Description
The Catacombs of Paris are a vast underground ossuary beneath the Left Bank, built in old limestone quarries south of Place Denfert-Rochereau. They hold the remains of more than six million people, stacked along tunnels cut into the rock, and they are one of the strangest visits in the city.
The tunnels are narrow and dark, and the first sign you pass reads, "Stop! This is the empire of Death." Then come the walls: skulls and femurs arranged in neat patterns, row after row, sometimes forming crosses or hearts.
Along the way, carved inscriptions turn the walk into a meditation on mortality. The ossuary is only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, and Parisians often call the whole tunnel network the catacombs.
The story began in 1780, when a basement wall gave way beside the Holy Innocents' Cemetery, pushed by the weight of the mass grave behind it. Six hundred years of Parisian dead, some two million in that cemetery alone, had nowhere left to go. The answer lay beneath the city.
The Left Bank sat on forgotten quarries, and houses had started sinking into them. The tunnels were reinforced and, from 1785, turned into an ossuary. Every night, wagons draped in black cloth carried bones across Paris, and emptying most of the cemeteries took two years.
Among the dead are Danton, Robespierre and Lavoisier, brought from the cemeteries of the Revolution. The tidy walls came later, from 1810, the work of the mines inspector Héricart de Thury, who also chose the ominous inscriptions.
Visitors came from early on: the future Charles X was one of them, in 1787. In 1944 the Resistance led the uprising that freed Paris from a headquarters in these tunnels, and in 2004 police found a fully equipped cinema under the Trocadéro.
The tunnels are narrow and dark, and the first sign you pass reads, "Stop! This is the empire of Death." Then come the walls: skulls and femurs arranged in neat patterns, row after row, sometimes forming crosses or hearts.
Along the way, carved inscriptions turn the walk into a meditation on mortality. The ossuary is only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, and Parisians often call the whole tunnel network the catacombs.
The story began in 1780, when a basement wall gave way beside the Holy Innocents' Cemetery, pushed by the weight of the mass grave behind it. Six hundred years of Parisian dead, some two million in that cemetery alone, had nowhere left to go. The answer lay beneath the city.
The Left Bank sat on forgotten quarries, and houses had started sinking into them. The tunnels were reinforced and, from 1785, turned into an ossuary. Every night, wagons draped in black cloth carried bones across Paris, and emptying most of the cemeteries took two years.
Among the dead are Danton, Robespierre and Lavoisier, brought from the cemeteries of the Revolution. The tidy walls came later, from 1810, the work of the mines inspector Héricart de Thury, who also chose the ominous inscriptions.
Visitors came from early on: the future Charles X was one of them, in 1787. In 1944 the Resistance led the uprising that freed Paris from a headquarters in these tunnels, and in 2004 police found a fully equipped cinema under the Trocadéro.