Why Millions of Bones Lie Beneath Paris: The Catacombs

Twenty meters below the streets of Paris, in tunnels cut from limestone, the bones of about six million people are stacked into walls. The Catacombs are the largest ossuary in Europe, and they exist because a city ran out of room for its dead.

Why did Paris move its dead underground?

Because the cemeteries were full, and dangerous. The Cemetery of the Innocents, near the central market of Les Halles, had taken burials since the Middle Ages, and by the 18th century the ground had risen more than six feet from bodies buried on top of one another, according to a Paris history site. The 16th-century writer Rabelais had already mocked its stench. In 1780, after heavy rain, a retaining wall gave way and decomposing remains spilled into the cellar of a neighboring property, according to Smithsonian Magazine. The cemetery was closed that year. In 1763 King Louis XV had already ordered burials moved outside the city, with little effect.

Where did the bones go?

Into the quarries. Paris had been built from limestone mined beneath it since the 13th century, leaving a network of tunnels under the Left Bank, much of it then outside the city. In 1786 a section near today’s Montparnasse was consecrated as the Paris Municipal Ossuary, and that April the first bones from the Innocents were carried across the city at night in covered wagons, accompanied by priests, according to the sources. The transfers continued, cemetery by cemetery, until about 1814, with further deposits into the 1860s as Haussmann rebuilt the city. By then the bones of six to seven million people had been moved, including, Smithsonian notes, the revolutionaries Marat and Robespierre.

Who arranged the bones into walls?

At first no one. The remains were tipped into the quarry galleries in heaps. From about 1810, Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, inspector of the quarries, had the bones stacked into the orderly walls of long bones and skulls that line the passages today, each section labeled with the cemetery it came from and the year, and he added stone tablets carved with verses about death, according to the Paris sites. A sign over the entrance reads, in French, “Stop! This is the empire of death.” The ossuary opened to visitors in 1809.

How much can you see?

About 1.5 kilometers, roughly a mile, of a network that runs for about 300 kilometers under the city; the public route is a fraction of a percent of the whole. Visitors descend 131 steps, walk through the galleries at a constant 14°C, and climb 112 steps out. More than half a million people visit each year, and tickets sell out, so book ahead. The rest of the network is closed to the public.

What were ossuaries for?

The Paris Catacombs are an extreme example of a practice common across Europe: when graveyards filled, bones were exhumed after the flesh had gone and moved to a charnel house or ossuary, making room for new burials. The Innocents had had charnel galleries along its walls for centuries, with bones visible to passersby and murals of the Dance of Death. Paris simply did it at a city-wide scale. See ossuaries and bone churches.

Why does the place move people?

Partly scale and partly anonymity. Six million people, none with a name, arranged by the cemetery they came from. Héricart de Thury intended the verses on the walls as a reminder that the same end awaits everyone, which is the old meaning of memento mori. For many visitors the effect is less horror than quiet. See memento mori: why remembering death can make life better and what happens to your bones after burial.

This is a history article. Figures such as the number of people buried at a site are estimates that vary between sources, and visiting rules change; check the site’s official page before planning a visit.