 Creepy Catacombs of Paris
by Nilma Dole
As we celebrate or will be
scared to celebrate Halloween this year, we look at the spookiest place
in Paris. Though it might be creepy at first, the Catacombs of Paris
give you a sense of history and how it is like for the dead in Paris.
Stumbling at its entrance near the Notre Dame, the Catacombs are a
famous underground ossuary located near the Denfert-Rochereau station of
the Paris Métro.
 Set up in a renovated section of the extensive network of the
Parisian subterranean tunnels and caverns towards the end of the 18th
century, it became a secret tourist attraction in 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 until
September, 2009.
Sending chills down your spine, it might stink a bit when you venture
into the depths of the dead but the artistic intricacies of the passages
of the Catacombs take you to a bygone era. The official name for the
catacombs is l’Ossuaire Municipal.
This cemetery covers a portion of Paris’ former mines near the Left
Bank’s Place Denfert-Rochereau, in a location that was just outside the
city gates before Paris expanded in 1860. Even though this cemetery
encompasses just a tiny section of underground tunnels comprising “les
carrières de Paris” (“the quarries of Paris”), Parisians today refer to
the entire network as “the catacombs”.
As history records, most of Paris’s larger churches once had their
own cemeteries, but city growth and generations of dead began to
overwhelm them. From the late 17th century, Paris’ largest Les Innocents
cemetery (near the Les Halles district in the middle of the city) was
saturated to a point where its neighbours were suffering from disease,
due to contamination caused by improper burials, open mass graves, and
earth charged with decomposing organic matter.
After almost a century of ineffective decrees condemning the
cemetery, it was finally decided to create three new large-scale
suburban cemeteries and to condemn all existing within the city limits;
the remains of all condemned cemeteries would be moved discreetly to a
renovated section of Paris’s abandoned quarries.
The use of the depleted quarries for the storage of bones, based on
the idea of Police Lieutenant General Alexandre Lenoir, was established
in 1786 by his successor, M. Thiroux de Crosne, under the direction of
Charles Axel Guillaumot, Inspector General of Quarries, and following
him, by Louis-tienne Héricart de Thury. Remains from the cemetery of
Saint-Nicolas-des-Champs were among the first to be moved. Bodies of the
dead from the riots in the Place de Grève, the Hotel de Brienne, and Rue
Meslee were put in the catacombs on 28 and 29 August 1788.
Also, be prepared to check out the Catacombs of Paris Museum also
known as the cemetery of Innocent (close to Saint-Eustace, in the
district of the “Halles”) which had been used during nearly ten
centuries and had become the origin of infection for all the inhabitants
of the district. Old Quarries were selected to deposit Parisian bones;
Paris indeed had just created the General Inspection of the Quarries
charged of the consolidation of the public highways undermined by the
Quarries.
The Quarries “of Tombe-Issoire” were the object of work including
masonry and consolidations of galleries, and by the digging of a flanked
staircase.
With Halloween around the corner, you can get ideas from the
Catacombs where the ‘Bone Pile’ lies where the walls are covered in
graffiti dating from the eighteenth century onwards. With scary skulls
lined along the walls, and passages where ghosts reside, your next
Halloween theme party could do with a French touch to it. So if you want
to jump out of your skin, the Catacombs of Paris are in! |
