Catacombs of Paris, a social mixte for 6 millions Parisians

Catacombs of Paris features

The Catacombs of Paris are 20 metres below the ground, 131 steps to go down, 112 to climb up. The length of the walkway is approx. 1500 m, while almost three hundred kilometers of galleries stretch beneath Paris, sometimes over three levels of quarries. The surface area of the ossuary is 11,000 m². Constant temperature: 14°C (57°F).

The history of the Paris Catacombs starts in the late eighteenth century, when major public health problems tied to the city’s cemeteries led to a decision to transfer their contents to an underground site.

Chronology about Catacombs of Paris

• 53 million years ago marks the end of sedimentation, Paris and the surrounding area are a vast swampy plain. 47 million years ago, the sea covers the north of France, which had been flattened by erosion. Beginning of formation of the Lutetian banks.
• First century A.D.: first open-pit quarries. Fourteenth century: first underground quarries.
• 1774: severe collapse of Rue Denfert-Rochereau; 300 meters were swallowed up.
• September 15, 1776: Louis XVI signs a decree that definitively prohibits extracting material from under public roads.
• April 4, 1777: Louis XVI creates the Department of General Quarry Inspection, which is in charge of protecting Parisian quarries.
• 1780: closing of the Saints-Innocents cemetery.
• April 7, 1786: benediction and consecration of the Tombe-Issoire quarries, which become the municipal ossuary known as the “Catacombs”.
• 1787-1814: transfer of bones from the parochial cemeteries of Paris.
• 1809: opening of the ossuary to the public.
• 1810-1814: rearrangement of the ossuary by Inspector Héricart de Thury.
• 1860: last bone deposits following urban development undertaken by Haussmann.
• 2002: attachment of the Catacombs to the Carnavalet Museum – History of Paris, which continues to promote the site.
• 2017: inauguration of the new exit and the bookstore-boutique.
• 2019: inauguration of the new entrance in the restored Ledoux house.

The Catacombs of Paris, a museum and a place of study

As one visits the catacombs, a sign above reads Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort ("Stop! The empire of Death lies here").

The municipal ossuary in the Paris Catacombs is one of the world’s largest and one of only a handful located underground. Before being opened to the public in 1809, it underwent an extensive decorative rearrangement under the auspices of Inspector Héricart de Thury, who transformed the site using a museographical and monumental approach.

The subterranean environment of the Paris Catacombs has also been the focus of several studies. Shortly after the catacombs were opened, two researchers from the French Museum of Natural History manifested a special interest. They were Jacques Maheu, a botanist, who studied the flora in this light-free environment, and Armand Viré, a speleologist and naturalist, who discovered the existence of cave-dwelling crustaceans. Today, pathological research continues when work is undertaken to consolidate the ossuary. Ensuring the preventive conservation of the bones in a very humid underground environment, respecting human remains and promoting the geological, archeological and historical heritage are real challenges for the Paris Catacombs.

Catacombs of Paris public and non public parts

Only a small part of the Catacombs can be visited.

Public Parts of the Catacombs

• Main Ossuary (Les Catacombes): The public portion of the Paris Catacombs is open to visitors and managed by the Paris Museums (Paris Musées). It starts at Place Denfert-Rochereau and spans a carefully maintained path of about 1.25 miles. This area features walls stacked with skulls and bones arranged in decorative patterns, along with plaques that bear poetic and philosophical quotes on death and life.

• Historical Significance: In the late 18th century, Paris relocated the remains of the deceased from overpopulated cemeteries to the abandoned limestone quarries beneath the city, establishing this haunting yet beautiful space.

• Key Highlights:

  • Port-Mahón Relief: A unique sculpture of the Spanish island Mahón carved into the stone by a quarry worker.
  • The Barrel: An architectural curiosity formed by columns and supporting arches made of bones.
  • Memorials and Plaques: A number of memorials and signs add historical and emotional context to the ossuary.

Non-Public Parts of the Catacombs

• Extensive Quarry Networks: Beyond the designated tourist route, the Catacombs expand into a vast and largely inaccessible network of tunnels and chambers (More than 300 km). These sections are maintained by city officials for structural safety but are not open to the public.

• Cataphiles’ Zone: This is an unofficial network of cataphiles (urban explorers) who access the restricted parts of the catacombs. They enter through hidden or sealed entrances and navigate through tunnels not maintained for visitors. Cataphiles map out the areas they explore, create artwork on the walls, and even hold gatherings in these secluded spaces.

• Secret Rooms and Graffiti: In the non-public sections, visitors can find hidden rooms, pools, and graffiti murals created over decades. Some areas include makeshift theaters, meeting rooms, and even subterranean art galleries. While these areas are fascinating, they can be dangerous due to unstable ground, flooding, or lack of oxygen.

Incidents that led to the creation of the Catacombs of Paris

In early 1780, curious phenomena were reported in the surrounding cellars of the Cimetière des Innocents (in central Paris). Exhalations from decomposing corpses were so strong that they filtered through the walls and extinguished the tallow candles. On May 30 of the same year, a spectacular incident highlighted the seriousness of the problem. A cellar in rue de la Lingerie, adjacent to the cemetery, gave way under the pressure of the thousands of corpses contained in a mass grave. Antoine-Alexis Cadet de Vaux, inspector of sanitation for the city of Paris, immediately had the cellar filled with quicklime, then bricked up, and ordered the cemetery closed for good.

In 1782, an anonymous project published in London and presented to the Paris authorities and ecclesiastics proposed an original solution to the problem. Inspired by ancient underground necropolises, it suggested taking advantage of the consolidation work carried out over the years by the Inspection Générale des Carrières to install an ossuary in an old underground quarry. Police lieutenant Lenoir envisaged transferring the bones from the Innocents cemetery outside Paris. The development of the Tombe-Issoire underground quarries, located under the Montrouge plain beyond the barrière d'Enfer to the south of the capital, seemed perfectly suited to this purpose. As early as the last months of 1785, the transfer of bones from the cemetery of the Innocents begin.

Transferring skeletons to the Catacombs

The transfer of the Saint-Innocent cemetary skeletons lasted fifteen months, and the operation was a success. Following the example of Saint-Innocents, other Parisian cemeteries, particularly those adjoining churches, were gradually emptied until January 1788, when they were abolished. The operation continued from 1787 to 1814. Transfers finally resumed from 1842 to 1860, during which time no fewer than eight hundred carriages carrying the bones made their way to the temporary Vaugirard ossuary, then to the Tombe-Issoire catacombs. Seventeen cemeteries, one hundred and forty-five monasteries, convents and religious communities and one hundred and sixty places of worship with their own cemeteries fed the underground quarries. Finally, several years later, Haussmann's major construction projects provided forgotten bones, which were in turn transported to the catacombs.

It is estimated that over six million remains were moved in this way over the course of a century in a series of ossuaries in the 14th arrondissement that still exist beneath Paris, making it the largest visited necropolis in the world. Among them are all the great names of the French Revolution.

Death in the Catacombs Only one death has officially been confirmed inside the Catacombs. In 1793, Philibert Aspairt, a door keeper for the Val-de-Grâce hospital, died in the catacombs. It is thought that he had lost his light source, and was left to die in the darkness. In 1804, 11 years later, his body was found, only a few metres away from a staircase that would have led to an exit. He was only identified by his hospital key ring, and the buttons on his jacket.

Personalities buried at the Catacombs of Paris

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 (one of the oldest), Madeleine Cemetery, Errancis Cemetery (used for the victims of the French Revolution), and Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux.

The catacombs contain the bones of more than six million Parisians, including many famous figures from French history buried in Paris. But their remains have joined those of millions of anonymous Parisians, and to this day, none have been identified.

• Charles-Axel Guillaumot, first Inspector General of quarries and responsible for consolidation and transfer of bones, was buried in 1807 in the Sainte-Catherine cemetery, whose contents were later moved to the catacombs.

• Nicolas Fouquet, superintendent of finance under Louis XIV, buried in the convent of the Filles-de-la-Visitation-Sainte-Marie, transferred in 1793

• Minister Colbert, buried in a vault in Saint-Eustache church violated during the Revolution and transferred to the Catacombs

• The remains of Rabelais, François Mansart, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the Man in the Iron Mask and Jean-Baptiste Lully can all be found here.

• From the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont are transferred those of Racine, Blaise Pascal and Marat, Saint-Sulpice and Montesquieu.

• From the Saint-Benoît cemetery, those of engravers Guillaume Chasteau and Laurent Cars, Charles and Claude Perrault, and Héricart de Thury, uncle of Louis-Étienne, the quarry inspector.

• The Ville-l'Évêque cemetery contains the bodies of the 1,000 Swiss Guards massacred at the Tuileries in 1792, as well as the 1,343 people guillotined at the Carrousel or Place de la Concorde between 1792 and 1794, including Charlotte Corday.

• With the transfer of the bones from the Errancis cemetery under the Restoration, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Lavoisier and Robespierre also joined the catacombs.

• On a more anecdotal note, two curiosities stand out:

  • the poet Nicolas Gilbert, buried in the Hôtel-Dieu de Clamart cemetery, was transferred to the catacombs when he was evacuated. A monument in the shape of a tomb celebrates his memory.
  • The martyr St. Ovid, buried in the catacombs of Rome, was brought back to Paris by Pope Alexander VII. His remains were placed in the Capucines convent, whose bones were transferred to the ossuary on March 29, 1804. He is thus the only person to have been buried in two catacombs.

Also the dead of the revolution

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 1er
• 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)

Catacombs and modern times

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.

In 2004, police discovered a fully equipped movie theater in an area of the catacombs underneath the Trocadéro. It was equipped with a giant cinema screen, seats for the audience, projection equipment, film reels of recent thrillers and film noir classics, a fully stocked bar, and a complete restaurant with tables and chairs. The group les UX took responsibility for the installation.

The film As Above, So Below, released in 2014, was the first production that secured permission from the French government to film in the catacombs. They aimed to use no alterations to the environment with the exception of a piano and a car which were hauled into the catacombs and set on fire.

During 2015, Airbnb paid €350,000 as part of a publicity stunt offering customers the chance to stay overnight in the Catacombs.

In August 2017, thieves broke into a cellar from the catacombs and stole more than €250,000 of wine

City Maintenance and Inspection of the Catacombs

• Because the catacombs are directly under the Paris streets, large foundations cannot be built above them and cave-ins have destroyed buildings. For this reason, there are few tall buildings in this area

• I.G.C. (Inspection Générale des Carrières): Established in the 18th century, this organization regularly inspects and maintains the Catacombs to prevent ground collapses and ensure structural safety throughout Paris. They monitor and secure vulnerable areas and restrict access to parts of the catacombs to preserve their integrity.

Access and Legal Aspects

Legal Restrictions

Entering non-public areas of the Catacombs is illegal and subject to fines. Police patrol these areas, and the risk of getting lost or injured is high for those without proper equipment and expertise. Non-public areas outside the catacombs are strictly forbidden. A special police force is in charge of the catacombs. They are particularly active at night, when violations are most frequently observed. In addition to a fine that can range from €60 to €3750, you're also exposing yourself to a number of risks: rockslides, bad encounters or simply getting lost are just a few examples of the dangers that await you. And good luck finding help, because it's doubtful that you'll be able to get a signal 20 meters underground.

Special Events and Research Access

Occasionally, limited non-public access is granted for research, special film projects, or exclusive events.

Anecdote on the Catacombes

There are many anecdotes about the catacombs. Here are just a few of them:

The cat skulls

In 1896, Emile Gérards wrote about an astonishing discovery: hundreds of cat skulls were found in the underground quarries near the Odéon theater. After a little research, it was realized that there was a shaft linking the catacombs to the courtyard of a restaurant renowned for its rabbit gibelottes. It's easy to imagine that the cat would have copiously replaced the rabbit on customers' plates: It's said that cat meat tastes a lot like rabbit!

The beach

Some areas of the catacombs were used as production spaces, as evidenced by the traces of lime or black paint that can still be seen today. The Espérance brewery closed its doors in 1970, and large quantities of sand were injected there. Hence the name beach, as the floor of these galleries beneath the 14th arrondissement is covered with sand at this point.