Père-Lachaise Cemetery

Historic · Charonne / Ménilmontant (20th)Paris,France

Forty-four hectares of tombs packed along cobbled lanes on a wooded Paris hill, unwanted until the city moved Molière's bones up the slope in 1817.

Père-Lachaise is a wooded hill of tombs standing shoulder to shoulder along cobbled lanes under old trees. Many are little stone chapels the width of a door, their iron doors opening on dead leaves and a jar of plastic flowers gone white. Traffic noise dies a few steps inside. Flowers on a fresh grave sit a few paces from stones nobody has visited in a century. The cemetery covers forty-four hectares, and most people leave having seen a corner of it. Almost nobody wanted to be buried here when it opened in 1804. Thirteen graves went in during the whole first year: the hill stood well outside Paris, on ground the Church had not blessed. So the city imported famous corpses, and in 1817 the bones of Molière, La Fontaine and the lovers Héloïse and Abélard were carried up the slope. It worked. By 1830 the hill held 33,000 graves. Walk to the south-east corner and you reach a plain stretch of wall where the army shot captured Communard fighters after the last week of the rising. The left has marched to it most Mays since.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Navigate by division number, not by direction — Small plaques at the lane corners give the division you are standing in. The avenues curve back on themselves, so the numbers are the only reliable guide.
The famous graves are where the crowd is — Jim Morrison's plain railed slab usually has a knot of people at it; step two lanes away and you are often alone.
Come when the branches are bare — The canopy closes over the lanes in summer and keeps them dark. In late autumn the low sun reaches the stone and worn inscriptions become legible again.
On 1 November the cemetery fills with Parisians — Families bring pots of chrysanthemums for All Saints' Day, a French habit, and for one day the lanes belong to locals rather than sightseers.
Wear shoes that grip — The lanes are old paving stones on a hillside, worn round by two centuries of feet and slippery after rain. Smooth soles slide on the steeper stretches.

Things to do

1
Look through the iron doors of the family chapels
Pick one of the older numbered divisions high on the slope and put your eye to the iron door of one of the little stone chapels. Inside most of them you will see a floor of dead leaves, a fallen kneeling stool and a jar of plastic flowers gone white. A few still hold a photograph propped against the back wall.
2
Find the wall with no names on it
Follow the perimeter path to division 76 in the south-east corner. The wall is plain rendered stone with one marble plaque in gold letters: Aux morts de la Commune, 21-28 mai 1871, which means "To the dead of the Commune, 21-28 May 1871". Nobody is named. Look for fresh flowers pushed into the joints. The big sculpted memorials standing nearby belong to the Second World War.
3
Find any grave by reading the green lane signs
The lanes here are signed like Paris streets, on dark green cast-iron plates with white capitals and the arms of the city on top. Each plate gives the name of the lane and the numbered division it runs beside, for example CHEMIN DU PERE ETERNEL, 10e DIVISION. Every burial in the cemetery is filed under one of those division numbers, so with a number in hand you can walk from sign to sign instead of circling.
4
Go down into the underground gallery of urns
From the Gambetta gate side, take the steps down beneath the crematorium, where France's first cremation was held in 1889. Below ground the corridors are lined with small square plaques, one for each urn. Many carry a photograph, a medal or a plastic rose wired to the stone. Voices drop to nothing down here.