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Friends,
Death is inevitable—a certainty which no one has ever been able to escape. It finds the rich, the poor, the powerful, and the weak. However you may view the afterlife, whether as the next great adventure or a permanent escape, death is the one thing you can count on.
You will meet at some point.
Throughout history, cultures, religions, tribes, and individuals have all attempted to explain the great unknown. From rituals to bibles, from songs to speeches, from graveside burials to hanging coffins, and the names etched in stone have helped the living to process the idea of loss.
Burials are a complex idea, squishy in their defining attributes. What is accepted as normal in one culture is frowned upon in another. And yet there are burial practices that have become a defining link between the person, their culture, and tourism.
For example, the Paris Catacombs.
We have all seen the pictures. Miles of underground tunnels filled with skulls and bones of the deceased, put together in a bleak artistic celebration of death. The remains are carefully placed in a systematic, almost pleasing manner, as if holding up the streets of Paris and providing a tidy profit for the local museum.
Talk about carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders.
But where did all the bones come from, and why did they end up at 1 Av. du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy? For that answer, we have to go back in time. Fifty-three million years ago, to be exact.
Brief History
Graham Robb’s “Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris
Fifty-three million years ago, Paris and the surrounding areas were nothing but a swampy plain until about 47 million years ago, when the sea decided to overtake the north of France that had been flattened by erosion. It was then that the formation of the Lutetian banks started.
In the first century A.D., the first open-pit quarries were established, and by the fourteenth century, the professionals realized that they needed to go underground to find the ‘good stuff.’ In other words, Parisians were using the underground limestone to build their city.
This was all fine and dandy until 1774, when the weight of the city became too great, and the Rue Denfert-Rochereau collapsed, engulfing almost 300 meters of the town. Roads, buildings, houses, horses, and people all fell into the massive sinkhole, many of whom never emerged alive.
Interesting side note, the original name of the street was Rue d’Enfer, which meant ‘Hell Street.’
An interesting idea
King Louis XVI called for a commission to investigate his Parisian underground on April 4, 177. Charles-Axel Guillaumot was appointed General Inspector of Quarries, a position he held until he died in 1807. He was the one to come up with the brilliant plan to ‘mirror’ the city above the tunnels. The pillars, from the quarry floors to the ceilings, literally uphold the town above and create a city beneath a city.
But what to do with all that open space?
Sinkholes weren’t the only problem.
Paris was dealing with overcrowding. Which meant their cemeteries were becoming overcrowded. Over the course of ten centuries, bodies from famine, war, the plague, and natural causes began to pile up. Literally, the burial grounds of Saints-Innocents were two and a half meters high.
It has become so bad that Parisians were forced to create mass graves. Once one mass grave was filled, another was created in its place.
“The stench of cadavers could be smelt in almost all churches; …the reek of putrefaction continued to poison the faithful. Rats live among the human bones, disturbing and lifting them, seeming to animate the dead as they indicate to the present generation they among which they will soon stand… They (the bones) will soon all turn to chalky earth.” – Louis-Sebastien Mercier.
Neighbors to the Saints-Innocent cemetery complained that milk would sour in hours, tapestries were discoloring, wine was turning to vinegar, and the walls of their homes and businesses were growing with mold.
Something needed to be done. And quickly.
The Church wasn’t happy.
Ironically, it was the Church that put up the biggest ‘sink’ to move the bodies to a new location. And it wasn’t because they didn’t want to disturb the dead. It was because burial fees were a significant source of income. Their solution? Raise the prices for burials so that only the wealthy could afford a final resting place.
In other words, only the rich were considered worthy enough to be guaranteed a spot in the blessed grounds.
You might be asking what happened to the bodies that couldn’t afford the burial fees. Well, many of them ended up in the Charnel House, their skulls stacked in the upper tiers while the bodies were left to rot on the burying grounds.
Hôtel-Dieu has all it takes to be pestilential (contagious), because of its damp and unventilated atmosphere; wounds turn gangrenous more easily, and both scurvy and scabies wreak havoc when patients sojourn there. What in theory are the most innocuous diseases rapidly acquire serious complications by way of the contaminated air; for that precise reason, simple head and leg wounds become lethal in that hospital. Nothing proves my point so well as the tally of patients who perish miserably each year in the Paris Hôtel-Dieu…a fifth of the patients succumb; a frightful tally treated only with the greatest indifference. – Louis-Sebastien Mercier.
In 1780, another disaster hit. A mass grave of over 2,000 partially decomposed bodies collapsed and spilled into an adjacent basement on Rue de la Lingerie.
Enough was Enough
On November 16, 1786, Monsigneur Leclerc de Juigne, the Archbishop of Paris, ordered the demolition and evacuation of the Saint-Innocents Cemetery and any remaining corpses and bones to be transported and buried in the new underground cemetery of the Montrouge Plain.
The funeral procession would occur at night. Torchbearers were followed by priests and funerary carts draped in black sheets, making their next journey to their final resting place while the Mass of the Dead was being chanted. Ironically, these bodies were given a funeral procession that their families couldn’t initially afford, almost like the Church was apologizing for the abuse their loved ones received.
Despite the nightly ritual, most Parisians remained unaware of what was happening until 1810. That was when the second General Quarry Inspector, Louis-Étienne François Héricart-Ferrand, created a brochure advertising the new burial grounds. Obviously, this sparked the curiosity of many people, and it led to what is now one of the most prominent tourist attractions in Paris.
Over the course of seventy-four years, more than six million Parisians were relocated to their new homes beneath the Plains of Montrouge. Unfortunately, the exact number can not be confirmed. It is a rough estimate based on the year 860 when the last graves were transferred to the ossuary.
Final thoughts.
With every action comes a reaction. Nothing can be truer than with the Paris Catacombs. Starting millions of years ago, Paris was not designed to contain the number of living and dead who flocked to its city streets. A decision had to be made on what to do with their loved ones. Regardless of whether you agree or disagree, at the time, it was the only option.
There is so much more to talk about when it comes to the enteral resting place of over six million souls, but we will have to save that discussion for another time. For right now, before we dive into the grim stories of lost tourists, candles made of human fat, and body snatchers, we should take a moment of silence for those who have passed.
Their names may not be remembered, but their story lives on.
Until next time, Keep Reading and Stay Caffeinated.
For those hungry to explore more, click below to find additional readings:
The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris. David McCullough tells the enthralling, inspiring—and until now, untold—story of the adventurous American artists, writers, doctors, politicians, and others who set off for Paris in the years between 1830 and 1900, hungry to learn and to excel in their work. What they achieved would profoundly alter American history.
Paris: The Novel. From Edward Rutherfurd, the grand master of the historical novel, comes a dazzling epic about the magnificent city of Paris. With Rutherfurd’s unrivaled blend of impeccable research and narrative verve, this bold novel brings the sights, scents, and tastes of the City of Light to brilliant life.
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If you’re looking for your next favorite read, I invite you to check out my book, The Raven Society. This spellbinding historical fantasy series takes us on a heart-pounding journey through forgotten legends and distorted history. Uncover the chilling secrets of mythology and confront the horrifying truths that transformed myths into monstrous realities. How far will you go to learn the truth?
The Writer and The Librarian (Book 1):
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Sources:
Inconveniently Dead – Theparisproject Net
What are your thoughts?