Soph’s Incredibly Specific Travel Notes: Catacombes de Paris
I love learning about weird history. And I like writing about it too.
Our story starts in mid-eighteenth century Paris. Quarrying for limestone had been carried out underneath the outskirts of Paris since the fifteenth century; stone needed for projects you may have heard of, like the Notre Dame.
But the quarries made the ground unstable, and there had been a series of major collapses. Louis XVI set up the Department of General Quarry Inspection, and its main purpose was to consolidate the abandoned quarries and strengthen the walls/ceilings so they didn’t collapse in.
Around the same time, the cemeteries in Paris had reached breaking point. Overcrowding in the city was a problem anyway, but the church graveyards of the city couldn’t cope with the number of dead. Disease, plagues, etc meant that at certain points in history there had been so many deaths that bodies were thrown into mass graves for expedience. The bodies were causing problems and illness in the local populations as well as being grim as hell.
So, Paris was not really very pleasant at that point.
In 1780, the largest cemetery in Paris, the Saints-Innocents cemetery, closed. By 1785 the decision was made to clear it out and move the bones elsewhere; a process that took two years. The bones were dumped into quarry wells and then distributed through the underground passages. My understanding is that this wasn’t done in any specific way, so that skeletons were just thrown any old way just to put them somewhere.
In 1786 the site was consecrated as the Paris Municipal Ossuary. But it gets a bit more interesting between then and now.
Arrete! C’est ici l’empire de la mort
Between 1810 and 1814, the ossuary was rearranged by Inspector Héricart de Thury. I imagine he looked at the mess and thought, “we should probably do something a bit more interesting and respectful with all of these bones”.
The result is extraordinarily macabre, decorated underground passages, opened to the public.
Skulls, tibiae and femurs make patterns in the walls which visitors can see. Most often you would see skulls arranged in a cross formation, but there is also a clear heart shape at one point. The other bones — of an estimated six million Parisians — lie behind these walls.
I was really taken with the catacombs; they are quiet, eerie, contemplative, reverent, and morbidly fascinating all at once. I have wanted to see them for about a decade, and although I waited for just over an hour in the freezing cold to get in, I’m so glad I did.
The walk through the catacombs takes 45 minutes to an hour, and I think you should take the time to go and see them if you are ever in the city. I would recommend booking in advance online, to skip the huge queue outside.
