The haunting history of the Paris Catacombs - Stephanie H. Smith

0:06 It’s 1780 in Paris,

0:09 and the heavy spring rains are saturating the earth.

0:14 In a home near the center of town,

0:16 a basement wall collapses under the pressure,

0:19 releasing a flood of decomposing corpses—

0:23 remains from the neighboring Cemetery of the Innocents.

0:27 Rumors spread that everyone in the house got sick due to bad air

0:32 emanating from the decaying flesh.

0:36 With the overcrowded cemetery housing generations of dead Parisians,

0:40 there was a growing worry that the entire city

0:44 was in grave danger of falling ill.

0:47 For centuries, Parisians had buried their dead in the Innocents,

0:52 the city’s largest cemetery.

0:54 While cemeteries across Europe were originally placed outside of urban areas,

0:59 in the 9th century,

1:00 the Church began allowing burials directly on its grounds.

1:05 As these urban parish cemeteries filled,

1:08 some churches started creating bone chapels,

1:12 like the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic,

1:15 to make room for new burials.

1:18 By the 18th century, public opinion on urban cemeteries shifted,

1:23 as Enlightenment thinkers and physicians

1:26 promoted new scientific ideas that linked hygiene to health.

1:31 They didn't yet understand the concept of germs,

1:34 believing instead that disease spread through “miasma,” or bad air.

1:40 Consequently, overcrowded cemeteries spewing cadaverous odors

1:45 were cast as public health threats.

1:48 Even after the Innocents and other cemeteries closed in the early 1780s,

1:54 residents continued to worry about the foul smells

1:58 and petitioned the government for a long-term solution.

2:02 But where could they move the remains of the millions of Parisians?

2:07 The vast abandoned network of quarries

2:10 beneath the city offered a logical solution.

2:14 Dating back to Roman times,

2:16 the mines had provided the limestone and plaster to build Paris.

2:21 But by the 18th century, they had begun collapsing under the city’s weight,

2:26 creating deadly sinkholes.

2:28 So in 1777, King Louis XVI established a team of engineers

2:35 to survey and reinforce the area.

2:38 And in 1785, Charles-Axel Guillaumot, the Inspector General of Quarries,

2:45 was tasked with turning sections of the unused tunnels into a massive crypt.

2:51 The Catholic Church initially resisted,

2:54 as it stood to lose income from burials and cemetery maintenance fees,

2:59 but public health concerns prevailed.

3:03 The transfer of human remains was done mostly at night,

3:07 to avoid upsetting passersby and to limit public exposure to the miasma.

3:14 Millions of anonymous bones were dug up by hand,

3:18 carted across Paris, and dumped unceremoniously in the Catacombs.

3:24 It was a distinctly modern project,

3:26 focused on efficiency rather than memorialization.

3:31 The Cemetery of the Innocents was the largest source,

3:34 though bones were soon brought from cemeteries throughout the city.

3:39 The French Revolution temporarily stalled relocation efforts.

3:44 Though the Catacombs did offer a space where inconvenient bodies

3:48 could disappear.

3:49 Some of the over 1,000 prisoners

3:52 executed in the Revolution’s September Massacres of 1792

3:57 were hastily cast there.

3:59 However, the Catacombs weren’t generally used for new burials.

4:04 Instead, the newly dead were interred in garden cemeteries

4:08 established, once again, on the city’s outskirts.

4:12 By the end of the Revolution,

4:14 the relocation project had sprung back to life.

4:18 And in 1809, Napoleon Bonaparte, aware of the unifying power of monuments,

4:24 ordered that a small section of the chaotic space

4:28 be curated and open to the public.

4:31 Piles of bones were pushed to the sides,

4:34 facades of skulls and femurs were artfully arranged,

4:39 and quotes about the fleeting nature of life were hung on the walls.

4:44 The rest of the Catacombs—

4:46 housing the remains of an estimated 6 million Parisians—

4:50 was, and largely remains, untouched.

4:54 After its beautification,

4:56 the Catacombs became a hugely popular tourist destination.

5:01 While signs indicated the cemetery where the bones were moved from,

5:06 the remains themselves were anonymous—

5:09 aristocrats lay next to laborers, raiders next to defenders,

5:14 the young next to their elders.

5:18 And so, the site became a symbol

5:20 of what one 19th-century photographer called the “confused equality of death.”

5:27 Sources vary, but some say the last remains

5:31 were moved as recently as the 1930s.

5:35 Today, people from around the world continue to visit the Catacombs,

5:40 finding amidst its caverns a haunting reminder

5:44 of our shared, inevitable future.