History

A Brief History of the Paris Catacombs

Beneath the lively streets of Paris lies a world that most will never see — a vast, silent underground empire stretching for hundreds of kilometres, home to the remains of over six million souls.

Its origins are darker than you might expect. In the late 18th century, Paris was facing a quiet crisis: its cemeteries were overflowing, threatening the health of the entire city. The answer lay underground. Authorities turned to a network of ancient, abandoned quarries running beneath the city — the very stone that had been used to build Paris above was now to shelter its dead below.
Beginning in 1785, bones were transferred under the cover of night, moving discreetly through the city’s streets to avoid public unrest. Over decades, the remains of millions were brought down into the darkness — from medieval cemeteries, demolished churches, and forgotten burial grounds scattered across Paris.

On April 7, 1786, the site was officially consecrated, and it soon took on a name that sent shivers down the spine: the Catacombs. Inspired by the ancient underground burial networks of Rome, the name felt fitting for a place that existed between the world of the living and the realm of the dead.

By 1809, the curious could descend into the depths by appointment — plunging 20 metres below the surface, the equivalent of a five-storey building disappearing beneath your feet. Royals, emperors, and thrill-seekers alike made their way down the narrow stone steps, drawn by an irresistible fascination. That fascination has never faded. Today, the Catacombs welcome hundreds of thousands of visitors each year — all eager to step, just for a moment, into the shadows of history.

The future ossuary: Paris’s former mines

Much of the Left Bank area rests upon rich Lutetian limestone deposits. This stone built much of the city, but it was extracted in suburban locations away from any habitation. Because of the post 12th-century haphazard mining technique of digging wells down to the deposit and extracting it horizontally 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 undermined state of the Left Bank was known to architects as 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.

Ossuary creation

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 burials were forbidden after 1780. The problem of what to do with the remains crowding intra muros cemeteries was still unresolved.

Mine consolidations were still occurring and the underground around the site of the 1777 collapse[9] 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.[citation needed] After deciding to further renovate the “Tombe-Issoire” passageways for their future role as an underground sepulchre, the idea became law in 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 recovered 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.

Cemeteries whose remains were moved to the Catacombs include Saints-Innocents (the largest by far with about 2 million buried over 600 years of operation), Saint-Étienne-des-Grès better source needed] (one of the oldest), Madeleine Cemetery, Errancis Cemetery (used for the victims of the French Revolution), and Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux. By this way the skeletal remains of several notable victims of the French Revolution were transferred to the Catacombs, including (the date is the date of death):

  • Charlotte Corday (18 July 1793)
  • 22 Girondists (31 October 1793); among them Jacques Pierre Brissot and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud
  • Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (6 November 1793), father of king Louis Philippe I
  • Madame Roland (8 November 1793)
  • Madame du Barry (8 December 1793)
  • Jacques Hébert (24 March 1794)
  • Georges Jacques Danton (April 5, 1794)
  • Camille Desmoulins (April 5, 1794)
  • Philippe Fabre d’Églantine (April 5, 1794)
  • Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (April 5, 1794)
  • Lucile Duplessis (April 13, 1794), widow of Camille Desmoulins
  • Marie Marguerite Françoise Hébert (April 13, 1794), widow of Jacques Hébert
  • Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (May 8, 1794)
  • Madame Élisabeth (May 10, 1794), sister of kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X
  • François Hanriot (July 28, 1794)
  • Maximilien Robespierre (July 28, 1794)
  • Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (July 28, 1794)
  • Georges Couthon (July 28, 1794)
  • Antoine Simon (July 28, 1794)

Renovation and ossuary decor

Catacombs in their first years were a disorganized bone repository, but Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, director of the Paris Mine Inspection Service from 1810, had renovations done that would transform the caverns into a visitable mausoleum. In addition to directing the stacking of skulls, femurs and tibias into the patterns seen in the catacombs today he used the cemetery decorations he could find (formerly stored on the Tombe-Issoire property; many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones. Also created was a room dedicated to the display of the various minerals found under Paris, and another showing various skeletal deformities found during the catacombs’ creation and renovation. He also added monumental tablets and archways bearing ominous warning inscriptions, and added stone tablets bearing descriptions or other comments about the nature of the ossuary, and to ensure the safety of eventual visitors, it was walled from the rest of Paris’s Left Bank’s already-extensive tunnel network

Modern

During World War II, Parisian members of the French Resistance used the tunnel system and established the headquarters from where Colonel Rol-Tanguy led the insurrection for the liberation of Paris in June 1944. The Wehrmacht established an underground bunker below Lycée Montaigne, a high school in the 6th arrondissement.