I cannot stress enough how much of a scaredy cat I am. When travelling, I much prefer to do the large majority of my historical sightseeing during the day. And you will very rarely find me going on a ghost tour. However, there are a handful of places that are (seemingly) terrifying but I am still hoping to visit. And that includes the Paris Catacombs. The hopefully-final resting place of more than six million Parisians, it is known for several odd occurrences. Let’s look at a quick history of the Paris Catacombs!
Overflowing Cemeteries
By the eighteenth century, Paris cemeteries were overflowing. In particular, the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery was one of the largest cemeteries, often used for mass graves, and could not hold the remains of anyone else by the late eighteenth century. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the cemetery had been forced to change to mass graves- up to 1,500 people would be buried in one mass grave before it was closed and another dug. In 1780, after a particularly wet spring, burials were forbidden in the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery, as well as all other Paris cemeteries.
Moving Remains to the Paris Catacombs
Although many people think that the Catacombs of Paris are entirely full of bones, that is only in a small portion.
For several centuries, many areas of what we now know as Paris were actually underground mines. Mining began in the thirteenth century and had largely ceased by the eighteenth, but the tunnel system still remained. It was decided in 1785 that part of these tunnels would be used an ossuary.
It took nearly thirty years to move the remains of nearly six million people to the catacombs, with nightly transportation from the cemeteries to the tunnels taking place from 1787 to 1814. Originally the bones were not deposited in any sort of order, but the director in 1810 decided that it should be a type of mausoleum and worked to put the bones into the designs you can still see today.
♠
If you would like to visit or learn more about the history of the Paris catacombs, you can visit their website here: https://www.catacombes.paris.fr/en.
Have you visited the Paris Catacombs?
Cheers,
The Historian
Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Pinterest
.JPG){kind=link}
