City of the Dead: The Catacombs of Paris

The Catacombs of Paris is the city of the dead. It is a group of caves and tunnels that is located directly under Paris and goes out for more than 300 kilometers.

The city of the dead started out first as a quarry of limestone. The catacombs were actually built by the Romans thousands of years ago. The quarry grew bigger and eventually became a city which covered a large expanse of land. During the reign of Philippe-Auguste, he started having tunnels made so he could make ramparts to protect the city. The quarries became more complicated as time passed and was so filled with tunnels that it was easy to get lost in them. The quarry also provided enough limestone to build housings and structures for many centuries.

The business of the quarry continued for many centuries until the city of Paris grew larger above the ground and also heavier. Much of the ground that was under Paris was hollow because the quarry was emptied close to the surface of the city. This problem resulted in many buildings falling through the ground and into the dug-up quarries.

Soon, another problem occurred. The many cemeteries and graveyards in Paris were getting filled up. The Cemetery of the Innocent, a very famous cemetery at the time, had more than thirty generations of buried human beings.

An author of a Website on the catacombs of Paris said that “Families used to pay the parish priest to bury their dead in here (the cemetery near the church). The priest didn’t want to refuse money, so after a while, of course, there was no more place (to put the bodies). So many priests decided to build a sort of house for dead people, which is called a “charnier” [mass grave]. The dead accumulated there.”

As the city grew and more people died, the cemeteries no longer had places to place the dead except piling the dead over each other. When the Cemetery of the Innocent could no longer plot the dead on firm ground, they were stacked and the cemetery grew more than ten feet above the ground! Anyone who lived anywhere close to these overcrowded cemeteries was constantly haunted by the putrid smell of the dead and the rotting.

As these old cemeteries became flooded with the dead, many of the walls were broken down, and when this happened, the fetid bodies rolled out into the city, and in many cases, plaguing the citizens of Paris with diseases. When the problem of where to put the dead became unbearable, a decision was make to start putting the bones of the dead in the abandoned hollow quarries just beneath the city. So the cemeteries were emptied of the dead and the once thought of useless quarry was put to good use. It became the home of the dead people of Paris.