The Catacombs of Paris (French: Catacombes de Paris, pronunciation) are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people. Built to consolidate Paris's ancient stone quarries, they extend south from the Barrière d'Enfer ("Gate of Hell"), a former city gate. The ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the effects of the city's overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents' Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1788, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris's cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire [fr].
The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of access points around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was opened to public visitation from 1874. Since 2013, the Catacombs have numbered among the fourteen City of Paris Museums managed by Paris Musées. Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, Parisians often refer to the entire tunnel network as the catacombs.
History
Paris's newest burial grounds were on the southern outskirts of the Roman-era Left Bank city. In ruins after the Western Roman Empire's 5th-century end and the ensuing Frankish invasions, this settlement was eventually abandoned for the marshy Right Bank: from the 4th century, the first known settlement there was on higher ground around a Saint-Étienne church and burial ground (behind the present Hôtel de Ville), and urban expansion on the Right Bank began in earnest after other ecclesiastical landowners filled in the marshlands from the late 10th century. Thus, instead of burying its dead away from inhabited areas as usual, the Paris Right Bank settlement began with cemeteries near its centre.
The most central of these cemeteries, a burial ground around the 5th-century Notre-Dame-des-Bois church, became the property of the Saint-Opportune parish after the original church was demolished by the 9th-century Norman invasions. When it became its own parish associated with the church of the "Saints Innocents" from 1130, this burial ground, filling the land between the present rue Saint-Denis, rue de la Ferronnerie, rue de la Lingerie and the rue Berger, had become the city's principal cemetery. By the end of the same century, Saints Innocents was neighbour to the principal Parisian marketplace Les Halles, and already filled to overflowing. To make room for more burials, the long-dead were exhumed and their bones packed into the roofs and walls of "charnier" galleries built inside the cemetery walls. By the end of the 18th century, the central burial ground was a two-metre-high (6.6-foot) mound of earth filled with centuries of Parisian dead, plus the remains from the Hôtel-Dieu hospital and the Morgue; other Parisian parishes had their own burial grounds, but the conditions in Saints Innocents were the worst.
A series of ineffective decrees limiting the use of the cemetery did little to remedy the situation, and it was not until the late 18th century that it was decided to create three new large-scale suburban burial grounds on the outskirts of the city, and to condemn all existing parish cemeteries within city limits.
Future ossuary: Paris's former mines
Much of the Left Bank area rests upon rich Lutetian limestone deposits. This stone built much of the city, but it was extracted in suburban locations away from any habitation. Because of the post 12th-century haphazard mining technique of digging wells down to the deposit and extracting it horizontally until depletion, many of these (often illicit) mines were uncharted, and when depleted, often abandoned and forgotten. Paris had annexed its suburbs many times over the centuries, and by the 18th century many of its arrondissements (administrative districts) were or included previously mined territories.
The undermined state of the Left Bank was known to architects as early as the 17th-century construction of the Val-de-Grâce hospital (most of its building expenses were due to its foundations), but a series of mine cave-ins beginning in 1774 with the collapse of a house along the "rue d'Enfer" (near today's crossing of the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and the boulevard Saint-Michel) caused King Louis XVI to name a commission to investigate the state of the Parisian underground. This resulted in the creation of the inspection Générale des Carrières (General Inspection of Mines) service.
Ossuary creation
The need to eliminate Les Innocents gained urgency from May 31, 1780, when a basement wall in a property adjoining the cemetery collapsed under the weight of the mass grave behind it. The cemetery was closed to the public, and all intra muros (Latin: "within the [city] walls") burials were forbidden after 1780. The problem of what to do with the remains crowding intra muros cemeteries was still unresolved.
Mine consolidations were still occurring, and the underground around the site of the 1777 collapse[9] that had initiated the project had already become a series of stone and masonry inspection passageways that reinforced the streets above. The mine renovation and cemetery closures were both issues within the jurisdiction of the Police Prefect, Police Lieutenant-General Alexandre Lenoir, who had been directly involved in the creation of a mine inspection service. Lenoir endorsed the idea of moving Parisian dead to the subterranean passageways that were renovated in 1782. After deciding to further renovate the "Tombe-Issoire" passageways for their future role as an underground sepulchre, the idea became law in late 1785.
A well within a walled property above one of the principal subterranean passageways was dug to receive Les Innocents' unearthed remains, and the property itself was transformed into a sort of museum for all the headstones, sculptures and other artifacts recovered from the former cemetery. Beginning with an opening ceremony on 7 April the same year, the route between Les Innocents and the "Clos de la Tombe-Issoire" became a nightly procession of black cloth-covered wagons carrying the millions of Parisian dead. It would take two years to empty the majority of Paris's cemeteries.
Cemeteries whose remains were moved to the Catacombs include Saints-Innocents (the largest by far, with about 2 million buried over 600 years of operation), Saint-Étienne-des-Grès (one of the oldest), Madeleine Cemetery, Errancis Cemetery (used for the victims of the French Revolution), and Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux. In this way, the skeletal remains of several notable victims of the French Revolution were transferred to the Catacombs, including (the date is the date of death):
Charlotte Corday (18 July 1793)
22 Girondists (31 October 1793); among them Jacques Pierre Brissot and Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud
Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (6 November 1793), father of king Louis Philippe I
Madame Roland (8 November 1793)
Madame du Barry (8 December 1793)
Jacques Hébert (24 March 1794)
Georges Jacques Danton (April 5, 1794)
Camille Desmoulins (April 5, 1794)
Philippe Fabre d'Églantine (April 5, 1794)
Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles (April 5, 1794)
Lucile Duplessis (April 13, 1794), widow of Camille Desmoulins
Marie Marguerite Françoise Hébert (April 13, 1794), widow of Jacques Hébert
Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier (May 8, 1794)
Madame Élisabeth (May 10, 1794), sister of kings Louis XVI, Louis XVIII and Charles X
François Hanriot (July 28, 1794)
Maximilien Robespierre (July 28, 1794)
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just (July 28, 1794)
Georges Couthon (July 28, 1794)
Antoine Simon (July 28, 1794)
Renovation and ossuary decor
Wall made of bones
Catacombs in their first years were a disorganized bone repository, but Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, director of the Paris Mine Inspection Service (Inspection générale des carrières) from 1810, had renovations done that would transform the caverns into a visitable mausoleum. In addition to directing the stacking of skulls, femurs, and tibias into the patterns seen in the catacombs today, he used the cemetery decorations he could find (formerly stored on the Tombe-Issoire property; many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones. A room dedicated to the display of the various minerals found under Paris was also created, in addition to another showing various skeletal deformities found during the catacombs' creation and renovation. He also added monumental tablets and archways bearing ominous warning inscriptions, and added stone tablets bearing descriptions or other comments about the nature of the ossuary, and to ensure the safety of eventual visitors, it was walled off from the rest of Paris's Left Bank's already-extensive tunnel network.
Modern
During World War II, Parisian members of the French Resistance used the tunnel system and established the headquarters from where Colonel Rol-Tanguy led the insurrection for the liberation of Paris in June 1944. The Wehrmacht established an underground bunker below Lycée Montaigne, a high school in the 6th arrondissement.
In 2004, police discovered a fully equipped movie theater in an area of the catacombs underneath the Trocadéro. It was equipped with a giant cinema screen, seats for the audience, projection equipment, film reels of recent thrillers and film noir classics, a fully stocked bar, and a complete restaurant with tables and chairs. The group les UX took responsibility for the installation.
The film As Above, So Below, released in 2014, was the first production that secured permission from the French government to film in the catacombs. They aimed to make no alterations to the environment with the exception of a piano and a car, which were hauled into the catacombs and set on fire.
In 2015, Airbnb paid €350,000 as part of a publicity stunt offering customers the chance to stay overnight in the Catacombs.
In August 2017, thieves broke into a cellar from the catacombs and stole more than €250,000 of wine.
In 2025, American desert rock band Queens of the Stone Age released an acoustic live performance entitled Alive in the Catacombs, recorded in 2024 while on the European leg of The End Is Nero World Tour. On the WTF with Marc Maron podcast, frontman Joshua Homme described how it took 18 years to secure permission to record in the catacombs. In 2026, architects, designers, technicians and masons undertook renovations, installing new lighting and ventilation systems, restoring the bone walls and preparing new audio guides. Some previously restricted sections were also made visible to visitors.
Deaths
Only one death has officially been confirmed in the Catacombs. In 1793, Philibert Aspairt, a doorkeeper for the Val-de-Grâce hospital, died in the catacombs. It is thought that he lost his light source and was left to die in the darkness. In 1804, 11 years later, his body was found, only a few meters from a staircase that led to an exit. He was only identified by his hospital key ring and the buttons on his jacket.
Visits
Entrance to the Catacombs
As one visits the catacombs, a sign above reads Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort ("Stop! The empire of Death lies here"). The Catacombs of Paris became a curiosity for more privileged Parisians from their creation, with an early visitor being the Count of Artois (later Charles X of France) in 1787. Public visits began after its renovation into a proper ossuary and the 1814–1815 War. Initially, visitors were allowed only a few times a year with the permission of an authorized mines inspector, but later more frequently and permitted by any mine overseer. A flow of visitors degraded the ossuary to a point where the permission-only rule was restored from 1830, and the catacombs were closed completely from 1833 because of church opposition to exposing human remains to public display.
The catacombs were open again for four visits a year from 1850, and public demand caused the government to allow monthly visits from 1867, bi-weekly visits on the first and third Saturday of each month from 1874 (with an extra opening for the November 1 Toussaint holiday), and weekly visits during the 1878, 1889 (the most visitors yet that year), and 1900 World's Fair Expositions. Later, they opened for regular daily visits.
After an incident of vandalism, the catacombs were closed to the public during September 2009 and reopened on 19 December of the same year.
Disruption of surface structures
Because the catacombs are directly under the Paris streets, large foundations cannot be built above them, and cave-ins have destroyed buildings. For this reason, there are few tall buildings in this area.
References
Admin a écrit le (2019-02-18). "La fréquentation des musées et lieux de patrimoine en France, en 2018 (18/02/2019)". Club Innovation & Culture CLIC France (in French). Archived from the original on 2020-11-25. Retrieved 2019-06-12.
"Catacombs A Timeless Journey". Les Catacombes de Paris [Catacombs of Paris]. Archived from the original on 2015-02-08. Retrieved 2015-01-05.
Willsher, Kim (19 October 2024). "'Bodies were dropped down quarry shafts': secrets of millions buried in Paris catacombs come to light". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 October 2024.
"Les Catacombes de Paris". Unveiling the Hidden Secrets of Les Catacombes de Paris.
"The Catacombs of Paris: Underneath the city of light lies a chamber of darkness and death - CityMetric". www.citymetric.com. Archived from the original on 2018-08-24. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
Geiling, Natasha. "Beneath Paris' City Streets, There's an Empire of Death Waiting for Tourists". Archived from the original on 2018-08-24. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
"Weird Wednesday: The mines of Paris". Archived from the original on 2020-07-29.
"intra muros". Dictionary.com. Archived from the original on 2014-12-06. Retrieved 2015-01-06.
(in French) « Par commission du 27 avril 1777, M. Guillaumot, architecte du Roi, fut nommé au poste de contrôleur et inspecteur général en chef des Carrières. Signe du destin, une nouvelle maison s'effondra le jour même dans les carrières de la rue d'Enfer ! » Histoire de l'IGC Archived 2018-10-05 at the Wayback Machine.
"Paris Catacombs Visitor Information". Archived from the original on 2012-08-06. Retrieved 2011-02-25.
Dark Historical Sites: Image. Archived from the original on 2015-12-08. Retrieved 4 October 2023.
"Plunge into the heart of the Catacombes de Paris - Paris tourist office". Archived from the original on 2015-08-27. Retrieved 2015-12-07.
Beyern, B., Guide des tombes d'hommes célèbres, Le Cherche Midi, 2008, 377 p. ISBN 978-2749113500
"The Catacombs" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-22. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
Meltzer, Hannah (2016-12-10). "Hidden villages, spooky tunnels and clever monkeys: 10 things you didn't know about Paris". The Telegraph. ISSN 0307-1235. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
"Catacombs of Paris – Fascinating and Scary at the Same Time". DocumentaryTube. 2021-06-29. Retrieved 2023-03-28.
"La Mexicaine De Perforation". Urban-Resources. 2004. Archived from the original on June 10, 2005. Retrieved August 23, 2004.
"Filming in the Paris Catacombs for As Above, So Below". Motion Picture Association. August 13, 2014. Archived from the original on December 3, 2022. Retrieved February 20, 2023.
"Paris catacombs: Airbnb stay in 'world's largest grave'". BBC News. October 15, 2015. Archived from the original on January 19, 2021. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
"Thieves bore into cellar from Paris catacombs to steal €250,000 of wine". The Guardian. August 30, 2017. Archived from the original on February 3, 2021. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
"Queens of the Stone Age - 'Alive In The Catacombs'". Matador Records. 2025-05-13. Retrieved 2026-05-14.
McDonald, Brendan (2025-06-05). "Episode 1649 - Josh Homme". WTF with Marc Maron Podcast. Retrieved 2026-05-14.
Castelain, Ana (2026-04-07). "Can a Renovation Breathe New Life Into Paris's Home for the Dead?" The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2026-08-16.
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References to the entryway sign:
BBC (2011). Revolutionary Paris: filthy cities. Films for the Humanities & Sciences (Film). Event occurs at 39:47. OCLC 835887472 – via Films On Demand.
Steves, Rick (2004). Rick Steves' Europe: Highlights of Paris—Eiffel and Monet to crème brulée. Back Door Productions. Event occurs at 17:57. ISBN 1598800671. OCLC 122353902 – via Films On Demand.
"Paris catacombs Vandalized, closed for repair". www.gadling.com. 2009-09-22. Archived from the original on 2011-02-15. Retrieved 2011-02-09.
Michaels, Sean (21 April 2011). "Unlocking the Mystery of Paris' Most Secret Underground Society (combined)". Archived from the original on 2018-08-25. Retrieved 2018-08-24.
Further reading
Quigley, Christine (2001) Skulls and skeletons: human bone collections and accumulations. McFarland, Jefferson, NC, US. pp. 22–29
Riordan, Rick (2008) The 39 Clues Book 1: The Maze of Bones. Scholastic Inc. pp. 169–176
External links
Wikimedia Commons logo
Wikimedia Commons has media related to the Catacombs of Paris.
Official website
Paris Musées
Google Street View navigation of the Catacombs
