Thursday: May 27
Them bones..
Come face to skull with the former inhabitants of Paris. The
Catacombes is an underground cemetery that holds 200-year-old skeletons. You can
see dead people. A lot of them. The Catacombs contain the remains of an
estimated six million Parisians.
The rise of Christianity brought with it the practice of
burying the faithful in consecrated ground. This resulted in many more Parisians
being buried within the city. Eventually the grave yards could not cope with the
number of bodies. Paris's water supply and the health of its citizens were under
threat. The dead were killing the living.
Something had to be done and the Catacombs was the solution.
Behind a procession of chanting priests, began a parade of black-covered
bone-laden horse-drawn wagons full of human remains. The process took years.
Catacombs of Paris
The Catacombs of Paris or Catacombes de Paris are a famous underground ossuary
in Paris, France. Located south of the former city gate, the "Barrière d'Enfer",
at today's Place Denfert-Rochereau ), the ossuary fills a renovated section of
caverns and tunnels that are the remains of Paris' stone mines. Opened in the
late 18th century, the underground cemetery became a tourist attraction on a
small scale from the early 19th century, and has been open to the public on a
regular basis from 1867. Following an incident of vandalism, they were closed to
the public in September of 2009 and reopened 19 December of the same year.
Click here to see other pictures.
Click here to see other pictures.
The official name for the catacombs is l'Ossuaire Municipal.
Although this cemetery covers only a small section of underground
tunnels comprising "les carrières de Paris" ("the quarries of
Paris"), Parisians today often refer to the entire tunnel network as
"the catacombs".
Paris since Roman times buried its dead to the outskirts of the city, but this
changed with the rise of Christianity and its practice of burying its faithful
deceased in consecrated ground in and adjoining its churches. By the 10th
century, because of the city's expansion over the centuries, there were many
parish cemeteries within city limits, even in central locations. When Paris'
population began to rise rapidly in the following centuries, some of these
cemeteries became overcrowded where expansion was impossible. Soon only the most
wealthy could afford church burials, which led to the opening in the early 12th
century of a central burial ground for more common burials: initially dependent
upon the St. Opportune church, this cemetery near Paris' central Les Halles
district was renamed as the 'Saints-Innocents cemetery' under its own church and
parish towards the end of the same century.
The practice common then for burying the lesser-wealthy dead was mass
inhumation. Once an excavation in one section of the cemetery was full, it would
be covered over and another opened. Few of the dead buried in this way had the
privilege of coffins; often the casket used for a burial ceremony would be
re-used for the next. Thus the residues resulting from the decaying of organic
matter, a process often chemically accelerated with the use of lime, entered
directly into the earth, creating a situation quite unacceptable for a city
whose then principal source of liquid sustenance was well water.
By the 17th century the sanitary conditions around Saints-Innocents cemetery
were unbearable. As it was one of Paris' most sought-after cemeteries and a
large source of revenue for the parish and church, the clergy had continued
burials there even when its grounds were filled to overflowing. By then the
cemetery was lined on all four sides with "charniers" reserved for the bones of
the dead exhumed from mass graves that had "lain" long enough for all the flesh
they contained to decompose. Once emptied, a mass sepulture would be used again,
but even then the earth was already filled beyond saturation with decomposing
human remains.
A series of ineffective decrees limiting the use of the cemetery did little to
remedy the situation, and it wasn't 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.
Part of the reason nothing was done about Paris' untenable burial practices was
a lack of ideas for disposing of the dead exhumed from Paris' intra-muros parish
graveyards. The government had been searching for and consolidating long
abandoned stone quarries in and around the capital since 1777, and it was the
Police Lieutenant General overseeing the renovations, Alexandre Lenoir, who
first had the idea to use empty underground tunnels on the outskirts of the
capital to this end. His successor, Thiroux de Crosne, chose a place to the
south of Paris' "porte d'Enfer" city gate (the place Denfert-Rochereau today),
and the exhumation and transfer of all Paris' dead to the underground sepulture
began in 1786.
From the eve of a consecration ceremony on the 7th April the same year, behind a
procession of chanting priests, began a parade of black-covered bone-laden
horse-drawn wagons that continued for years to come. In work overseen by the
Inspector General of Quarries, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the bones were deposited
in a wide well dug in land bought from a property, "La maison de la Tombe
Issoire" (a house near the street of the same name), and distributed throughout
the underground caverns by workers below. Also deposited near the same house
were crosses, urns and other necropolis memorabilia recuperated from Paris'
church graveyards.
The catacombs in their first years were practically only a bone repository, but
Guillaumot's successor from 1810, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, oversaw the
renovations that would transform the underground caverns into a real and
visitable sepulture on par with any mausoleum. In addition to directing the
rearrangement of skulls and tibias into the arrangement that we see in the
catacombs today, he used the tombstones and cemetery decorations he could find
(many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of
bones.
The Catacombs entry is in the western pavilion of Paris' former Barrière d'Enfer
city gate. After descending a narrow spiral stone stairwell of 19 metres to the
darkness and silence broken only by the gurgling of a hidden aqueduct
channelling local sources away from the area, and after passing through a long
and twisting hallway of mortared stone, a visitor finds himself before a
sculpture that existed from a time before this part of the mines became an
ossuary, a model of France's Port-Mahon fortress created by a former Quarry
Inspector. Soon after, he would find himself before a stone portal, the ossuary
entry, graced with the inscription "Arrête, c'est ici l'empire de la Mort"
('Stop, this is the empire of Death').
Beyond begin the halls and caverns of walls of carefully arranged bones. Some of
the arrangements are almost artistic in nature, such as a heart-shaped outline
in one wall formed with skulls embedded in surrounding tibias; another is a
round room whose central pillar is also a carefully created 'keg' bone
arrangement. Along the way one would find other 'monuments' created in the years
before catacomb renovations, such as a source-gathering fountain baptised "La
Samaritaine" because of later-added engravings. Also worthy of note are the
rusty gates blocking passages leading to other 'unvisitable' parts of the
catacombs – many of these are either un-renovated or were too un-navigable for
regular tours.
In a cavern just before the exit stairway leading to a building on the rue
Dareau (former 'rue des Catacombes') above, one could see an example of the
Quarry Inspection's work in the rest of Paris' underground caverns: its roof is
two 11-metre high domes of naturally degraded, but reinforced, rock; the dates
painted into the highest point of each bear witness to what year the work to the
collapsing cavern ceiling was done, and whether it has degraded since. These "fontis"
were the reason for a general panic in late-18th-century Paris, after several
houses and roadways collapsed into previously unknown caverns below.
Bodies of the dead from the riots in the Place de Grève, the Hôtel de Brienne,
and Rue Meslée were put in the catacombs on 28 and 29 August 1788.