Catacombs of Paris

Paris's principal burial ground, the cemetery of the Saints-Innocents beside the Les Halles market, had by the late 18th century swollen with the dead of six centuries, some two million burials, until its mass graves stood higher than the surrounding streets. In May 1780 a basement wall on the Rue de la Lingerie, next to the cemetery, collapsed under the weight of one of its pits, forcing the cemetery's closure and a ban on further burials inside the city walls. Renovated mine-inspection tunnels near the former Rue d'Enfer, opened up after a 1774 cave-in had prompted Louis XVI to set up an Inspection Générale des Carrières, were chosen to take the remains, and the plan became law in late 1785. A well was sunk above the passageways to receive the bones, and a walled plot above ground, the Clos de la Tombe-Issoire, was set aside to display headstones and monuments recovered from the Innocents. The ossuary was blessed and consecrated on 7 April 1786, in a ceremony attended by the mines inspector Charles-Axel Guillaumot.

From 1788, covered black-cloth wagons carried the dead from the Innocents to the mine shaft near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire in nightly processions; clearing most of the city's cemeteries took about two years. The Innocents supplied by far the largest share, followed by Saint-Étienne-des-Grès, the Madeleine Cemetery, and the Errancis Cemetery, used for victims of the French Revolution. The skeletons of prominent figures of the Revolution ended up among the anonymous dead, including Charlotte Corday, Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins, the chemist Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, and Maximilien Robespierre.

Transfers ran into the 1810s, then resumed between 1842 and 1860; in total, seventeen cemeteries, 145 monasteries and convents, and 160 parish cemeteries fed the underground quarries. Baron Haussmann's later demolitions across Paris turned up further forgotten remains, which followed the same route. In total an estimated six million bodies were moved into the quarries over roughly a century.

Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, who took charge of the Paris mine inspection service in July 1809, turned the disordered bone store into the arranged ossuary seen today. He directed the stacking of skulls, femurs and tibias into walls and columns, reused headstones and funerary monuments salvaged from the Clos de la Tombe-Issoire, and added a room displaying minerals found beneath Paris and another showing skeletal deformities uncovered during the works. Stone tablets carved with warnings and with quotations from religious, literary and philosophical texts were set into the galleries, which he had sealed off from the rest of the Left Bank's mine network for visitors' safety; he published his account, Description des catacombes, in 1815.

The Count of Artois, later Charles X, was an early visitor in 1787, and organised public visits began in 1806, though only irregularly and by a mines inspector's permission. Overcrowding forced a return to permission-only access in 1830, and church opposition to displaying human remains closed the catacombs entirely from 1833; they reopened for four visits a year from 1850, monthly from 1867, and twice a month once new entrances were built around Place Denfert-Rochereau in 1874. In 1793 a Val-de-Grâce hospital door-keeper, Philibert Aspairt, went missing underground after apparently losing his light; his body was found in 1804, a few metres from a staircase, identified only by his key ring and jacket buttons.

During the German occupation, members of the French Resistance used the tunnel network beneath Paris and made it the headquarters from which Colonel Rol-Tanguy directed the insurrection for the city's liberation in June 1944; the Wehrmacht had separately built a bunker in the tunnels below the Lycée Montaigne. Since 2013 the Catacombs have been one of the fourteen City of Paris Museums run by Paris Musées, drawing around 600,000 visitors a year.