The Catacombs of Paris: Six Million Souls in the City's Darkest Secret
Beneath the romantic streets of Paris lies one of the world's most macabre monuments: the Catacombs, holding the remains of over six million people in underground tunnels that stretch for hundreds of kilometres. This isn't ancient history—the bones were moved here starting in 1785 when Paris's overflowing cemeteries became a public health crisis, with one horrific incident seeing cemetery walls collapse and corpses flood a neighbouring basement.
For fifteen months, nightly funeral processions led by priests crossed Paris, transferring remains from 17 cemeteries, 160 places of worship, and 145 monasteries into former limestone quarries. Initially, bones were simply thrown down wells in disorganised heaps. It wasn't until Inspector Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury reorganised them in the early 1800s that they took their current artistic arrangement—walls of femurs punctuated by rows of skulls, decorated with plaques bearing philosophical quotes about mortality.
Among the anonymous millions rest some of France's most famous figures: mathematician Blaise Pascal, playwright Racine, revolutionary leaders Robespierre and Danton, and 1,343 people guillotined during the Terror at Place de la Concorde—though their bones are now impossibly mixed with millions of others. The ossuary remained largely forgotten until becoming a novelty venue for concerts in the early 19th century, opening to public visits in 1874. Today, visitors can explore approximately 1.5 kilometres of the vast network, a fraction of the 800 hectares of tunnels beneath Paris.
