From Communal Graves to Community Mausoleums:

A Short History of Urban Cemeteries

Text and photos by Rusty Clark

Revised 28 April 2009

 

 

 

Paris Churchyards - Cimetiere des Innocents

 

 

(l) Paris Catacombs ca. 1875 (c) Cimetiere des Innocents (r) Cimetiere des Innocents Charnel House

           

In 1780, the Cimetiere des Innocents, a thousand year old Paris burial ground, literally burst its bounds, broke through a wall of an adjacent apartment building, and spewed corpses into the basement, nearly asphyxiating the residents with the terrible stench. After this oft-cited scandal broke, French authorities passed legislation to close the cemeteries and churchyards in the capital to further interments. Within a decade the removal of a millennium of bones began in some thirty ancient burial grounds. The Montrouge quarry, south of the city, was opened to receive them. The quarry had supplied much of the stone used to build Paris, and was a warren of winding caverns and tunnels. These secular catacombs soon filled with millions of bones dumped by the cartload from above. In 1785, the Cimetiere des Innocents became a “silent and sinister” park, “terrain where once huge common graves, thirty feet deep and about half as long and wide, held the remains of generations of Parisians.”[1]

 

The First Garden Cemetery - Père Lachaise

 

 

Père Lachaise

           

Plague and scandal finally put an end to the clergy’s thousand year stranglehold on burial traditions and revenue. Laws outlining new rules for cemeteries and funerals were issued in Paris in 1804, and are little changed today. Regulations required that bodies should be laid side by side, that cemeteries should be landscaped and contain ornamental plantings, that plots would be held in perpetuity, and allowed stone markers to be placed on individual graves.[2] On a sweeping garden estate located on a hill overlooking Paris, the first garden cemetery opened. The new Père Lachaise cemetery, established by decree of Napoleon, who became emperor the same week, set a world standard. It was the first important, planned cemetery in modern history. “Père Lachaise represents less a turning point than a returning point. It was a reversion to the time of antiquity when the pyramids in Egypt, the Kerameikos cemetery in Athens, the Etruscan burial grounds in Italy and other necropolises around the Mediterranean basin served as sites or even cities of the dead, with identifiable graves and, in some cases, individualized markers.”[3]

           

The urban planner, Nicholas Frochot, was authorized to purchase land originally owned by the confessor of King Louis XIV, Père Lachaise. The opportunity to buy permanent gravesites in a pastoral landscape did not immediately attract the citizens of Paris, and so Frochot arranged to have the bodies of the famous writers Molière and La Fontaine removed to the grounds, and later welcomed the remains of the lovers, Heloise and Abelard. These celebrities accorded Père Lachaise the cachet it had lacked and soon all of Paris was avid to perambulate among the monuments and plantings, and consign their dead to its leafy bowers. Before long the cemetery little resembled a garden, appearing instead to be a small city, with mausoleums lining the intersecting roads marked by street signs.[4] Frochot himself was buried in Division 37.

           

By 1850, Père Lachaise was already crowded, and in 1874 the cemetery was increased four-fold in area to 200 acres. A Handbook for Visitors to Paris provided the following to those interested in the management of the world’s foremost garden cemetery:

 

About 50 interments a day take place here; two-thirds of them are in open graves (fosses communes), where 40 or 50 coffins are laid side by side and 3 deep in a trench which is then covered over with earth. The charge for this (unless proof of poverty can be adduced) is 20 fr., and it is usual to erect near the spot a small wooden railing and cross, which costs about 15 fr., and a few flowers are usually planted. At the end of 5 years all these railings and crosses are pulled up and the wood given to the hospitals for fuel; the ground is covered with 4 or 5 ft. of earth dug from other graves or from the hill above, and a fresh tier of coffins is deposited. The next class of graves are the fosses temporaires, where for about 50 fr. a separate grave and 10 years' occupation is secured. Here each grave has a little railing, garden, and cross, or chapel. The more solid sepulchral monuments are built on land bought absolutely (concession à perpétuité). The price of a piece of ground 2 metres (6 ft.) square is 500 fr.[5]

           

Garden Cemeteries in the United Kingdom

 

Kensal Green--Anglican Chapel

 

By the 1830s, London, motivated by the same health concerns and unsightly graveyards, modeled their first modern cemetery after Père Lachaise. Kensal Green Cemetery was laid out in 1832, and quickly became a destination for sightseers and casual visitors. It was followed by seven new commercial cemeteries between 1837 and 1841, all located on the outskirts of the city. Within the decade, Liverpool established St. James Cemetery in a defunct stone quarry, and Glasgow opened its Necropolis in 1832. These grand showcases featured arboretum-like landscaping, and exquisite chapels, and raised the prestige of their cities. Not everyone was approving. The Quarterly Review considered the “whole spirit of the present establishments [to be] necessarily mercenary.”[6] While the upper classes rested in permanent peace, many poorer people were still buried in unmarked graves and Potter’s Fields.

 

 

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