A history of Père Lachaise Cemetery

Before it was a cemetery

The hill was called Mont-Louis, and in the seventeenth century it belonged to the Jesuits, who ran a country retreat there for members of the order. Its most celebrated resident was François d'Aix de La Chaise, confessor to Louis XIV for thirty-four years and one of the more powerful men in France without ever holding an office. He is the Père Lachaise the cemetery is named after, and he is not buried in it.

The Jesuits were suppressed in France in 1763 and the estate passed through several hands. When the city of Paris bought it in 1804 it was an orchard and a garden on a slope with a very good view, which is exactly what the prefecture wanted.

Why Paris needed a new cemetery at all

By the late eighteenth century Parisian burial had become a public-health emergency. The Cimetière des Saints-Innocents, in the middle of the city, had been taking bodies for six hundred years on a plot the size of a large square. The ground had risen metres above the surrounding streets. In 1780 a cellar wall on the rue de la Lingerie gave way under the weight of the adjoining mass grave, and the cemetery was closed; its contents were eventually moved to the quarries that became the catacombs.

Napoleon's decree of 12 June 1804 settled the matter. Burial inside churches was banned, burial within the city limits was banned, and each district was to have its own cemetery outside the walls. Père Lachaise — then the Cimetière de l'Est — was the first of them, and it opened on 21 May 1804.

The first person buried here was a five-year-old girl. In its first year the cemetery took thirteen burials, on ground that could hold tens of thousands.

Brongniart's garden

The design was given to Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, the architect of the Paris Bourse, and it is the reason the cemetery feels the way it does. Brongniart did not lay out a grid of plots. He designed an English landscape garden — winding paths that follow the contour, planted trees, deliberate views, an ascent to a high point — and then put graves in it.

This was a genuinely new idea in Europe. A churchyard was consecrated ground attached to a building; what Brongniart made was a public park in which the dead happened to be. Every garden cemetery built in the nineteenth century, from Highgate in London to Mount Auburn outside Boston, is downstream of this hill.

The monumental gate on boulevard de Ménilmontant came later, in 1825, by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde. Brongniart's original chapel was replaced by the present one in the 1820s.

The 1817 transfers, and the rescue

For its first decade nobody wanted it. It was outside the city, it was a long way from anywhere, it was not attached to a parish, and Parisians did not trust it. By 1812 there were a few thousand graves on forty-four hectares.

In 1817 the administration solved the problem by moving in celebrities. The remains identified as [Molière and Jean de La Fontaine](/famous-graves/moliere-la-fontaine/) were transferred here with public ceremony and installed in matching raised sarcophagi. [Héloïse and Abélard](/famous-graves/heloise-abelard/) followed, under a neo-Gothic canopy that Alexandre Lenoir had assembled from salvaged abbey stonework.

It worked immediately. Buying a plot at Père Lachaise stopped being a practical decision and became a social one. By 1830 there were more than 33,000 graves. Every fashionable Parisian death for the next century — Chopin in 1849, Balzac in 1850, Delacroix in 1863 — arrived here because of a marketing decision taken in 1817 by a municipal administration that needed to balance a budget.

The cemetery was extended five times over the following decades, which is why the division numbers run chronologically outward from the original core rather than in any geographical order. The map page explains how to read them.

May 1871: the Commune

During the Semaine sanglante — the week in which the French army retook Paris from the Commune — the cemetery became a battlefield. Communard fighters used the tombs as cover and fought among them through the night of 27 May 1871. It was, by every account of it, appalling: hand-to-hand fighting in the dark between family vaults.

The following day, 147 captured Communards were lined up against the wall at the south-eastern boundary, shot, and buried in a trench where they fell. That wall is now the Mur des Fédérés, in division 76, and it has been a site of political pilgrimage ever since — the destination of an annual march, and at various points in the Third Republic a place the authorities tried to keep people away from.

It is worth understanding that the wall's significance is not only what happened at it. Thousands of Communards were killed across Paris that week, and many were buried in mass graves elsewhere. This particular wall became the memorial because it is here, in the cemetery where the bourgeoisie had chosen to be buried, and the argument about who the city belongs to is built into its location.

Cremation, and Bartholomé's monument

Cremation was legalised in France in 1887, against determined opposition from the Church, and the first crematorium in the country was built here. Jean-Camille Formigé designed it in a Byzantine-revival idiom — a great brick dome, more basilica than furnace — which was a deliberate architectural argument that this was a dignified practice rather than a sanitary convenience. The first cremation took place in January 1889, and the columbarium grew around it in division 87.

In 1899 the cemetery installed Albert Bartholomé's Monument aux Morts at the head of the main avenue. Bartholomé had begun making funerary sculpture after his wife's death, and the relief is unlike anything else here: a line of naked figures, of every age, walking into a plain doorway cut in the stone. There is no religious iconography and no consolation in it. Behind it is an ossuary holding the remains of Parisians whose names have been lost.

The twentieth century

From 1949 onwards, survivors' associations placed a series of monuments in division 97 commemorating the concentration camps and the deportations — Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Neuengamme and others — alongside memorials to the French Resistance. They are the most demanding sculptures in the cemetery and they receive a small fraction of the visitors who pass within thirty metres of them on the way to Édith Piaf.

The other thing that happened in the twentieth century was mass tourism. Jim Morrison's burial in 1971 brought a new kind of visitor and, for two decades, a genuine conservation problem: graffiti on neighbouring family tombs, damage, theft of the marker. The barriers and the summer guards date from that period, and so does a certain wariness in the cemetery's relationship with its own fame.

The lipstick on Oscar Wilde's tomb is the same story in miniature. Affection, at scale, is a conservation threat. The glass wall raised in 2011 is the compromise the cemetery arrived at, and it is a good one.

Père Lachaise today

It is still a working cemetery, and that is the fact most visitors do not hold on to. Around around 10,000 funeral ceremonies take place here every year, alongside roughly around 3 million visitors. Plots are still sold, in concessions of ten, thirty and fifty years and in perpetuity; expired concessions are recovered and reused, which is standard French practice and the reason a great many nineteenth-century graves are no longer here.

The site covers 44 hectares with 15 kilometres of paths, making it the largest green space within the boundaries of Paris as well as the most visited cemetery in the world. It is administered by the Ville de Paris, entry is free, and it always has been.

Two hundred years after Brongniart drew it, the thing that makes it extraordinary is the same thing that nearly killed it in 1810: it is not a churchyard. It is a garden with a million people in it, on a hill, in the middle of a city, open to anyone who walks through the gate.