Père Lachaise Cemetery

The Jesuits held this hill east of Paris as a house of rest, and the young Louis XIV watched fighting from it during the Fronde, an occasion that gave the ground the name Mont-Louis. Its best-known occupant was François d'Aix de La Chaise (1624–1709), confessor to Louis XIV, who lived there from 1675 until his death and whose name the cemetery carries. In 1762 the Society of Jesus had to give up the estate over a debt, and it was later acquired for the city by Nicolas Frochot, prefect of the Seine, for 180,000 francs.

The closure of the Holy Innocents' Cemetery on 1 December 1780 left Paris short of burial ground, and new cemeteries were laid out beyond the city, among them the Cimetière de l'Est on Mont-Louis. Napoleon, then First Consul, had declared that "every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion". Seventeen hectares of the hill were assigned to it, and the design was given in 1803 to the neoclassical architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, who set out its axes as a great English-style garden.

The cemetery opened on 21 May 1804. Parisians were slow to use it: the ground lay outside the city on a height in a poor quarter, and many Catholics refused a grave the Church had not blessed. There were 13 graves in 1804, 44 the next year and 833 in 1812. In 1817 the administrators organised the transfer of the remains of Molière and Jean de La Fontaine, followed by the purported remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil. By 1830 there were more than 33,000 graves, and the cemetery was enlarged five times (in 1824, 1829, 1832, 1842 and 1850) from 17 hectares to nearly 44.

During the Paris Commune in May 1871 the fédérés placed their artillery in the middle of the cemetery and were encircled by Thiers's Versaillais and by the Prussians. Fighting continued to the evening of 27 May, after which 147 men were shot against a wall and buried in common graves; the wall has been known since as the Mur des Fédérés and is still a rallying point for the French political left. Accounts differ over who they were: survivors of the fighting in the cemetery, or Commune soldiers captured in earlier battles, held in the prisons of Mazas and la Roquette and condemned by military courts. Adolphe Thiers, who led the suppression of the Commune, is buried in the same cemetery.

On 25 March 1918 a German shell destroyed the Thouvenin chapel in the 22nd division, and a second fell in the cemetery on 13 April.

An 1804 law required that each religion have a cemetery or a section of one. The Jewish enclosure opened on 18 February 1810 in the 7th division, and the actress Rachel Félix and the first chief rabbi of France, David Sintzheim, were buried there. A Muslim enclosure was authorised in the 1850s, many Muslim soldiers from the colonies having died in the Crimean War, and it opened on 1 January 1857 as the first Muslim cemetery in France, though it received only 44 burials between 1856 and 1870. The law of 14 November 1881 made segregation in cemeteries illegal, the enclosure walls were pulled down and Jewish burials moved to the 96th division. The mosque was left standing, but the Ottoman Empire, responsible for its maintenance, lapsed in that duty; it was destroyed in 1914, and in 1923 the plan to rebuild it was abandoned in favour of the Grand Mosque of Paris.

The crematorium was the first in France, and the first cremation took place on 30 January 1889, just over a year after the law of 15 November 1887 authorised it; work on Jean-Camille Formigé's columbarium-crematorium building began only in 1894. Cremation stayed uncommon, 49 in that first year, and became more usual after the Catholic Church lifted its ban in 1963.

In 1899 Albert Bartholomé's Monument aux Morts was erected as a memorial to unidentified dead Parisians; behind it lies an ossuary of bones brought from cemeteries across the city, its doors usually locked. Other monuments commemorate the victims of the concentration and extermination camps and of the Rwandan genocide.

Père Lachaise still accepts burials, limited to those who died in Paris or lived there, with few plots available; graves are held on 30-year leases, and remains from leases not renewed are moved to the ossuary. The city of Paris, which owns and runs the cemetery, records one million burials as of 2012. At nearly 44 hectares it is the largest cemetery in Paris and receives about 3.5 million visitors a year; parts of it have been protected as monuments historiques since 1983.