed to La Tomb Issoire (Catacombs)
1788 Transfer of bones concluded
1787 Church destroyed; flower and herb market established in newly constructed square named for poet Joachim-du-Bellay. Fountain (oldest monumental fountain in Paris) moved to center
1858 Market closed, Les Halles pavilions constructed at site
The Quarries to the Catacombs
1 C Open pit quarries
14 C Underground quarries established
1774 Collapse at Denfert-Rochereau, 300 meters of land disappear
1776 Louis XVI: Decree prohibits digging under city streets
1777 Creation of Inspectorate of Quarries
1786 Consecration of Tombe-Issoire as municipal ossuary
1809 Tunnels shored up with supporting pillars by Vicomte de Thury, Inspector General of Quarries; Catacombs opened to public
1842-60 Additional remains added to Catacombs as city renovated
1861 Nadar photographs Catacombs with artificial lighting, models
2002 Carnavalet Museum of City of Paris gains authority, promotes visits
2017 New exit and bookstore opened
2019. Inauguration of new entrance, meditation ares, restore Ledoux House
Plan de Paris, Braun et Hogenberg, 1572
Growth of Paris and Cemeteries
The origins of Paris lie with the Parisii tribe that dwelled along the Seine beginning in the Iron Age—and the burial or disposal of bodies of the deceased has been inevitable since that time.
The Gallo-Roman town of Lutitia was established on the Ile de le Cité 2,000 years ago, and excavated ruins can be viewed in the Archeological Crypt, located on the parvis of Notre Dame Cathedral. Several ancient tombs were discovered in the basement of the cathedral in the course of restoring Notre Dame from the 2019 fire. Included in the discovery is a 14th century lead sarcophagus that may contain a church dignitary. The sarcophagus has yet to be opened, but a preliminary view with a small camera inserted inside provides clues to burial customs.
The city grew outward from “la Cité” in two directions.
The Left Bank was known as l’Université, for the many colleges located there. The Cluny Museum holds crypts. Also, a Hebrew cemetery was uncovered in the Saint-Michel district, where a Jewish community thrived in the 12th-13th centuries around the corner of rue Pierre-Sarrazin and rue de la Huchette Jews were expelled from France in 1306 by Philippe le Bel. The land went to Dominicans.
The Right Bank was known as “la Ville” for the growing city that Paris became. Cemeteries here were attached to eglises or parishes. One of the oldest cemeteries on the Right Bank is Cimetière du Calvaire in Montmartre. It opened in 1688 at the Montmartre Abbey. Originally outside the city, it may not have been subject to closure. It was damaged in the Revolution’s then reopened in 1801. In 1831 it closed, when the Cimetiere Saint-Vincent was opened. The cemetery is tiny: just 85 burial plots. Another notable burial ground is Cimetire de Picpus. Lafayette. https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cimetiere-de-picpus-picpus-cemetery
The Père Lachaise Effect
The events at Cimetière des Saints-Innocents and the Catacombs had far-reaching influence on urbanism in Paris and in other major cities around the world. The template for the cemetery of the future was Cimetière Père Lachaise.
Père Lachaise Cemetery: 20th Ar.
By 1800, a new plan was afoot for the burial of the dead: large, park-like cemeteries on the perimeter of the city. The first was Cimetière du Père Lachaise, opened in 1804 and named for Father Francois de la Chaise (1624-1709), a Jesuit priest who was confessor to Louis XIV and who had lived at this hillside location overlooking the city. For Parisians it was a tough sell. The habit of visiting the graves of loved ones nearby was hard to break; Pere Lachaise wasn’t even in city limits (until 1860). An answer was found in marketing. The remains of luminaries in French culture and literature would be relocated to Pere Lachaise: First in were the remains of Jean de la Fontaine and Moliere, followed by the ill-fated lovers Heloise and Abelard.
Celebrity proved a steady draw. Today, a stroll through Pere Lachaise is a wonderful activity, and, with a celerity internment map on your phone you can visit the graves of countless artists, writers, diplomat, etc.
Luminaries: Edith Piaf, Colette, Baron Haussmann, Chopin, Proust, Sarah Bernhardt.
FACTS: 110 acres, 1 million permanent residents, 3.5 million annual visitors, making it the “most visited necropolis in the world.”
Montparnasse Cemetery: 14th Ar.
Montparnasse Cemetery (opened 1824) was originally the cemetery of the southern portion of the city.
Luminaries: Baudelaire, Dreyfus, Serge Gainsbourg, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Tristan Tzara, de Maupassant.
Facts: 47 acres, 300,000 permanent residents
Montmartre Cemetery: 18th Ar.
Montparnasse Cemetery (opened 1825) was established as the cemetery serving the northern portion of the city. It was originally known as Cimetière des Grandes Carriers after the gypsum quarries once worked there.
Luminaries: Piere Cardin, Degas, Dumas, Heine, Stendahl, Truffaut.
Facts: 10.5 acres, 300,000 permanent residents
Passy Cemetery: 16th Ar.
Passy Cemetery (opened 1820) replaced an older cemetery that was closed in 1802. It was regarded as the necropolis of the aristocracy.
Luminaries: Manet, Berthe Morisot, Debussy, Fauré
Facts: 4.3 acres, 2,600 permanent Parisians
Influence on other urban cemeteries:
London: Kensal-Green Cemetery (opened 1833), considered too far out of town, being a full mile north of Paddington Station. Inspired by Pere Lachaise, Greek and Gothic style buildings. One of Magnificent Seven cemeteries in London.
Facts: 72 acres, 250,000 permanent residents
New York City: Green-Wood Cemetery (opened 1838) Located in Brooklyn, this was one of the first rural cemeteries in America. By 1860, it was a success. It drew a half-million visitors a year for family outings on its 478 acres. Now a National Historic Landmark and home to 570,000 permanent residents, many artists and political figures.
Facts: 478 acres, 600,000 permanent residents
Cambridge, Mass: Mount Auburn Cemetery (opened 1831) is considered the first rural, garden cemeteries in the United States. It combined classical monuments in a hilly terrain, with vistas to Boston, four miles away. The design was inspired by Pere Lachaise, and, in turn, it influenced the Green-Wood Cemetery.
Facts: 174 acres, 93,000 permanent residents