Catacombs: six million dead beneath Paris

Every day, thousands of people cross the streets of Paris without knowing. Without knowing that twenty meters below their feet there are 300 kilometers of tunnels. Without knowing that those tunnels hold the remains of six million people. Six million. More than the entire population of Norway, buried beneath a living city. The Paris Catacombs are not just a tourist attraction. They are the consequence of two centuries of one question: what do we do with our dead when the city can no longer hold them? And the answer Paris found in the 18th century was brutal, practical and almost poetic.…

To understand the Catacombs you need to understand what happened in 1786. Paris had a disgusting problem. The Cemetery of the Holy Innocents had been the city's central cemetery since the 10th century. Eight hundred years of accumulating the dead. When the cemetery filled up, they buried on top. Then on top of that. And so on. The bodies decomposed so close to the surface that they contaminated the water wells. Residents of nearby neighborhoods fell ill. Epidemics were frequent. In May 1780 a cemetery wall collapsed. And bodies literally spilled onto the neighboring houses. The city h…

The first years, the bones were thrown in without order. Loaded from carts. Piled without criteria. An organic chaos of human remains. But in 1810, inspector Louis-Etienne Hericart de Thury decided this was unacceptable. The dead deserved order. And he began to organize the bones along the tunnel walls. Tibias and femurs forming horizontal layers, with skulls interspersed every so often. It was not art at first. It was organization. But the result ended up being something between a mausoleum and a collective work of art. Columns of femurs forming arches. Hearts made of skulls in the wa…

In 1789 the French Revolution began. And in the years that followed, Paris executed thousands of people under the guillotine. Many of those bodies ended up down here. Robespierre was guillotined on July 28th, 1794. His remains rest in the Catacombs. Danton, one of the Revolution's leaders, guillotined on April 5th, 1794. Down here. Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry. Guillotined. Here. The killers and the killed mixed together. The executioners and the executed without separation. In the Catacombs there is no difference of class, politics, crime or virtue. They are all e…

At some point in your journey you will see an inscription on the wall. In French it says: "Arrete. C'est ici l'empire de la Mort." Stop. This is the Empire of the Dead. This phrase was carved into the stone in 1810 by inspector Hericart de Thury. Not as a warning. As a declaration. As a way to mark the passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead. The place where you cross that inscription is the point where the ordinary quarry tunnels become the official ossuary. What came before was just rock and subsoil. What comes after is six million people. In other countr…

Before it was an ossuary, this was a quarry. And the quarry workers who worked down here left something unexpected: art. On the walls of some galleries, sculptures carved into the stone can still be seen. The most famous is a miniature of the fort of Port Mahon, in Menorca, Spain. It was carved by a disabled soldier named Decure, who had been a prisoner of war there. He returned to Paris. Started working in the quarries. And for years, in his free time, underground, in the dark, he reconstructed from memory the fort where he had been held captive. The work spans several meters. It had s…

During World War Two, Paris was occupied by the Nazis from 1940 to 1944. And while the Germans controlled the streets, something different was happening beneath them. The French Resistance used the catacombs tunnels as communication routes, meeting places and hiding spots. This was nothing new: the tunnels had been used for smuggling for centuries. But during the occupation, they became critical. Messengers could move beneath the city unseen. Weapons were stored. Secret meetings were organized. In one section of the tunnels, near the Montparnasse cemetery, the Resistance installed an op…

On November 3rd, 1793, Philibert Aspairt entered the tunnels. He was the gatekeeper of the Val-de-Grace hospital, directly above. He entered alone. Without permission. Without a guide. It is believed he was looking for a wine cellar from the old Carthusian convent. He never came out. His body was found eleven years later, in 1804. A few meters from an exit. He had died of hunger and dehydration in the darkness. His body was buried exactly where they found it. The gravestone is still there, somewhere in the non-tourist tunnels, marking the exact spot where he died. Philibert Aspairt…

The tourist section of the Catacombs is only 2% of the total. The remaining 98% is closed to the public. But that does not mean it is empty. In Paris there exists a subculture of people called cataphiles. They explore the tunnels illegally, at night, for pleasure. They are not criminals in the usual sense. They are artists, university students, workers. Regular people with an unusual obsession. Some carry maps. Others go from memory. There are those who spend weeks mapping new sections. They organize into groups. They have their own codes of conduct: no vandalism, no leaving trash, help…

There is a fact about the Catacombs that still surprises historians. Many of the bones down here belonged to famous people. But since they were mixed without identification during the transfer, nobody knows exactly where. Moliere, the playwright. Here. Jean de La Fontaine, the poet of fables. Here. Rabelais, the satirist. Here. Charles Perrault, the author of Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. Here. And also criminals. And victims of criminals. And revolutionaries. And counter-revolutionaries. The French Revolution killed more than 2,700 people during the Terror period alone. Betw…

Think about this as you leave. Right now, above your head, there are people in cafes. Tourists taking photos. Children in school. Delivery cyclists. Markets. Couples arguing. Concerts. Funerals on the surface. And twenty meters below all of that: six million people who were once all of those things too. The Catacombs are not a museum of death. They are a reminder of continuity. Every street in Paris has bones beneath it. Every square meter of this city is built on people. Boulevard Saint-Germain, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Latin Quarter, the Ile de la Cite. All of it, supported by the…

When you come out, you will breathe differently. I cannot be certain. But those who visit the Catacombs say so. That the first sip of Paris air smells different after being down there. More real. More present. With a weight it did not have before. The Catacombs do not teach about death. They teach about scale. Six million people. Each with a full life. With a story. With someone who loved them and someone who hated them. With fears and dreams that nobody today remembers. Reduced to bones piled in a wall underground in a city that keeps running above. That should not make you sad. It …