Why Parisians have over 6 million bodies buried under their floors.
The Catacombs of Paris are a strange place. Stranger than those of Rome, lengthier than those in Odessa, they have a haunting history and an unusual background.
It’s the eve of the revolution, the city of Paris is putrid with the smell of dead bodies, human excrements, and human activity. For over the past 1000 years, the bodies of those Parisians have been buried in the same place and sometimes at the same time. The old cemetery of Saint Innocent is the center of this calamity; over 1500 bodies are buried in a single pit at once, bodies are piled 8 foot high and by 1780, heavy rain caused the smell of human flesh decaying to be smelt from miles away.
By 1785, burials were forbidden and the state of urgency increased. Over the past 500 years, illicit miners had been mining the ground on the left banks of the Seine (Lutetian Limestone) thus it was decided to build renovation on these great mine underground exploitations.
By 1788, the bones of the over 2 million dead in Saint Innocents were slowly moved into these areas. Initially, they were just a pile of bones lying in these great underground tunnels and little happened until -wait for it- the French Revolution…
Rapidly after the revolution, a man called de Thury (extremely French name), decided this great pile of bones would make a great mausoleum and started stacking the skulls and femurs into strange patterns and motifs (imagine if the dead could see their bodies now). He also created an even stranger area where visitors could see the strange skeletal deformities of the dead and added ominous warning inscriptions around them.
The catacomb was now home to over 6 million dead bodies, amassed into these stack of bones, entrenched by stairs, monuments, aquifers, criminals, and even graffitis.
In 1793, a man named Philibert got lost in these thousands of kilometers of tunnels, starved to death, and died. His body would only be found 11 years later. Countless stories waffle in these tunnels from the revolution to today…
It would be used by both the Resistance Francaise against the Nazis and by the Nazis under the lycee Montaigne. It really does have so many stories and legends to tell that it would be impossible to put in this article.
Today it is home to tons of parties underground, even an underground cinema (raided in 2006), thefts of wine (250,000 euros in 2018), Airbnb stunts, movies, strange cults, millions of graffitis, and adventurers.
Many seem to forget that they are walking under a pile of 6 million bodies when they walk in the exotic streets of Paris. So next time, when you are visiting some exquisite boutique or strange Bistrot, remember, just under your feet are those parties, those adventurers, those cults, and of course those catacombs.
