Stories in Stone Paris: A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries & Their Residents

By Douglas Keister

The intrigue of death in the City of Love

Paris, city of lights, city of love, city of magic, city of art, city of death. Around twelve million people call the Paris metropolitan area home, and millions more call it their permanent home, including upwards of seven million in the catacombs in the Montparnasse district.

The cemeteries and monuments in Stories in Stone Paris cut across a wide swath of the last two hundred years of Paris history. With this field guide in hand, discover the funerary architecture, memorials and symbolism within twenty-eight of Paris’ notable resting places, including GPS coordinates for many gravesites.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibbs Smith
• Release date: Sep 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781423630609

Douglas Keister

Douglas Keister has photographed fourteen award-winning, critically acclaimed books (including Red Tile Style: America's Spanish Revival Architecture, The Bungalow: America's Arts & Crafts Home, and Storybook Style: America's Whimsical Homes of the Twenties) earning him the title "America's most noted photographer of historic architecture." He also writes and illustrates magazine articles and contributes photographs and essays to other books, calendars, posters, and greeting cards. Doug lives in Chico, California, and travels frequently to photograph and lecture on historic architecture and photography.

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Stories in Stone Paris

A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries and Their Residents

Douglas Keister

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Stories in Stone Paris

A Field Guide to Paris Cemeteries and Their Residents

Digital Edition 1.0

Text © 2013 Douglas Keister

Photographs © 2013 Douglas Keister

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

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ISBN: 978-1-4236-3060-9

To Marie Beleyme, who betters our future by honoring our past.

A gravesite

Stories in Stone Paris

Table of Contents

Death in the City of Love The Paris Catacombs The Big Three Père-Lachaise Montmartre Cemetery Montparnasse Cemetery The Small Cemeteries Passy Cemetery St. Vincent Cemetery Charonne Cemetery Auteuil Cemetery Picpus Cemetery The Dog Cemetery Les Invalides The Panthéon Saint-Étienne-du-Mont Saint-Denis Eternal Excursions Cemetery Architecture & Monument Styles Cemetery Symbolism Acknowledgments Map

Death in the City of Love

Illustration of the Eifeel Tower.

Paris, city of lights, city of love, city of magic, city of art, city of death. Some twelve million people call the Paris metropolitan area home including about two and a quarter million within Paris’ 20 arrondissements. Millions more call Paris their permanent home, including upwards of seven million in the Catacombs in the Montparnasse district.

The Paris basin area was first inhabited around 4200 B.C. Then in around 250 B.C., a group of people known as the Parasii established a settlement that would stay. The Romans moved into the area in 52 B.C. and founded a settlement on the left bank of the Seine named Lutetia Parisiorum.

During Roman times, the Roman rulers applied their burial customs to the populace dictating that burials were to occur outside the town limits. The Law of the Twelve Tables stated, it is forbidden to burn or inter a corpse within the walls. The citizenry largely ignored that edict. As the years ticked on and Roman influence waned and was supplanted with Christian and Catholic tradition, most Parisians elected to bury around the perimeter of parish churches in areas known as God’s Acres. Wealthy and influential church officials were often buried within the walls and floors of the church. And in the words of modern-day realtors, it was location, location, location. The common belief was that the closer the body was to the altar, the better chance the deceased would be inched towards the heavens with the parishioners’ prayers. By the end of the eighteenth century, all of Paris’ fifty-two parish churches and their adjoining burial grounds were full to bursting with bodies. When all available space with the walls, floors and interior of the church was filled, even the elect and the well to do had to settle for ground burial. The dead were buried ten deep, but still there was not enough room, so they were often dug up and their bones piled high in gallery arcades and charnel houses surrounding the cemeteries. Cremation was not an option, since the Catholic Church expressly forbade it. No body = no resurrection.

Photo of Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

Père-Lachaise Cemetery

The most famous, or better yet, infamous, of these burial grounds was the Cemetery of the Innocents. The Cemetery of the Innocents (Cimetière des Innocents) started as a small churchyard cemetery for the Church of the Holy Innocents around the twelfth century (the area had been used as a burial ground dating to the Roman times). A market and the cemetery existed side by side in a sort of mutual harmony. The cemetery was good for the market’s business since the steady stream of burials and funeral processions brought people to the market. The market was good for the cemetery’s business since it was an attractive location and the Catholic Church profited from burial fees. Eventually the cemetery expanded and began accepting burials from sixteen different parishes, the morgue, the prison and Paris’ largest hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. Plagues in 1348, 1418 and 1466 brought even more bodies. Bodies were typically buried in open pits that held about 1,500 corpses each. Even with various expansions, the cemetery was only about 400 feet by 200 feet. At one point, the ground level was raised to accommodate more bodies. Later, the bodies were dug up and placed in arcades around the cemetery. By the middle of the eighteenth century, around two million Parisians had been buried in the cemetery. Finally, in 1763 Parliament opened an inquest to figure out what to do with the ever-expanding cemeteries. Alas, the theological interests quashed the inquest since the church made money extracting funeral and burial fees.

By 1780 the burial crisis came to a head when a basement wall in a building next to the Cemetery of the Innocents collapsed, sending upwards of two thousand bodies in various states of decay tumbling into the basement. It would take another six years before the government and the church could agree on how to properly move the bodies to a new location while preserving the tenets of the church concerning death, burial and the afterlife. The other problem, of course, was, despite the ban on burial, Parisians kept dying. That problem initially fell upon Napoléon Bonaparte who delegated it to Nicolas Frochot who established the first new cemeteries in Paris. Those cemeteries and Père-Lachaise (Cimetière du Père-Lachaise) in particular became the template for all future cemeteries, not only in Paris but also over much of the world.

Photo of Cemetery of the Innocents.

Cemetery of the Innocents

Photo of Place Joachim du Bellay.

Place Joachim du Bellay, site of the Cemetery of the Innocents. Finished in 1550, the Fountain of Innocents is the oldest monumental fountain in Paris. 48° 51' 38.17 N 2° 20' 52.43 E

In what seems like a clever irony, cemeteries are not for the dead. The dead, of course, could care less. Cemeteries are for the living. They are the place we go to remember and to honor the past and those who created it. We go to experience our own mortality. We go to see fantastic art and architecture. We go to get close to celebrities and history makers. And cemeteries aren’t the only places we’ll go to remember. We’ll go to Washington, D.C., to view a long black granite wall and touch the names of those who died in the Vietnam War. Or we’ll journey to New York City to touch the names of the victims of 911. Visitors to Paris may wish to visit a makeshift memorial above a tunnel beneath the Pont de l’Alma where on August 31, 1997 a twentieth-century princess met her end.

The cemeteries and monuments in Stories in Stone Paris cut across a wide swath of the last two hundred years of Paris history. It is, of course, quite impossible to list every important person or monument. So, while you are going from monument to monument, stop and linger at others along the path and make some discoveries and explorations on your own. Cemeteries and memorials are places for us to truly understand that our time in this realm is fleeting. Honor those places. Honor your life and those around you.

Photo of tour guide Thierry Le Roi.

Tour guide Thierry Le Roi at Oscar Wilde tomb, Père-Lachaise

Concessions

A word about the permanence of burial in Paris—Americans are often shocked to find that, unlike in America, where burial is permanent, burial in much of Europe is often a temporary affair. Local customs in Europe differ, but many graves are essentially rented for various periods of time. Because of a limited amount of land, burial concessions in Paris are particularly stringent and are generally restricted to residents or plot holders. A permanent concession in Paris’ intra-muros area can cost around $8,000 per square yard. Many people purchase concessions for five, thirty or fifty years, after which time the grave is dug up and resold.

Jim Morrison’s grave in Père-Lachaise is a case in point. In 2001 his grave, which had a thirty-year concession, was slated to be dug up, and, although cemetery officials would have been more than happy to remove him (and by association his ardent fans), they relented and apparently Jim will stay. But even permanent concessions aren’t necessarily permanent. If a tomb falls into disrepair and becomes an eyesore or safety hazard, the cemetery will post a notice that the tomb must be repaired in four years or is subject to removal.

Photo of a Princess Diana Memorial.

Princess Diana Memorial (above the tunnel near the Flame of Liberty) 48° 51' 51.06 N 2° 18' 3.09 E

The Paris Catacombs

Illustration of the Eifeel Tower.

A notice on an informational placard next to the Catacombs of Paris (Catacombes de Paris) entrance reads: The tour is unsuitable for people with heart or respiratory problems, those of a nervous disposition and young children. It’s cold (57 degrees Fahrenheit constant temperature), dark, wet, scary, claustrophobic, there are no restrooms, and it will cost you about eight Euros to get in. But the tourists come by the thousands. Many of them come again and again and not always through the main entrance. In fact, there is a name for them: cataphiles.

Around 250 million years ago, during the Triassic Period, an area known as the Paris Basin began to form. As the eons ticked on, sedimentary layers, which included large areas of limestone and gypsum, were deposited. The Romans were the first to start using the porous stone on a large-scale basis, using it to build bathhouses and carve sculptures. But the supply of easily mined limestone and gypsum was soon exhausted and they needed to start burrowing underground to obtain more stone. Thus were the seeds of the catacombs sown. Now and then a mine would collapse, but aside from a few hapless quarrymen, the collapsing mines didn’t affect the general populace. That is, until Paris started to grow southward and the mine collapses started swallowing up buildings and citizenry. Enter architect Charles Axel Guillaumot, who was hired by Louis XVI to explore, map and stabilize the quarries. The timing was fortuitous because around the same time a series of unfortunate cave-ins (unrelated to the mines) in buildings next to the Cemetery of the Innocents sent putrefying bodies and a slimy ooze into the buildings’ basements.

Photo of skulls.

Skulls are cemented in the wall.

Photo of a diorama-like carving.

Before entering the ossuary there is a diorama-like carving crafted by an eighteenth-century quarry worker that evokes his home in Majorca, an island off the eastern coast of Spain.

The bodies had been piling up in the Cemetery of the Innocents for hundreds of years. Galleries around the cemetery were stacked with layer upon layer of bones. The cemetery was far beyond capacity. Louis XVI responded to the situation by closing the cemetery on September 4, 1780. In the meantime, burials continued in other cemeteries. Then on November 9, 1785 a decree of the Council of State officially allowed the digging up of the bones and transferring them to what at the time was called the Tombe Issoire. The Tombe Issoire was located in a quarry in what is now the 14th arrondissement of Montparnasse. For the next couple of decades the bones from the Cemetery of the Innocents as well as other full-to-bursting cemeteries were loaded onto carts that were accompanied by priests and transported to the catacombs. Plaques were placed with the stacked bones to identify which cemetery they came from. Eventually, over six million Parisians made their way there and call the catacombs their permanent home. Almost immediately the catacombs became an attraction and curiosity. Scholars, researchers, naturalists, photographers, artists and foreign notables descended the spiral steps to pay homage. The most notable use of the catacombs was on April 2, 1897 when a few hundred guests were invited to a private concert where a forty-five-piece orchestra played, among other things, Chopin’s Funeral March, Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre and the Funeral March from Beethoven’s Heroic Symphony. In the twentieth century members of the French Resistance used the catacombs during World War II to hide from the Germans, and the Germans also used a portion of the tunnels as a bunker.

Over the years improvements to lighting and the establishment of an easy-to-follow route have made the catacombs easier to negotiate. Still, they are not for the timid or the physically impaired. There are 130 steps down into the catacombs and eighty-three steps back up, and it is a one-way street of one and one quarter miles in length. Nevertheless, for true taphophiles (cemetery lovers) and cataphiles it is a site not to be missed.

Photo of the pathways.

Femurs, tibias and skulls line the pathways. Other bones are piled in behind.

Photo of placards.

Placards indicate the source of the bones and their removal date.

Photo of The Crypt of Passion.

The Crypt of Passion, also called the Rotunda of Tibias because of the squat circular column at the center, was the site of an 1897 concert in the catacombs.

Photo of the sign above the entrance.

The sign above the entrance to the ossuary reads: Stop! This is the empire of the dead.

Photo of the spiral staircase.

The spiral staircase descends sixty-six feet in 130 steps.

The Big Three

Illustration of the Eifeel Tower.

Paris’ full-to-bursting city cemeteries began to be emptied in 1786, but, of course, people kept dying. In 1801, the prefect Nicolas Frochot called for the closing of all remaining cemeteries and the creation of new cemeteries outside metropolitan Paris. His plans eventually called for the development of four large cemeteries at the cardinal points of North, South, East and West. The Cemetery of the West was never fully realized and smaller Passy Cemetery (Cimetière de Passy)filled in that void. The first cemetery to be realized was the Cemetery of the East, which became known as Père-Lachaise. Père-Lachaise was named after Père François de la Chaise (1624–1709), who lived in the Jesuit house on the property. He was the confessor to Louis XIV. Established in 1804 and eventually expanded to 110 acres, Père-Lachaise is the largest and most visited of the big three cemeteries. The cemetery to the South opened in 1824 and was named Montparnasse for the district it resides in. At forty-seven acres, it is the second largest of the big three. Montparnasse Cemetery (Cimetière du Montparnasse) is about three miles distant from Père-Lachaise. While there, consider visiting the Catacombs, which is an easy two-block walk away. The cemetery of the North is named Montmartre for its location in the Montmartre district. At twenty-eight compact acres, it is the perfect cemetery for an easy stroll and has well-known personalities at almost every turn. Montmartre Cemetery (Cimetière de Montmartre) is about three miles distant from Père-Lachaise and just slightly over three miles from Montparnasse.

Each cemetery has its own special charm and because of Paris’ easily accessible Metro system, they are all easy to get to. The free maps that can be obtained at the conservation offices at Montmartre and Montparnasse and the fold-out map of Père-Lachaise in this book will make navigating the cemeteries and finding the last address of favorite Parisians a breeze.

Photo of Père-Lachaise.

Père-Lachaise

Père-Lachaise

Established in 1804, Père-Lachaise has the distinction of being the first garden cemetery in the world. Almost all cemeteries for the next century were, in some fashion, modeled on Père-Lachaise. Prior to the development of Père-Lachaise, most burials in Paris were in often ill-kept city cemeteries or in churchyards, known as God’s Acres. Moneyed types and church officials were occasionally buried in special monuments or within the walls of a church, but everybody else was pretty much destined to spend eternity crowded together in tiny plots of real estate, often piled one on top of another.

Due to the disastrous overcrowding of Paris’ existing cemeteries and the subsequent emptying of those cemeteries and transfer of the bones to the Catacombs, a solution of what to do with the dead needed to be found. Enter a small man whose imprint is on much of French history: Napoléon Bonaparte. The French Revolution had led, at least in theory, to the end of the separation of classes and that secularization, theoretically, would apply to their permanent homes in the cemetery. Napoléon assigned Nicolas Frochot with the task of acquiring land for the future burial grounds. His first acquisition was a piece of land owned by Louis Baron-Desfontaines that was also the site of a Jesuit house occupied by Louis XIV’s confessor Père François de la Chaise (1624–1709). Frochot then hired architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart to design the layout of the cemetery. Brongniart modeled the new burial ground on English estates and created a new environment of eternity that looked more like a park than a cemetery. Thus, the garden cemetery was born.

Despite the attractive layout of Père-Lachaise, Parisians didn’t flock to the new cemetery to buy plots. Many perceived it as being too far out of town. Catholics declined to be buried in a place that hadn’t been blessed and others balked at the price. In the first year of operation, only thirteen people were buried at Père-Lachaise. The first burial was five-year-old Adélaïde Paillard de Villeneuve, who was buried in what is now Division 42. Burials inched incrementally forward for the next decade and a half, then, in a move that would gladden the heart of a modern-day marketer, Frochot brokered the transfer of the remains of Héloïse and Abélard, Molière and La Fontaine to Père-Lachaise in 1817. What self-respecting Parisian wouldn’t want to be buried with these