Père Lachaise Cemetery
Cimetière du Père Lachaise
|
| Details |
| Year established |
1804 |
| Country |
France |
| Location |
Paris |
| Type |
Public, non-denominational |
| Size |
44 hectares (110 acres) |
| Number of interments |
over 1 million |
Père Lachaise Cemetery (French: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, [simtjɛːʁ dy pɛːʁ laʃɛːz]; officially, cimetière de l'Est, "East Cemetery") is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France (44 hectares (110 acres)),[1] though there are larger cemeteries in the city's suburbs.
Père Lachaise is in the 20th arrondissement, and is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of three World War I memorials.
The cemetery is on Boulevard de Ménilmontant. The Paris Métro station Philippe Auguste on line 2 is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise, on both lines 2 and 3, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. Many tourists prefer the Gambetta station on line 3 as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and then walk downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.
History and description
The cemetery takes its name from the confessor to Louis XIV, Père François de la Chaise (1624–1709), who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property, situated on the hillside from which the king during the Fronde, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne, was bought by the city in 1804. Established by Napoleon in this year, the cemetery was laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, and later extended.
Père Lachaise Cemetery was opened on the 21st of May 1804. The first person buried there was a five-year old girl named Adélaïde Pailliard de Villeneuve, the daughter of a door-bell of the Faubourg St. Antoine. Napoleon Bonaparte as a consul declared that “Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”. [2]
Several new cemeteries replaced the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. At the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Passy Cemetery.
At the time of its opening, the cemetery was considered to be situated too far from the city and attracted few funerals. Moreover, the Christians refused to have their graves in a place that had not been blessed by the Church. Consequently, the administrators devised a marketing strategy and in 1804, with great fanfare, organised the transfer of the remains of La Fontaine and Molière. Then, in another great spectacle in 1817, the purported* remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine (by tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love) (*see disputation).
This strategy achieved its desired effect when people began clamouring to be buried among the famous citizens. Records show that, within a few years, Père Lachaise went from containing a few dozen permanent residents to more than 33,000. Père Lachaise was expanded five times: in 1824, 1829, 1832, 1842 and 1850. In 1804, the Père Lachaise had contained only 13 graves. The following year there were only 44 and 49 in 1806, 62 in 1807 and 833 in 1812. Today there are over 1 million bodies buried there, and many more in the columbarium, which holds the remains of those who had requested cremation.[3]
The Communards' Wall (Mur des Fédérés) is also located in the cemetery. This is the site where 147 Communards, the last defenders of the workers' district of Belleville, were shot on 28 May 1871 – the last day of the "Bloody Week" (Semaine Sanglante) in which the Paris Commune was crushed.
The Crematory and columbarium
A funerary chapel was erected in 1823 by Etienne-Hippolyte Godde at the exact place of the ancient Jesuit house. This same Neo-classical architect created the monumental entrance a few years later.
A columbarium and a crematorium of a Neo-Byzantine style were designed in 1894 by Jean Camille Formigé.
Père Lachaise today
Père Lachaise is still an operating cemetery and accepting new burials. However, the rules to be buried in a Paris cemetery are rather strict: people may be buried in one of these cemeteries if they die in the French capital city or if they lived there. Being buried in Père Lachaise is even more difficult nowadays as there is a waiting list: very few plots are available.[4] The gravesites at Père Lachaise range from a simple, unadorned headstone to towering monuments and even elaborate mini chapels dedicated to the memory of a well-known person or family. A lot of the tombs are about the size and shape of a phone booth, with just enough space for a mourner to step inside, kneel to say a prayer, and leave some flowers.
The cemetery manages to squeeze an increasing number of bodies into a finite and already crowded space. One way it does this is by combining the remains of multiple family members in the same grave. In many parts of North America, such a custom is unheard of, as each body is presumed to have its own casket, vault, and plot of land. But at Père Lachaise, it is not uncommon to reopen a grave after a body has decomposed and inter another coffin. Some family mausoleums or multi-family tombs contain dozens of bodies, often in several separate but contiguous graves. Shelves are usually fitted out to accommodate them.
In relatively recent times, Père Lachaise has adopted a standard practice of issuing 30-year leases on gravesites, so that if a lease is not renewed by the family, the remains can be removed, space made for a new grave, and the overall deterioration of the cemetery minimized. Abandoned remains are boxed, tagged and moved to Aux Morts ossuary, in Père Lachaise cemetery.[5]
Plots can be bought in perpetuity, for 50, 30 or 10 years, the last being the least expensive option. Even in the case of mausoleums and chapels, coffins are most of the time below ground.
Aux Morts ossuary
Behind the Aux Morts (To the Dead) monument sculpted by Paul Albert Bartholomé lies an ossuary of the bones of Parisians from cemeteries all over the city,a smaller kind of modern day catacombs. Although the monument is well known, it is not general knowledge that it is also an ossuary, and its doors usually remain closed and locked to the public. When it became overcrowded recently, the bones were removed for cremation and returned to the ossuary after the incineration process. In the Père Lachaise ossuary, efforts are made to store bones and ashes in separate boxes. [6]
The number of human remains
Although some sources incorrectly estimate the number of interred as 300.000 in Père Lachaise ,according to the official website of Paris; to date, one million people have been buried there.[7] Along with the stored remains in the Aux Morts ossuary,the number of human remains exceeds 2-3 million in Père Lachaise cemetery.
Burials
| Among those interred here are: |
|
A
B
- Salvador Bacarisse – Spanish composer
- Honoré de Balzac – French novelist of the 19th century
- Joseph Barbanègre - French general
- Henri Barbusse – French novelist
- Paul Barras – French statesman
- Antoine-Louis Barye – French sculptor
- Alain Bashung – French singer
- Stiv Bators – ashes sprinkled on the grave of Jim Morrison
- Jean-Dominique Bauby – French journalist
- Jean-Louis Baudelocque – French obstetrician
- Pierre Beaumarchais – French playwright
- Gilbert Bécaud – French singer
- Pierre Augustin Béclard – French anatomist
- Hilaire Belloc – Anglo-French writer
- Vincenzo Bellini – Italian composer; remains later transferred to Italy
- Judah P. Benjamin – American lawyer and statesman
- Pierre-Jean de Béranger – French lyricist
- Claude Bernard – French physiologist, known for several advances in medicine, as the introduction of the scientific method to the study of medicine, and the study of the sympathetic nervous system.
- Bernardin de Saint Pierre – French writer
- Sarah Bernhardt – French stage and film actress
- Alphonse Bertillon – French anthropologist and father of anthropometry
- Julien Bessières – French scientist, diplomat and politician
- Ramón Emeterio Betances – Puerto Rican nationalist
- Bruno Bianchi - French animator, co-creator of Inspector Gadget[8]
- Marie François Xavier Bichat – French anatomist and physiologist
- Fulgence Bienvenüe – French civil engineer remembered as the Father of the Paris Métro
- Samuel Bing – German art dealer
- Georges Bizet – French composer and conductor
- Louis Blanc – French historian and statesman
- Sophie Blanchard – first professional female balloonist and the first woman to die in an aviation accident
- Auguste Blanqui – French statesman
- François-Adrien Boieldieu – French composer
- Rosa Bonheur – French painter
- Ludwig Börne – German political writer and satirist
- Pierre Bourdieu – French sociologist
- Alexandrine-Caroline Branchu – French opera singer
- Édouard Branly – French scientist
- Pierre Brasseur – French comedian
- Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin – French Lawyer, Politician, Epicure, and Gastronome
- Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart – French architect, best known for designing the layout of the Pėre Lachaise Cemetery
- Pierre Brossolette – French journalist, politician and Résistance leader
- Jean de Brunhoff – French author of Babar the Elephant
- Auguste-Laurent Burdeau – French politician and plaintiff in the Drumont-Burdeau trial
C
D
E
F
G
- Antonio de La Gandara – French painter
- Louis-Antoine Garnier-Pagès – French statesman
- Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac – French chemist and physicist
- Pierre Georges – French Resistance leader better known as Colonel Fabien
- Théodore Géricault – French Romantic painter, whose major work The Raft of the Medusa is reproduced on his tomb by sculptor Antoine Étex.
- Sophie Germain – Early French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher
- Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou – leader of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan
- André Gill – French caricaturist
- Annie Girardot - French actress
- Manuel de Godoy – Spanish prime minister and court favorite
- Yvan Goll – French-German poet and his wife Claire Goll
- Enrique Gómez Carrillo – Guatemalan novelist, journalist, war correspondent, chronicler and diplomat, lived most of his life in Europe; he was the correspondent to important newspapers in Spain and Argentina; published 86 books between novels and chronicles of his journeys to faraway places.
- Laurent de Gouvion Saint-Cyr – French military commander and Marshal of France
- Zénobe Gramme – Inventor of the Direct Current (DC) Dynamo. There is a statue on the grave of Zénobe sitting and looking at a dynamo rotor.
- Stéphane Grappelli – French jazz violinist and member of the Quintette du Hot Club de France
- André Grétry – Belgian-born French composer
- Maurice Grimaud – French Prefecture of Police during May 1968[9]
- Giulia Grisi – Italian opera singer. Her grave is marked under her married name Giulia de Candia.
- Félix Guattari – French militant, institutional psychotherapist and philosopher
- Jules Guesde – French statesman
- Yvette Guilbert – actress and singer
- Joseph-Ignace Guillotin – proposed the guillotine as the official method of execution in France
- Ernest Guiraud – French musician
- Yılmaz Güney – Kurdish/Turkish actor, film director, scenarist and novelist
H
I
J
K
L
M
- Jacques MacDonald – French military commander and Marshal of France
- William Madocks – English landowner and statesman
- Milosz Magin – Polish composer
- Nestor Makhno – Ukrainian Anarchist revolutionary
- Jacques-Antoine Manuel – French lawyer and statesman
- Auguste Maquet – French author
- Marcel Marceau – French mime artist
- Angelo Mariani – French chemist
- Célestine Marié – French opera singer
- André Masséna – French military commander and Marshal of France
- Étienne Méhul – French composer
- Georges Méliès – French filmmaker; produced A Trip to the Moon
- Émile-Justin Menier – French chocolatier
- Henri Menier – French chocolatier
- Antoine Brutus Menier – French chocolatier
- Maurice Merleau-Ponty – French philosopher
- Cléo de Mérode – French dancer
- Stuart Merrill – American symbolist poet
- Charles Messier – French astronomer, publisher of Messier's catalogue
- Jules Michelet – French historian
- Amedeo Modigliani – Italian painter and sculptor. Famous for his intense rivalry with Pablo Picasso.
- Molière – French playwright
- Gustave de Molinari – Belgian-born economist associated with French laissez-faire liberal economists.
- Silvia Monfort – French comedienne
- Gaspard Monge – French mathematician; remains later moved to the Panthéon
- Yves Montand – film actor
- Jim Morrison – American singer and songwriter with The Doors, author, and poet. Permanent crowds and occasional vandalism surrounding this tomb have caused tensions with the families of other, less famous, interred individuals.[10] Contrary to rumor, the lease of the gravesite was upgraded from 30 year to perpetual by Morrison's parents; the site is regularly guarded (due to graffiti and other nuisances).[11]
- Jean Moulin – leader of the French Resistance during World War II who went missing after his arrest with several other Resistants at Caluire, Lyon in June 1943. Understood to have died on a train not far from Metz station in July that year, ashes 'presumed' to be his were interred at Père Lachaise after the war and then transferred to the Panthéon in December 1964.
- Marcel Mouloudji – French singer
- Joachim Murat – French Napoleonic general and Marshal of France.
- Alfred de Musset – French poet, novelist, dramatist; love affair with George Sand is told from his point of view in his autobiographical novel, La Confession d'un Enfant du Siècle
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
- Émile Waldteufel – French composer
- Countess Marie Walewska – Napoleon's mistress, credited for pressing Napoleon to take important pro-Polish decisions during the Napoleonic Wars. Only her heart is entombed here; her other remains were returned to her native Poland.
- Sir Richard Wallace – English art collector and philanthropist
- Eduard Wiiralt – Estonian artist
- Oscar Wilde – Irish novelist, poet and playwright. By tradition, Wilde's admirers kiss the Art Deco monument while wearing red lipstick, though this practice will no longer be allowed due to the damage it has caused to his tomb, which had to be repaired and encased in glass.[12] Wilde died in 1900 and was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux. His remains were transferred in 1909 to Père Lachaise. The tomb is also the resting place of the ashes of Robert Ross, who commissioned the monument.
- Jeanette Wohl – French literary editor, longtime friend and correspondent of Ludwig Börne
- Richard Wright – American author, wrote Native Son and other American classics
Z
See also
- Category:Burials at Père Lachaise Cemetery
Gallery
References
External links