The Paris Morgue

Imagine flocking to a morgue to view dead bodies as a form of entertainment?  

In August 1886, Parisians rushed to the Paris Morgue after newspaper Le Journal Illustre ran its cover story “Enfant de la Rue du Vert-Bois”, about a four-year-old girl found dead with a mysterious bruise on her hand.  As haunting as the scene was, people wanted to see the girl posed in a tiny dress.  The crowd went wild as “the mob rushes the doors with savage cries, fallen hats tromped on, parasols and umbrellas broken, and woman falling sick from being half suffocated.”  Over 150,000 people flocked to see Enfant de la Rue du Vert-Bois.

The Paris Morgue attracts visitors by the hordes and is one of city’s most popular tourist attractions.  Once existed so family and friends could identify anonymous bodies, but instead, visitors came with the intention of seeing the dead up close.  And the more gruesome or mysterious the death, the more tourists show up to view the body.

USC history professor Vanessa R. Schwartz writes about the Paris Morgue:  “The Morgue served as a visual auxiliary to the newspaper, staging the recently dead who had been sensationally detailed by the printed word.”  People flocked to the Morgue whenever an unknown person was decapitated or a bloodied trunk was on display.

Another example is cited by Schwartz in 1895, “that of a 18-month-old child pulled from the Seine River and the next day, the body of a three-year-old found in the river nearby, the question asked was, “Are these two sisters?”   Locals flocked to the Morgue to speculate on the sighting.  Crowds swelled to the point police were dispatched in order to keep the peace.  

An American writer described a trip to the Morgue in an 1885 story for The Crimson:

“Men are crowding and elbowing each other; old hags are pointing toward the glass, and croaking to one another; pretty women are gazing with white faces of pity, but with none the less thirsty greediness, upon some fascinating spectacle; little children are being held aloft in strong arms, that they too may see the dreadful thing, and they do see, and they toss their tiny, wavering arms aloft and crow right gleefully.”

The Morgue had attracted so many visitors by the end of the 20^th century; it was mentioned in the Paris guidebook.  Social commentator Hughes Leroux wrote in 1888:  “There are few people having visited Paris who do not know the Morgue.”  Local venders were cashing in on the hype:  the sidewalk outside the Morgue overflowed with People “Hawking oranges, cookies, and coconut slices.”

While other morgues attracted plenty of tourists, it didn’t rival that of the Paris Morgue.  It was an intentional move as the city rebuilt it in 1864 with city planners designing it to attract as many visitors as possible to speed up the identification of corpses.  The Paris Morgue stands behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame and is open from dawn to dusk seven days a week—more than any major morgue at the time.