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Catacombs of Paris

Map of Paris' former underground mine exploitations
Established	1810
Location	Place Denfert-Rochereau, 75014 Paris
Website	Les Catacombes de Paris

The Catacombs of Paris, are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris' ancient stone mines. Extending south from the Barrière d'Enfer ("Gate of Hell") former city gate, this ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the city's overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began not long after a 1774 series of gruesome Saint Innocents-cemetery-quarter basement wall collapses added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1786, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris' cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire..

The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of accesses around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was open to public visitation from 1874. Since January 1, 2013, the Catacombs number among the 14 City of Paris Museums managed by Paris Musées. Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground "carrières de Paris" ("quarries of Paris"), Parisians presently often refer to the entire tunnel network as the catacombs.

History

Paris' Cemeteries

Les Innocents cemetery during 1550.

Paris' earliest burial grounds were to the southern outskirts of the Roman-era Left Bank city. In ruins after the Roman empire's 5th-century end and the ensuing Frankish invasions, Parisians eventually abandoned this settlement for the marshy Right Bank: from the 4th century, the first known settlement there was on higher ground around a Saint-Etienne church and burial ground (behind the present Hôtel de Ville), and urban expansion on the Right Bank began in earnest after other ecclesiastical landowners filled in the marshlands from the late 10th century. Thus, instead of burying its dead away from inhabited areas as usual, the Paris Right Bank settlement began with cemeteries near its centre.

The most central of these cemeteries, a burial ground around the 5th-century Notre-Dame-des-Bois church, became the property of the Saint-Opportune parish after the original church was demolished by the 9th-century Norman invasions. When it became its own parish associated with the church of the "Saints Innocents" from 1130, this burial ground, filling the land between the present rue Saint-Denis, rue de la Ferronnerie, rue de la Lingerie and the rue Berger, had become the City's principal cemetery.

By the mid 18th Century, Paris' rapid growth was catching up with the city - existing cemeteries were overflowing with bodies of the deceased."Saints Innocents" - the largest and most important cemetery within Paris' city limits hosted roughly 2 million bodies., not including other cemeteries. Roughly 6 million sets of remains within the city of Paris needed to be disinterred and reburied somewhere else for the health of the general public.

Mid 18th Century, the make room for new burials, the fully decomposed dead were exhumed and their bones packed into the roofs and walls of "charnier" galleries built inside the cemetery walls. By the end of the 18th century, the central burial ground was a two metre high mound of earth filled with centuries of Parisian dead, plus the remains from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital and the Morgue; other Parisian parishes had their own burial grounds, but the conditions in Les Innocents cemetery were the worst.

A series of ineffective decrees limiting the use of the cemetery did little to remedy the situation, and it was not until the late 18th century that it was decided to create three new large-scale suburban burial grounds on the outskirts of the city, and to condemn all existing parish cemeteries within city limits.

History of the Site

Further information: Mines of Paris

Left Bank of the Seine rests upon rich Lutetian limestone deposits. This stone was used for the majority of building Paris, from all over the city without any forethought as to further urban impacts. Because of the post 12th-century haphazard mining technique of digging wells down to the deposit and extracting it horizontally along the vein until depletion, many of these (often illicit) mines were uncharted, and when depleted, often abandoned and forgotten. Paris had annexed its suburbs many times over the centuries, and by the 18th century many of its arrondissements (administrative districts) were or included previously mined territories.

The Paris authorities choose an easily accessible site just outside of the capital: using old quarries of Tombe-Issoire, under the plain of Montrouge. These quarries were utilized since the 15th century and then decommissions. They contribute to a small fraction of the labyrinth which extends under the city on approximately 800 hectares. The development of the site and the organization of the bone transfers are executed by Charles-Axel Guillaumot, an inspector at the service of the Inspectorate General of Careers of Paris, or IGC. This process was established April 4th, 1777 by Louis XVI with the intent to monitor and consolidate the abandoned quarries after the soil in Pairs began to cave in the mid-18th century. The undermined state of the Left Bank was known to architects as early as the early 17th-century construction of the Val-de-Grâce hospital (most of its building expenses were due to its foundations)., but a series of mine cave-ins beginning 1774 with the collapse of a house along the "rue d'Enfer" (near today's crossing of the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and the boulevard Saint-Michel) caused King Louis XVI to name a commission to investigate the state of the Parisian underground. This resulted in the creation of the inspection Générale des Carrières (Inspection of Mines) service. The first evacuations took place from 1785 to 1787 from the Saints Innocents, after being condemned in 1780. Any and all burial sites and mass graves were emptied of their bones and then transported to the quarries by night to avoid the ridicule from the Parisian population and the Church. The bones were then deposited in quarry service shafts and then archived into a gallery format by the quarry workers. These transfers continued after the revolution and resulted in the removal of parish cemeteries in the center of Paris such as Saint-Eustache, Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs and the convent of Bernardins.

Ossuary Formation

The need to eliminate Les Innocents gained urgency from May 31, 1780, when a basement wall in a property adjoining the cemetery collapsed under the weight of the mass grave behind it. The cemetery was closed to the public and all intra muros (Latin: "within the [city] walls") burials were forbidden after 1780. The problem of what to do with the remains crowding intra muros cemeteries was still unresolved. Before opening the catacombs to the public in 1809, it was the subject of consistent decorative revisions under the supervision of Inspector Héricart de Thury, transforming the quarry into museographic and monumental vision. Bones were carefully organized on the walls to create decorative mosaics. Steering away from the grotesque reality of millions of dead bodies, to creating a shrine to Paris. Mine consolidations were still occurring and the underground around the site of the 1777 collapse that had initiated the project had already become a series of stone and masonry inspection passageways that reinforced the streets above.. The mine renovation and cemetery closures were both issues within the jurisdiction of the Police Prefect Police Lieutenant-General Alexandre Lenoir, who had been directly involved in the creation of a mine inspection service. Lenoir endorsed the idea of moving Parisian dead to the subterranean passageways that were renovated during 1782. After deciding to further renovate the "Tombe-Issoire" passageways for their future role as an underground sepulchre, the idea became law during late 1785.

A well within a walled property above one of the principal subterranean passageways was dug to receive Les Innocents' unearthed remains, and the property itself was transformed into a sort of museum for all the headstones, sculptures and other artifacts recuperated from the former cemetery. Beginning from an opening ceremony on 7 April the same year, the route between Les Innocents and the "clos de la Tombe-Issoire" became a nightly procession of black cloth-covered wagons carrying the millions of Parisian dead. It would take two years to empty the majority of Paris's cemeteries.

Tourism

The Paris Catacombs had no religious significance, instead, they were established as a practical solution to the overcrowding of intercity cemeteries. Beginning in 1809, the Catacombs became accessible to the public by appointment. This extended beyond the general public to include foreign powers such as: in 1787, the Comte d'Artois, future Charles X, goes there in the company of ladies of the court; in 1814, the Austrian Emperor Franz I visited them, and in 1860 Napoleon III came down with his son. During the nineteenth century, the City of Paris transitioned from appointment only visitation, to monthly or quarterly openings. Today the Catacombs of Paris receive nearly 550 000 visitors a year.

Education

The City of Paris brought on an educational dimension the catacombs - Héricart de Thury built cabinets in the tradition of cabinets of curiosities, one dedicated to mineralogy, the other to pathology. Specimens illustrated diseases and bone deformations in accordance with the research of Dr. Michel-Augustin Thouret in 1789. The educational tools included a set of plates adorned with religious and poetic texts distributed in the galleries in the catacombs, to bring the visitors into a state of introspection and reflection about death<ref name="l'ossuaire">.