Molière and La Fontaine at Père Lachaise

A cemetery nobody wanted

Père Lachaise opened in May 1804 and very nearly failed. It was too far out — beyond the city wall, in a district Parisians thought of as the country — and it was not consecrated ground in the way people expected. In its first year it took thirteen burials. By 1812 it had a few thousand, on forty-four hectares, and the city was losing money on it.

The prefecture's answer was not to lower prices. It was to move in some celebrities.

The 1817 transfers

In 1817 the administration organised the ceremonial transfer of two of the most recognisable names in French letters. Molière and La Fontaine were brought across the city, installed in matching raised sarcophagi on a prominent path, and publicised heavily. In the same period Héloïse and Abélard were installed nearby under a Gothic canopy, which covered the romantic market as well as the literary one.

The effect was immediate and enormous. Buying a plot at Père Lachaise stopped being a practical decision about where to put a relative and became a statement about the kind of family you were. By 1830 the cemetery held more than thirty-three thousand graves. Every fashionable Parisian burial for the next century — and, eventually, Chopin, Balzac, Delacroix, Piaf, Wilde — follows from this decision.

It is, viewed coldly, the most successful destination-marketing campaign in the history of the funeral industry, and it was executed by a municipal administration in 1817.

Are they actually in there?

Probably not, or at least not certainly. Both men had complicated afterlives.

Molière died in February 1673, hours after playing the title role in Le Malade imaginaire. Actors were denied Christian burial, and his widow had to petition the king; the compromise was a night burial in the Saint-Joseph cemetery, in a plot reserved for unbaptised infants, with no service. During the Revolution his supposed remains were exhumed and taken to Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des monuments français, and from there to Père Lachaise.

La Fontaine was buried at the Saints-Innocents, a cemetery so overcrowded that it was closed in 1780 and its contents emptied wholesale into the catacombs. The remains identified as his went through the same Lenoir route.

Neither exhumation met anything a modern archaeologist would call a standard. Historians have argued about it for two centuries, and the honest position is the one the cemetery itself takes: these are the monuments, the identification is traditional, and it cannot be confirmed. We say so on the walk, because a story you have to protect from questions is not worth telling.

Finding them

From the main gate, take the avenue Principale and bear left; the chemin Molière is signed, and the two sarcophagi stand raised on columns above the path where you cannot miss them. That prominence is not an accident — they were sited to be seen from a distance by people who had come specifically to look.

Chopin is two minutes away in division 11, and Héloïse and Abélard are downhill in division 7. The three stops together take about twenty minutes and cover the whole founding story of the cemetery, which is why our free self-guided route starts with them.