City Life, City Death
Strolling the Paris cemetery at the base of Montmartre
Like many ancient cities, Paris has a bodies problem.
The Cimetière Montmartre is Paris’s third largest cemetery, after — yes, you guessed it, Père Lachaise, with second place claimed by the less notorious Cimetière Montparnasse at the southern end of the city.
Montmartre Cemetery was created in 1825 on an old gypsum quarry that previously hosted bodies dumped during the French Revolution. Like the other large Paris cemeteries, it was created to solve the problem of too many bodies inside the city proper. Today, the four major Paris cemeteries (the ones listed above as well as Passy) are well within the expanded city limits. They have also evolved beyond the body-dumping stage, at least for now.
However, the Paris cemeteries are pretty much full. And there are not just four cemeteries inside Paris: there are fourteen. Their ‘saturation,’ as officials call it, is clearly a problem, though not the biggest one facing the modern city.
Not surprisingly, given its quarry origin, the Cimetière Montmartre lies under a bridge on the rue Caulaincourt, and as you walk toward Montmartre you can peep through the blue-painted metalwork to the graves below.
