Picture Paris in the 1780s. Not the city of lights and lovers — a city choking on its own dead. For over a thousand years, Parisians had been burying bodies in the same cemeteries, and the biggest, Saints-Innocents, sat right in the middle of town. Graves were stacked ten deep. In 1780, a basement wall in a building next door finally collapsed, and a landslide of decomposing remains poured into someone’s cellar. The city was rotting from the inside out.
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Ghosts & Curses·1/2·1′
The place
Catacombs of Paris
The Empire of the Dead — Six Million Bones Made Art
When Paris ran out of room for its dead, it built them a palace underground
Late 18th century (1786-1788)Catacombs of Paris
Moral of the Story
“Death is the great equalizer — the social hierarchies we build in life are meaningless when reduced to bone.”
Characters
C
City engineers of ParisN
Night workersS
Six million anonymous ParisiansI
Inspector-General of QuarriesSource
Archives de Paris; Inspection Générale des Carrières records