SYMHC Classics: Paris Catacombs

This 2019 episode notes that the Catacombs contain the bones of an estimated 6 to 7 million people, and explains that their history is really two interconnected stories of mines and human remains.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. As we get ready to set off
on our trip to Barcelona, and we also come up
on Halloween, we are bringing out a previous episode that
combines the macabre with another trip that we took to Europe.
It is the Paris Catacombs, which followed our twenty nineteen
trip to France. This originally came out on October twenty third,

(00:23):
twenty nineteen, So enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in
History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye.

(00:43):
Back when we were planning our trip to Paris earlier
this year, one of the things that we specifically asked
to include on the itinerary was a trip to the Catacombs.
Those are in the southern part of the city. They're
on the left bank of the Seine, and the Catacombs
are an ossuary that cans the bones of an estimated
six to seven million people. They are stacked in their

(01:05):
floor to ceiling. Of course, that was an ideal topic
for an October episode, but that ostuary is just one
part of a huge network of tunnels and mines that
are under the city. Their history goes back centuries before
the bones were even part of it. And really this
is two interconnected stories of minds and human remains. Because

(01:27):
in the eighteenth century Paris was dealing with two really
big problems simultaneously. It had way too many dead bodies
to deal with and a lot of the city was
at great risk of collapsing into those mines. I mean,
who hasn't had those two problems happening at the same time.
You know, when we were on our catacomb's tour, the

(01:50):
collapsing of the city was one hundred percent news to me,
and I was like, that is as to meet dramatic
as these bones are surrounded by. Yeah, and the city
of Paris has a distinctive look. I love it so deeply.
Many of its historic buildings are made from limestone, including
famous landmarks like the Louver and notcl Dame Cathedral. Limestone

(02:14):
is a rock made from marine sediments and it's abundant
in the region thanks to the warm sea that covered
the area roughly forty five million years ago, and it
gives these buildings a consistent, creamy facade, often under a
gray zinc roof. Yeah, when you look at like wide
sweeping shots of Paris in movies if you've never personally
been there, that's what's behind that just sort of dreamy,

(02:38):
consistently colored look. Yeah, we should point out that that's
in part also because the city has had a lot
of regulation in place about what can be built and
how it can be built, and that things need to
look like they belong together, right right. This is especially
like in the central historic part of the city. If
you get out into the suburbs, it doesn't so much

(02:59):
look like that anymore. Some of this limestone came from
other parts of France, but a lot of it came
from under the city of Paris itself. This type of
limestone is so closely associated with the city that it's
often called Paris stone, but its more formal name is
Lutitian limestone. Geologists in the nineteenth century named it after Lutitia,

(03:22):
which was the Roman name for the city that we
now know as Paris. People were quarrying limestone, gypsum, and
other materials in what's now Paris all the way back
to antiquity. When this started around the first century, the
city was much smaller, mostly occupying the area just to
the south of the Seine and the islands in the
river itself. The earliest quarries were open pits to the

(03:44):
south of the city proper, but by the fourteenth century
people were mining limestone underground rather than using these open quarries,
and as the mines and the city both got bigger,
they eventually overlapped. Mines were primarily under what's now the
thirteenth and fourteenth Arrondiusment, but they also extended under a

(04:05):
lot of other parts of the city as well. Although
abandoned galleries within the mines were supposed to be filled
in in a lot of cases, this didn't always happen.
When it did happen, naturally, the fill material that was
used was never as strong or as stable as the
limestone that had been taken out. Basically, people were digging
limestone out from under Paris, bringing it above ground, and

(04:27):
making buildings out of it without necessarily reinforcing or bracing
the space they left behind. This sounds sort of like
the start of a sci fi movie on how to
do it wrong. Unsurprisingly, this led to some problems. Yeah,
Even under the best possible circumstances, it would be challenging
to simultaneously keep up with centuries of expansion in both

(04:51):
the city above and the mines below. This expansion, like
I said, it just took place over hundreds of years.
There was not a mass sister plan for the city
of Paris that was maintained consistently for all of that time.
And then when it came to what was happening underground,
a lot of the time nobody was keeping track of
the big picture with that at all. By the seventeen hundreds,

(05:13):
no one really had a sense of just how much
stone had been removed from under Paris or exactly where
the tunnels and galleries had been dug. And on top
of that, in places the mines had been dug in layers,
with one crew digging under a gallery that an earlier
crew had previously hollowed out. So in the late eighteenth century,
parts of Paris started collapsing into the mines underneath. This

(05:37):
crisis really peaked between seventeen seventy four and seventeen seventy eight,
and during that time as many as twenty people were killed.
That might sound like a pretty low death toll compared
to most of the disasters that we have talked about
on this show, but these collapses were so unpredictable and
frequent and dramatic that they were just terrifying. I don't

(05:58):
know about anybody else, but the idea that my house
might suddenly fall into a sink hole with that warning
is way scarier to me than anything else we're talking
about in the show. Today. People even blame these collapses
on the work of the devil. That makes sense, right.
The devil is below you, trying to shut your house down.
The first major collapse took place on December seventeenth, seventeen

(06:20):
seventy four, when a stretch of Rue d'anfair, the Street
of Hell, collapsed into a mine. Roughly three hundred meters
of road and adjacent buildings collapsed into a hole that
was at least twenty five meters deep. Other collapses followed
that one. On September fifteenth, seventeen seventy six, King Louis
the sixteenth signed a decree closing the mines and prohibiting

(06:42):
digging under public roads. People who owned private land that
was situated over a mine were required to have that
mine inspected and reinforced. The king also dispatched an architect
named Antoine du Pont to inspect the damage. From this
collapse and to try to map them the mine system
as well as determine whether the private property owners were

(07:04):
in compliance with this requirement. On April fourth of the
following year, Louis the sixteenth issued another decree which established
a Department of General Corey Inspection. Award winning Royal architect
Charles Axel Guillammeau was appointed as its first inspector. General
DuPaul stayed on as an engineer, although it's clear that
he and Guiamau did not really get along terribly well.

(07:28):
Gamo was given the task of mapping the minds and
making them safe, and he had the skills that experienced
to do this. At the same time, though this situation
was dire, Another major collapse occurred near the city center
on April twenty fourth, which was the day that he
started work, and this project was also massive. There were
about eight hundred hectares of mines under the city of Paris,

(07:51):
that's about three square miles or eight square kilometers. Guillemau
needed to map that entire system, including figuring out what
public roads in buildings were situated on the land above
and marking those landmarks with signs below. The King was
not quite so worried about what was under private land.
Gmo needed to reinforce and brace areas that were in

(08:13):
danger of collapsing, and he developed a code for marking
support columns that would note when the column was placed
and who had done it. You can still see lots
of those down there today. Gmo had hundreds of men
working on this project, including laborers and cartographers, but there
was really no way to do all of this work
quickly enough to immediately prevent all future collapses. They kept

(08:38):
happening regularly over the next few years. In seventeen seventy eight,
a collapse in the neighborhood of Minimal killed seven people,
and it took weeks to find all of their bodies.
In addition to all of this mapping and stabilization work,
Giammo also took on another task, preparing the old minds
to receive human remains, and we're going to talk about

(09:00):
that after we first paused for a little sponsor break.
As the city of Paris was dealing with all these
collapsing roads and buildings, that was also dealing with another
major problem, and that was an over abundance of dead bodies.

(09:22):
As the city was expanding over what was essentially hollowed
out limestone. It had also really outgrown its available burial space.
In the centuries before the French Revolution, most people in
Paris were buried in cemeteries that were adjacent to their
parish churches. The city had thirty two such cemeteries, and
in most cases people were buried in mass graves rather

(09:44):
than individual plots. It was not unusual for these graves
to be dug as trenches and then left open until
they were full. It also was not unusual for the
same piece of land to be reused as time passed,
with a new mass grave being dug where an older
group of bodies had decomposed. As the city got bigger
and more crowded, though, this method of burial became less

(10:06):
and less workable homes and other buildings encroached on the cemeteries.
There were more bodies packed into the mass graves more tightly,
with less time passing before the same piece of ground
was needed to bury more people In an overcrowded graveyard,
there just wasn't enough organic material and oxygen available for
microorganisms to do the work required for decomposition, so there

(10:29):
were too many bodies and it was taking longer for
them to break down. Complicating all of this was the
fact that some of these same churchyards were also used
as communal green space, or they were next door to
those types of spaces. So, for example, if a market
was next door to or overlapping with a graveyard, that
graveyard might be littered with blood and offal from butchered

(10:50):
animals or rotting produce that had not been sold. Foul
air and the smell of decay became persistent problems on
top of the inherent grossness of that situation and the
fact that decaying bodies really can spread disease. At this
point in history, people blamed miasmas or bad air for

(11:10):
a range of illnesses. There was a lot of talk
about quote, cadaverous exhalations in these graveyards and the health
problems that they were causing. By the seventeen sixties, officials
in Paris were issuing reports detailing all kinds of problems
that were associated with the cemeteries, including thick and foul
smelling air and a range of mysterious illnesses. In seventeen

(11:34):
sixty five, an ordinance was passed outlawing burials in church cemeteries,
instead requiring new cemeteries to be built outside of the
city itself, but this ordinance was never enforced. People understandably
were upset by the idea that they could not be
buried in the same place that their loved ones had been.
In some cases, families had been buried in the same

(11:55):
church cemetery for generations. The Catholic Church also objected to
the plan because it meant that burials were going to
become secularized. Even though people generally objected to the idea
of moving the cemeteries outside the city, they continued to
be concerned about their unhealthful effects in the city. It
was kind of like a weird turnabout of the not

(12:17):
in my backyard problem. In addition to blaming illnesses on
bad cemetery air, people claimed that it was causing milk, meat,
and other food to spoil within hours. People also reported
wine turning into vinegar almost as soon as it was
opened because of all this cemetery funk. It's not clear
how much of this was real and how much was

(12:39):
an urban legend, but it's clear that people were really
fearful about whether these cemeteries were hurting them. In spite
of that, though, nothing really changed until seventeen eighty, and
that is when the situation at Cemthier de Saint Anossin,
or the Cemetery of Holy Innocence, became completely unmanageable. This
was the largest cemetery in Paris and also one of

(13:01):
the oldest. Burials had started there in antiquity and its
use as a cemetery was ongoing by the twelfth century.
In eleven eighty six, King Philippe the second Auguste had
a wall built around it as a mark of respect
for the dead, but then also with the hope of
discouraging people from using it as a public commons and
market space. At first, the wall worked pretty well for

(13:22):
this second purpose, but as the city grew, it was
treated more and more like a common green space and
the neighboring buildings got closer to it, some of them
right up against that wall. Although it was technically owned
by the adjacent Holy Innocence Church, this cemetery was operated
more like a public cemetery. Residents of eighteen different parishes

(13:43):
had burial rights there. Two hospitals and a morgue also
sent their bodies to Holy Innocence. By the eighteenth century,
about ten percent of the people who died in Paris
were being buried in that one place, and that was
far more than the space could handle. In seventeen eighty,
people started reporting extremely foul odors around the Cemetery of

(14:03):
the Holy Innocence, and they started filing official complaints. Then,
one night, a restaurant owner went into his cellar for
some wine and described himself as being totally overcome by
the smell. It turned out that the cemetery wall had collapsed,
filling the cellars of several homes with human remains. Newly
appointed Salubrity inspector Antoine Alexica de de Vaux investigated the

(14:27):
situation and filed a report stating that at least three
houses had been affected by poisonous gases seeping in from
the cemetery. Residents were reporting all kinds of health effects,
including delirium, respiratory issues, and vomiting. The inspector recommended that
they not only seal off the basements and disinfect the homes,
but also that the cemetery be closed entirely. Not long

(14:50):
after Louis the sixteenth government issued an ordinance calling the
Cemetery of Holy Innocence quote an intolerable and illegal threat
to the city. The burials stopped there that year seventeen eighty,
although the bodies that were already there stayed where they
were for the time being. People just didn't know what
to do with them. In seventeen eighty two, though, someone

(15:11):
writing under the name Villadieux published an essay proposing that
the bodies be moved down into the mines that were
under the city, which conveniently had just been undergoing this
whole mapping and reinforcement process. This is where the mind
story and the body story intersect, So before we get
to that, we will take another quick sponsor break. About

(15:40):
five years passed between the closing of the Cemetery of
the Holy Innocence, meaning when people stopped burying new bodies there,
and the removal of those bodies to the mines under
the city of Paris. The process started in December of
seventeen eighty five, with bodies being removed from the cemetery
at night to try to avoid upsetting people and the
Catholic Church. On April seventh, seventeen eighty six, a portion

(16:04):
of the mine system was consecrated as the Paris Municipal
Osuary At some point in this process of body relocation,
people started calling the area the Catacombs, after the Catacombs
of Rome. A lot of folks refer to this whole
system of minds as the Catacombs, even though the osuary
is only one small part of it. Yeah, when we
were there, it was an interesting thing, and that they

(16:27):
talk about how huge it is, but what you walk
through is really a fairly short little section of it.
I think there's the perception, and I know I had
it that you would just kind of be turned loose
in this huge PLA. No, that is not the case.
The process of removing the bodies from the Cemetery of
the Holy Innocence took months, and it involved the remains

(16:48):
of more than twenty thousand people. The cemetery had been
so overcrowded that many of the bodies had supoontified, I
means the fats in the body turned into a soapy
substance rather than decomposing. Scientists Antoine Faercrois and Michel Turret
studied these bodies and coined the term at apisser to
describe what they were seeing. Once the bodies were all

(17:11):
gone out of the cemetery of the Holy Innocence. The
charle houses that were associated with the cemetery were torn down,
the ground was disinfected with lime, and concrete was poured
over the entire area. A fountain was installed in the
middle of this, and today the former Cemetery of the
Holy Innocence is the Fountain of Innocence, which is a

(17:31):
public plaza. Soon people living near other cemeteries started petitioning
for those bodies to be removed as well. One by one,
the cemeteries within the city were closed and emptied. These
remains weren't artfully arranged the way they are in the
catacombs today. For the most part, the bodies were just
put into it in piles. And then in the midst

(17:53):
of all this exhumation and body relocating, the French Revolution
started in seventeen eighty nine. Axel Guillemont was briefly imprisoned
during the revolution, in part because his position had been
a royal appointments, and in part because Antoine DuPont was
campaigning against him. Like we said earlier, they did not
seem to get along. I don't have all the detail

(18:15):
about exactly what went on there. There seems to have
been an ongoing power struggle, though all the church property
was nationalized in the fall of seventeen eighty nine and
including the cemeteries, but for the most part, this long
term effort of cemetery closures and body removals was put
on hold, especially as the French Revolution morphed into the
Reign of Terror. However, this was also one of the

(18:38):
few times when the recently dead were taken to the
catacombs rather than bodies that had already been interred in
a cemetery. A mass killing of prisoners was carried out
between September two and sixth the seventeen ninety two out
of fears that they might band together into counter revolutionary uprising.
More than one thousand prisoners were killed in what came

(18:59):
to be known as September massacres. Although some were buried
in cemeteries, most were placed in the catacombs, and the
ones that were buried in cemeteries were moved to the
catacombs when those cemeteries were emptied. Later. Napoleon came to
power in France in seventeen ninety nine, and the cemeteries
of Paris became part of the question of how the

(19:19):
French in general and Parisians specifically imagined theirselves in their
new society post revolution, there were still a lot of
public health concerns that surrounded the cemeteries that had been
there before the revolution, and then on top of that,
the violence and the recent horror of the Reign of
Terror made the subject of these overcrowded burial spaces and

(19:40):
the bodies in them a particularly sensitive one. People proposed
sweeping reforms in multiple areas of society, including what the
city should look like and how bodies should be treated
after death. People started to imagine public cemeteries as places
that could be beautiful while also inspiring a sense of
morality and community ties. So during these years, a lot

(20:03):
of things happened that were connected to this idea of
how to make spaces for the dead, and what those
spaces should mean to the living, and how all of
that connected to the greater idea of French society. Before
the revolution ended, the Church of Sant Genevieve had been
reimagined as the Pantheon, which was to house bodies of
some of France's most notable citizens, including Voltaire, Victor Hugo,

(20:28):
emil Zola, Alexandre dumat Pierre, and Marie Currie. There had
been a few burials in what is now Perlichez Cemetery
before this point, but the cemetery as it exists today
was opened in eighteen oh four. It was designed by
architect Alexandre Teo d'Or Brognere an urban planner Nicholas Rocheaut.

(20:48):
It was France's first garden cemetery, which was a cemetery
style that became popular in North America and parts of
Europe in the nineteenth century. Garden cemeteries were also called
rural cemeteries, and they were meant to provide a sanitary
way to bury the dead, but also to serve as
a public park land and to reinforce romantic ideals that
were connected to nature and hygiene. The bodies of a

(21:12):
number of notable people were moved to Perliches, including abbal
Ard and Heloise, and today it's one of the city's
most popular tourist attractions. I went there on our trip
to Paris, and it is beautiful and it does all
the things that those types of cemeteries were supposed to inspire,
which is like walking through nature and contemplating mortality in
a peaceful, serene environment. Other similar cemeteries followed, both in

(21:36):
France and elsewhere underground, though the bodies that had been
placed in the catacombs were mostly left unattended from the
start of the French Revolution through the early eighteen hundreds.
By then, in spite of the earlier work that Gumo
had done, the catacombs were once again unsafe. Collapses and
sinkholes continued, although on a smaller scale than they had

(21:58):
at the end of the eighteenth century. Plus part of
the system was now full of remains in various states
of decay. The mines stayed cool year round, but they're
also very damp, so the remains had been affected by
moisture and rot. But in March of eighteen oh nine,
Luis Etien Rica de Tuy was appointed to the Underground

(22:19):
Department of Mines and Quarries, and he undertook a project
to turn what had basically just been an underground body
dump into a monument that was suitable for public admission.
This is when the bones were arranged in the way
that they are today, with the long bones and the
skulls backed up florida ceiling where you can see them,
and smaller bones and bone pieces tucked away behind. There

(22:42):
are some spots if you go down there, where you
can get a peek at the smaller bones and these
fragments as well. There are placards around that note in
a general way which cemetery the bones came from and
when they were placed in the catacombs. The catacombs open
to the public just four months after Eric al Detur
took on this project. Visitors pass under a carving that

(23:03):
reads arete say e see lampert de la more or
stop this is the Empire of death. There are also
placards carved with quotations about death, which ric Cardo Turri
decided to add in eighteen ten. Other than that, the
decorations are really minimal. Little has changed about the catacombs
themselves since the early nineteenth century, and the last deposit

(23:26):
of bones happened in eighteen sixty. The biggest edition since
then is the electric lighting, which it now has. Even
though this osuary was created because people were afraid of
the negative effects that dead bodies were having in their neighborhoods,
the catacombs with the bodies in them quickly became a
tourist attraction. Ere Car de Touri placed a guestbook at

(23:47):
the exit. In between July of eighteen oh nine and
August of eighteen thirteen, visitors left their impressions of the
catacombs in it as they left. General reactions in this
guest book were all over the place, although a lot
of people may notes along the lines of here one
can learn how to live, or some variation of Memento
mauri or remember you will die, which is also the

(24:09):
name of a gift shop in Magic Kingdom. It is yes,
I love it. Guests also observed how the placement of
the anonymous, indistinguishable bones illustrated that all people are equal
in death. This was particularly true since the cemeteries that
had been emptied included the bodies of famous and influential people,

(24:30):
including Maximilian Robespierre. Throughout their existence, the mines under Paris
have been used for a range of purposes that really
have nothing to do with getting limestone or dealing with
excess bodies. Researchers started working in the catacombs of the
nineteenth century, studying everything from the anatomy and pathology of
the bones to whether anything could or did live down there.

(24:53):
Photographer Gaspar Felix Tornachal, known as Felix Nadar studied the
use of artificial light in photography down there. He patented
the light source that he used to photograph the catacombs
in eighteen sixty one. People also hid in them during
the Revolution and the World Wars and other times of strife,
and the minds, of course have been put to all

(25:13):
kinds of criminal use, including being used by smugglers and
people just hiding out from the law. Even though so
much work was done to map and stabilize the mines,
they are still prone to collapse in flooding and it
is easy to get lost. For these reasons, entry into
them was outlawed on November two of nineteen fifty five.
Visitors to the catacombs are allowed to walk only through

(25:36):
a designated section. As we mentioned before, it's brief, which
is fenced off from the rest of the mines and
parts of the austuary that are off limits to visitors.
It is basically a one way tour. You go down
the steps to get in there, you walk in a
linear fashion through it and then go out, and there
is just a massive system beyond that that people are

(25:57):
not allowed into. Even so, today there is a whole
subculture of catacomb officionados who are known as cataphiles, who
have their own slang and their own rules of behavior
and etiquette. They've used some of this space, the space
that folks are not supposed to access to create artwork,
including graffiti and carving's. Cataphiles access the minds through little

(26:21):
known entrances, through things like sewers and sellers and other openings.
There's a whole police department that is tasked with trying
to find those and close them off because it can
be very dangerous down there. As I was researching this,
I found a news story about a couple of teenagers
who were lost down there for days, and that was

(26:41):
just within the last couple of years. There is apparently
a lot of people who hang out down there all
the time, fortunately with no injuries or deaths involved, but
they are still still a dangerous place to go, especially
without knowing your way around or how to deal with
stuff down there. Yeah. I mean even you know, as

(27:03):
you're walking through the area that you are allowed into,
you can see they are fenced off, as we mentioned,
but you can see down some of those other areas
and it goes to pitch blackness in a hurry, I
can't imagine being lost down there, particularly if you have
maybe lost power on your phone or something. I would

(27:25):
be terrified, not because I am afraid of the bones,
but just because I am trapped in a place where
I can't see and no one knows where I am. Yeah,
and you have no cell phone signal. There's really no
way to get a signal down there. You can find
on the internet and they will be in the show
notes various like magazine features by folks who have gained

(27:46):
the trust of some cataphiles to be able to be
guided down there, and several of them have harrowing moments
where they're like, I have to crawl through this little
tunnel that I can barely fit through. Rubble is raining
down on me, and I can tell that the metro
is directly above my head. What if something happens like

(28:07):
there's no nope, nopelope. Anytime you're crawling through a tunnel
you barely fit through, I'm out. I'm yeah. Well, it
reminds me in a lot of ways of caving. I
know a lot of people go caving, yeah, like an
adventure sport, and that can also be very dangerous. I
don't understand why you would choose that over having a

(28:28):
delicious meal. I just don't understand. I know it's very
thrilling for some people. I have a friend who's an
adrenaline junkie. I never understand why she wants to do
the thing she does. She must think I'm the dullest
human on the planet. I'm like, yes, but bacon, there's
happiness to be gained in other places. Yeah, but the catacombs,
I mean, it goes without saying it is a huge

(28:51):
tourist attraction, but I really do highly recommend visiting if
you're in Paris. The thing that struck me when we
were there this time, I'm a little older and theoretically wiser,
and it really was more than anything. It made me
think about the equalizing nature of death in a way
that was very reassuring and not upsetting at all. It

(29:11):
was really really lovely, and I'm grateful that I had
the chance to return. Yeah, especially in the post French Revolution,
with the you know, the the ideals of the French Revolution,
especially at the beginning, being about equality and fraternity. That
like that that presentation of the bones is being this
sort of universal equalizing I think was intentional. I was

(29:38):
more struck by just how many there are, because Paris
as a city has been you know, a large depending
on how you know large in quotation marks, depending on
what period of time, But it has been inhabited as

(29:58):
a city for so long, and what do you do
with the remains of your dead when you run out
of room? And so like my fascination with it, I
think was like a lot more with just the more
pragmatic idea of like, oh, what do we do with
all of our bodies? Right? Thanks so much for joining

(30:21):
us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of
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(30:45):
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