How the Paris Catacombs began: from the Cemetery of the Innocents to the ossuary

A cemetery with shops

The Cemetery of the Innocents lay on the Right Bank, beside the Rue Saint-Denis, enclosed by a wall. Built against that wall ran arcaded galleries, the charniers or charnel houses, which served as an ossuary: their floors were paved with tombs, and they were a promenade and a shopping street at the same time. Linen was sold under the arches, and public letter-writers drafted letters for people who couldn't write. One side was painted with a Dance of Death, that procession in which death makes no distinction between kings and beggars.

The galleries were paid for by donations from well-off locals. One tradition credited their construction to Marshal Boucicaut and to Nicolas Flamel; what's documented is that Flamel paid for at least two of the arches, and on one of them had figures painted that, much later, alchemists would read as a secret recipe.

The epitaphs had character too. One from 1514, belonging to a woman named Yolande Bailly, boasted of 293 descendants.

Walled in for life

The cemetery held harsher stories as well. Beside the church, for forty-six years, lived a recluse called Alix la Burgotte, in a cell with two small barred openings: one onto the street, where her food came in, and the other onto the church. She died in 1466, and Louis XI paid for her marble tomb. We know this from her epitaph, which a 19th-century dictionary of Paris streets copied out.

Others ended up there by court order. In 1485 the Parlement of Paris (a court of law, not a parliament) sentenced Renée de Vendomois, who'd arranged her husband's murder, to live "recluse et emmurée", shut away and walled in, in the same cemetery.

A king, a traffic jam and a charnel house

One side of the cemetery ran along the Rue de la Ferronnerie, a narrow street with shops built up against the galleries. On Friday 14 May 1610, at about four in the afternoon, a jam of carriages brought Henri IV's coach to a halt there. His footmen ducked into the charnel-house gallery and, at that moment, a man climbed onto the wheel and stabbed the king. It was Ravaillac.

That same 19th-century dictionary pointed out the coincidence: Henri II had ordered the street to be widened in an edict also dated 14 May, back in 1554. It didn't happen until after a decree of 1669, signed by Colbert among others, which had a long stone frontage built on the cemetery side with the galleries beneath. The buildings at numbers 10 and 12–14, from those years, still stand on the old cemetery ground and are protected as historic monuments.

Why the old quarries? A scare underground

Meanwhile, the south of Paris was hiding a problem of its own: old stone quarries ran beneath its streets. In 1774 a small building on the Rue d'Enfer collapsed into two levels of tunnels. A few years later, Louis XVI banned any more quarrying under inhabited areas and set up a General Inspectorate of Quarries, placing Charles-Axel Guillaumot in charge.

That void, until then a threat, was about to find a use.

When and why were the bones moved? 1780 and the night-time transfers

In 1780 the Cemetery of the Innocents was closed, after almost ten centuries of use. On 9 November 1785 a royal decree settled what would happen to the site: it would take the herb and vegetable market that blocked the Rue Saint-Denis and the Rue de la Ferronnerie every morning. But first the dead had to go.

Between 1785 and 1787 the bones were taken to the old quarries of the Tombe-Issoire, which then lay beyond the city limits. The transfers took place at nightfall, the Catacombs museum itself explains, so that neither the public nor the Church would react with hostility. The remains were tipped down two service shafts into the quarries, which were consecrated as the municipal ossuary on 7 April 1786.

The macabre soon turned into a curiosity. In 1787 the Count of Artois, the future Charles X, went down to visit the ossuary with ladies of the court.

Fact or legend?

• Fact: the transfers were made at nightfall, to avoid hostile reactions from locals and from the Church. The Catacombs museum says so itself.
• Fact: Alix la Burgotte lived walled in for forty-six years. Her epitaph says so, known to us from a 19th-century transcription.
• Legend: that Flamel's alchemical recipe was hidden in the painted figures at the Innocents.
• Unverified: a plaque set in the pavement of the Rue de la Ferronnerie is said to mark the exact spot of the attack on Henri IV. We haven't been able to confirm it.
• Our own observation: the resemblance between d'Enfer and Denfert. See below.

What was left above ground

Once the ground was cleared, the market moved in. The ground of the dead became the ground of the vegetables.

The Fountain of the Innocents changed its life too. The work of Lescot and Goujon, it had stood against the church, on the corner of the Rue aux Fers and the Rue Saint-Denis, and had only two sides. When the church was pulled down, the fountain was dismantled piece by piece and put back together free-standing, out in the open market. The snag is that a free-standing fountain needs four sides: three new naiads joined Goujon's five, and the old stones were mixed with new ones, stained to match the colour. Telling them apart isn't easy. That was the point.

And in the south, the two pavilions Ledoux built in 1787 for the barrière d'Enfer, one of the gates in the tax wall that ringed the city, are still standing. One of them is now the entrance to the Catacombs. In 1879 the old Place d'Enfer – "Hell Square" – was renamed Denfert-Rochereau, in honour of the colonel who defended Belfort. Whether the similarity between the two names played a part, we don't know. But it's hard not to smile.

Where to hear it

On the route Mysteries of Old Paris: from the Grève to the Innocents, Podtour takes you to the square with the fountain to tell you about the cemetery, the night-time removal and the recluse, and finishes a few steps away, in the street of the 1610 traffic jam. The Catacombs are an indoor site with their own admission and aren't part of the route: Podtour tells the story from above, where it began.

If you'd rather start with something free, The Île de la Cité: from the Pont Neuf to Notre-Dame, our free route.

Further reading

• Paris Musées · Catacombes de Paris, "L'histoire du site", catacombes.paris.fr (in French). https://www.catacombes.paris.fr/lhistoire/lhistoire-du-site
• Paris Musées, Dossier de presse. Catacombes de Paris (2024), PDF (in French). https://catacombes.paris.fr/sites/default/files/2024-08/D%20Presse%202024_sup%C3%A9rieur.pdf
• Félix and Louis Lazare, Dictionnaire administratif et historique des rues de Paris et de ses monuments (1844), entries "Innocents (marché des)" and "Ferronnerie (rue de la)", Wikisource (in French). https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Dictionnaire_administratif_et_historique_des_rues_de_Paris_et_de_ses_monuments/
• Ministère de la Culture, Mérimée database, "Immeuble" (10 Rue de la Ferronnerie), PA00085885, in French. https://pop.culture.gouv.fr/notice/merimee/PA00085885
• Étienne-François Villain (abbé), Histoire critique de Nicolas Flamel et de Pernelle sa femme, Paris, 1761 (in French). https://archive.org/details/histoirecritique00vill