Le Père Lachaise

By Thirza Vallois

Paris Kiosque - November 1998 - Volume 5, Number 11
Copyright (c) 1998 Thirza Vallois - used with permission
Excerpted from "Around and About Paris"

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Only a few years ago, no self-respecting French person would have celebrated anything mildly connected with America. (The Catholic holiday of La Toussaint (All Saints Day) was de rigueur on October 31st, followed the next day by Le Jour des Morts, when everyone either went to visit the graves of their dear departed relatives, or used the opportunity to have yet another long weekend away from work - the favourite national pastime of the French!

But for the last two years the shopwindows of Paris have been decked with pumpkins and America is marching on France after all! On the night of Hallowe'en witches and ghost are to be seen in plenty hovering through such American-orientated neighbourhoods as the Marais and thereabouts. But don't try your hand at trick or treat. Few Parisians will welcome you with a smile should you ring their door bells!

For the sake of old days and old traditions, however, the cemeteries of Paris is where you should head on November 1st, even if the weather is dismal. In fact, especially if it is dismal, appropriately named in French as "un temps de La Toussaint!" They all have fascinating stories to tell, as recorded in Thirza Vallois's outstanding series, Around and About Paris. Here is the story of the largest and most famous of Paris's cemeteries, Le Père Lachaise, although the others deserve your visit to no lesser an extent.

Rues des Haies, des Fougères, des Mûriers, des Amendiers (respectively the streets of hedgerows, fern, mulberry and almond trees), Villa des Bruyères (heather) and Porte des Lilas (lilac) - incongruous celebrations of nature in the sordid heart of plebeian Paris of the Industrial Age. To innocent ears the name Belleville may simply suggest a place of beauty, but to respectable Parisians it sent a shudder down the spine: `the lowest depths of wretchedness and hate where ceaselessly seethe the ferments of envy, laziness and anger.' Honest housewives of eastern Paris, determined doggedly to safeguard their respectability, protested vehemently that they were not from Belleville but from Ménlimontant, which was just a little further south but less squalid in reputation. For Belleville was a troublesome neighbourhood which disturbed the peace of mind of the affluent and the secure: `We hope that tonight Belleville will be willing to let France sleep,' wrote the Moniteiur Universel following the defeat of the Commune. Fortunately, Belleville was tuched away at the easternmost end of the city, clinging to a steep hill 128.5 metres high, a world apart fo the relief of bourgeois Paris.

Most Parisians, however, still perceive it as remote and unappetising.

Not so the dead. From the start, those very proper Parisians, who when still alive had taken up residence on the opposite side of the city and would have never set food in these accursed parts, were ready to pay astronomical prices for a share in the most prestigious cemetery in Paris, le Père Lachaise, a spectacular necropolis, basically constituting the only museum the 20th arrondissement has to show for itself. Here the last two centuries of the history of France and Paris are on display and the ghosts of Tout-Paris enjoy the setting of the largest garden in the capital - 44 hectares - rising above the world of the living to the west, on a lofty hill and that much closer to heaven...

In order to make a commercial success of the venture, the 19th century bourgeoisie had to be persuaded to allow their remains to be transferred to the eastern edge of Paris - not yet a place of evil reputation but certainly remote. The Prefect of the Seine Frochot resorted to an astute promotional campaign which, by playing on vanity, naturally worked: by putting up for sale in perpetuity land grand property, he was sure to arouse interest among self-engroussed Parisians, and by setting prices so high that only the upper crust could afford them, he made the new cemetery both desirable and fashionable (one of the rare fashions that have not worn out in nearly 200 years!). And when Frochot further transferred to this site the remains of glorious past celebrities - notably those of the medieval lovers Abélard and Héloïse and those mistaken for La Fontaine and Molièe's - Everyone was taken in by it, including Frochot himself, who rests in division no. 19, Brogniart, the architect of the new cemetery and of the Paris stock exchange, and Godde who built the cemetery gate. Jacques Baron, the previous owner of the 17-hectar grounds of the cemetery also lies here, and at a very high price: the poor man, who had been squeezed out of his grounds by the hard-bitten Frochot for a pittance, had to pay 300 times the amount for his own little plot of 5 square yards!

Balzac, who had buried here his characters, was brought here in his turn, despite his biting account of the place and of its clients:

This is a disgusting comedy! This is once again Tout-Paris with its streets, its signs, its industries, it hôtels; but seen through the wrong end of the spyglass, a microscopic Paris, reduced to the small dimensions of shadows, of larva, of the dead, a human race that has nothing great left but its vanity. (Ferragus)

Or as Georges Brassens put it summarily in one of his songs:

Les gens avaient à coeur
De mourir plus haut que leur cul
People had set their hearts
On dying higher than their arse

Both had in mind the extravagant monuments errected for the dead in a delirium of self-aggrandisement. The best artists of the day, the very same who were commissioned to embellish Paris - Percier, Fontaine, Viollet-le-Duc, Garnier, Visconti, Davioud - were now recruited to inflate the egos of the deceased and build for them bombastic mausoleums.

The Jews were also allotted a sector in the new cemetery, since they had been emancipated during the Revolution, but the Muslims were only granted a section in 1856 by Napoléon III who was seeking a rapprochement with Turkey. The defeated Commune was also granted a share at Père Lachaise, thoug more reluctantly. In 1883 the Third Republic, by then secure in its victory, could afford the magnanimous gesture of offering the working classes this tragic wall as a shrine to mourn their frustrated ideals. They call it Le Mur des Fédérés.

The cemetery of Père Lachaise has been extended several times since it was first acquired by Frochot on behalf of the city of Paris in 1804. Part of the site was in the 15th century the splendid property of a wealthy spice merchant, Rénault de Wandonne, who himself had bought the grounds from the Bishop of Paris, the owner of large stretches of land on the periphery of the city, notably the entire area of today's 8th arrondissement. In 1430 Régnault de Wandonne built himself a folie (from feuillu meaning leafy, not the 18th-century meaning of a frivolous monument.

The estate was still known as La Folie-Régnault two centuries later, when the Jesuits bought it as a country retreat from their city dwelling on the busy rue Saint-Antoine. They renamed it Mont-Louis, in homage to the Sun King who had given the Jesuits his full support and had chosen his own confessor from among their ranks, the Reverend Father Fançois d'Aix de la Chaize - hence the name Père Lachaise given to the estate later. The Jesuits did not sustain their influence over the licentious Louis XV and were expelled from France altogether in 1763, following which the Mont-Louis was bought up by private people and fell eventually into the hands of the Baron family.

It would be impossible to list the celetrities who rest here - Chopin, Piaf and now Yves Montand are certainly among the favourites, as well as Jim Morrison, whose fans - the sort that make respectable middle-class people shudder - used to gather around his grave for psychedelic and other uplifting ceremonies, until a closer watch was recently put on the site. The Anglo-Saxon community pays its respects to Oscar Wilde, just as frowned on in his day. Some visit Isadora Duncan's grave, fewer Sit Richard Wallace's. Distinguished representatives of the fine arts and science, music and dance, literature, architecture, the stage and the screen, the armed forces and the politicians are gathered here under the shade of 12,000 venerable trees, alongside more ordinary Parisians. As befitting the orderly French, they have chosen to complete their earthly journy in the 20th arrondissement, at the end of the snail-shell-like layout of Paris. The streams of daily visitors (this is the sixth most visited site in the capital) enjoy recognising the original bearers of so many street names down below by stopping at their graves, thus perpetuating their memory and piecing together fragments of the history of Paris.

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Thirza Vallois brings Paris to life in a way that enthralls her readers and provides them with a detailed knowledge of the city which exceeds that of most Parisians, while her fast moving style disguises a depth of historical fact that is normally only found in academic tomes. Writer William Boyd wrote in The Spectator: "I think we can safely toss all other Paris guidebooks aside....There can be no higher praise than when I say they come close to the world's greatest guidebook, J. Link's "Venice for Pleasure" and they should soon achieve similar legendary status." The French Ambassador to the UK wrote: "I am convinced that this guide will constitute from now on, for the British lovers of Paris, a reference book which will have the success it deserves." Around and About Paris may be ordered here.

A long time resident of Paris, she currently lives just three hours outside of Paris in London, and may be contacted via thirzavallois@iliadbooks.demon.co.uk.