The most visited cemetery in the world was, for over a decade, a commercial failure. It opened on 21 May 1804 and had thirteen graves by the end of that year. What turned it around was not sentiment or design. It was a marketing campaign — and the most famous monuments here may not contain the people whose names are on them.
Why Paris had to bury its dead outside the walls
For centuries Parisians were buried in parish churchyards in the middle of the city. The worst of them, the Cimetière des Innocents near Les Halles, held an estimated two million bodies in ground that had risen metres above the street.
In 1780 a cellar wall on the rue de la Lingerie gave way under the pressure of the mass grave next to it. The Innocents was closed and emptied into the quarry tunnels that became the Catacombs.
An imperial decree of 12 June 1804 then banned burial inside Paris and required large new cemeteries beyond the walls. This hill was the first and the largest, and it opened as the Cimetière de l'Est — the Eastern Cemetery.
The name belongs to a Jesuit who has nothing to do with it
The hill was called Mont-Louis. The Jesuits acquired the property in 1626 and rebuilt their house here in 1682, and its best-known resident was Père François d'Aix de La Chaise (1624–1709), confessor to Louis XIV for more than thirty years.
He is not buried here. He had nothing to do with any cemetery. But the hill kept his name, so the most determinedly secular ground in Paris is named after a king's priest.
Brongniart was asked for a burial ground and designed a park
Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, who also built the Paris Bourse, laid the cemetery out as an English landscape garden: paths curving with the contours rather than a grid, irregular planting of chestnut, maple and ash, and deliberate openings looking back over the city.
Two further principles came from the Napoleonic settlement. Burial was open to all regardless of religion — a Jewish enclosure opened in 1810, and a Muslim one in 1857, the first in France. And families could buy a plot in perpetuity and build on it.
That last provision produced the architecture. A perpetual plot is a piece of real estate, and people build on real estate. It is why you walk down terraces of family chapels two metres square with iron doors and the family name cut into the lintel, and why the place reads as a town.
It failed, so the city imported celebrities
Thirteen graves in 1804. It was too far from the centre, and devout Catholics would not use ground the Church had not blessed.
In 1817 the administration arranged the ceremonial transfer of the remains of Molière and Jean de La Fontaine, with procession and publicity, followed by Pierre Abélard and Héloïse under a Gothic canopy near the entrance.
It worked completely. By 1830 the cemetery held more than 33,000 graves, and it was expanded five times between 1824 and 1850 to its present 44 hectares. Within a generation the model had crossed to Glasgow's Necropolis, Highgate and Mount Auburn in Massachusetts.
Molière died in 1673 and, as an actor who had not renounced his profession, was buried at night in a plot whose position was uncertain almost immediately. Historians have doubted for two centuries that the remains moved in 1817 are his. The same doubt applies to La Fontaine, and more strongly to Abélard and Héloïse, whose remains were moved repeatedly before 1817. The monuments are certainly theirs. The contents are not proven.
The wall on the east side
On 28 May 1871, the last defenders of the Paris Commune were caught fighting among the tombs on the high ground. 147 of them were shot against the eastern wall and buried in a trench where they fell.
That stretch of plain stone is the Mur des Fédérés. The French left has marched to it every year since the 1880s, and the divisions around it have accumulated memorials to the deportees of the Nazi camps, to the Resistance and to the International Brigades — the densest concentration of twentieth-century political memory in Paris.
Casualty figures for the whole of the Semaine sanglante across the city are still genuinely argued over by historians. The 147 at the wall is the specific, agreed number.
Some of the residents, and what is odd about them
- Frédéric Chopin is here — but not all of him. At his own request his heart was removed, carried to Warsaw by his sister in a jar of alcohol, and sealed in a pillar of the Church of the Holy Cross.
- Gioachino Rossini was buried here in 1868 and exhumed in 1887 for reburial in Florence. His tomb still stands, empty.
- Honoré de Balzac ended Le Père Goriot on this hill, with Rastignac looking down at Paris and declaring war on it. He is buried in the view.
- Maria Callas has a niche in the columbarium, but it is a memorial: her ashes were scattered in the Aegean.
- Oscar Wilde's monument, by Jacob Epstein, was installed in 1914 and censored on arrival.
Why Oscar Wilde is behind glass
From the late 1990s visitors began kissing the monument wearing lipstick, and thousands followed. The grease soaks into limestone, and every cleaning takes a little of the stone with it.
In 2011 the monument was restored and a glass barrier installed, funded jointly by the Irish state and the City of Paris. It is one of the few conservation projects anywhere undertaken to protect a work of art from affection.
Seven things almost everyone believes that aren't true
| Claim | Verdict | What is actually the case |
|---|---|---|
| Napoleon founded the cemetery | Partly false | The 1804 imperial decree created the legal framework. The City of Paris bought the land and built it |
| Molière is buried under his monument | Disputed | His 1673 grave was already unlocated when the 1817 transfer took place. The monument is certainly his; the remains are unproven |
| Abélard and Héloïse lie under the Gothic canopy | Disputed | The canopy was assembled in 1817 from older fragments, after several earlier reburials. Authenticity is not established |
| It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site | False | It has no inscription. It is protected nationally and municipally, and several monuments are listed individually |
| A grave here is yours forever | Mostly false | Standard concessions today are 30-year leases. Unrenewed remains are exhumed to the ossuary beneath the Monument aux Morts |
| Jim Morrison's grave has a bust on it | Not since 1988 | The bust was placed in 1981 and stolen in 1988. It has never been replaced |
| The cemetery is full and closed | False | Burials continue, and roughly three thousand cremations a year pass through the crematorium |
It is also, now, a wood
The City of Paris ended pesticide use in its cemeteries, and Père Lachaise has been managed for biodiversity since. There are foxes living here, wild orchids and cyclamen in the grass between the tombs, and something like a hundred species of bird.
More than a million people are buried across 44 hectares and 97 divisions. The registers say the first was a five-year-old girl, the daughter of a door-bell maker, in 1804 — before the writers, and before the plan worked.
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Written from Wanderlight's research dossier for Père Lachaise Cemetery — the same one the narration is written from. Where the evidence is thin, this page says so rather than rounding the uncertainty up.