Skeletons under the Streets: The September Massacres and the Paris Catacombs

When the Paris Catacombs opened to the public in the summer of 1809, Louis Etienne Héricart de Thury, the engineer in charge of their maintenance explained why he thought it was important to convert a subterranean ossuary into an accessible public space:  “I believed it was necessary to take special care in the conservation of this monument, considering the intimate rapport that will surely exist between the Catacombs and the events of the French Revolution.”  Although the vast majority bones contained in the underground ossuary had no connection whatsoever to the Revolution, with this statement Thury reduced the Catacombs to one specific set of human remains:  the bones of the victims of the September Massacres — one of the French Revolution’s most notorious episodes of public violence. These amounted to approximately twelve-hundred skeletons, in an ossuary that boasted several million. To further stress the significance of these particular bones, Thury marked them with a small expiatory monument.

This paper explores the range of ways that early-nineteenth-century Parisians responded to these controversial bones.  Although they featured prominently in published descriptions of the Catacombs where they served as an easy reference to Revolutionary violence, very few of the ossuary’s ordinary post-revolutionary visitors showed any special interest in them.  I posit that this elision may have had something to do with how the Catacombs functioned in the post-revolutionary city.  As a space that contained — and displayed — eight centuries of Parisian history in the form of anonymous human remains, the Catacombs proved particularly resistant to simple narratives.  The Catacombs was at once Revolutionary and Royalist; sacred and secular; fun and frightening.  Moreover, by bringing together the past, present, and future, the Catacombs made it difficult for its visitors to fixate on particular moments, or individuals, in time.