SYMHC Classics: Paris Catacombs

00:00:02
Speaker 1: 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.