Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

Historic · Île de la Cité (4th)Paris,France

An underground memorial behind Notre-Dame walked as a narrowing sequence of concrete spaces, ending at two hundred thousand lit glass rods.

The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation is at the eastern point of the island, behind the cathedral, and almost all of it is below ground. There are almost no objects and very little text. Instead there is a sequence of spaces you move through in a fixed order, each narrower than the last. Georges-Henri Pingusson finished it in 1962 as a national memorial to the people deported from France between 1940 and 1945, built so that a visitor would feel the place rather than read an explanation of it. From the street you see a low white wall and nothing else. A narrow stair drops between two blank concrete faces into a small triangular yard where the sky is cut to a slot overhead. The river is there, straight ahead, but only through a screen of iron spikes: you can see the water and you cannot reach it. A low doorway leads into the crypt. Along a corridor behind a grille stand two hundred thousand lit glass rods, one for each person deported from France. At the far end there is a flame and the grave of one deportee who was never identified.

Worth knowing

Good to know

People come here to remember, not to look — Voices carry in the crypt, the space is very small, and photographing other visitors is out of place even where it is allowed.
The only way in is a narrow stair — There is no lift and no step-free route into the yard or the crypt, and bags are checked at the gate above.
It is behind the cathedral, at the tip of the island — Nothing shows from the quay but a low white wall and a gate in a small garden, so people walk past it constantly.
Do not assume it is open — Opening is limited and changes with the season, and the gate can be shut while the garden around it is not.
Walk it through once, in order — The memorial is small and it is built as a single route, so a second circuit shows you nothing new and breaks the order the spaces were designed in.

Things to do

1
Go down the stair without stopping
The way in is a flight of steps between two blank walls that close in as you descend. Do not pause on the steps. They are built so that the noise of the street falls away behind you and the yard at the bottom is almost silent, and you only feel that change if you walk straight down.
2
Stand at the iron screen over the river
In the triangular yard, walk to the far point and look through the bars. The Seine is a few metres below and moving. This is the only opening in the whole memorial, and it is barred, so you cannot reach the water. Everything else in view is bare stone, which makes the river the only moving thing you can see from inside.
3
Look down the corridor of lights, then read one camp name
Step through the low doorway and stop. The corridor runs away behind a grille, packed with two hundred thousand small lights, one for each person deported from France; seeing that number stretch away as a physical distance is what the room is for. Then turn to the walls, where the names of the camps are cut into the concrete. The memorial gives no history and no explanation on site, so pick one name, read it, and do not move on straight away.