Millions of tourists climb the Eiffel Tower every year, and plenty more go visit the great cemeteries of Paris: Père Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre. Even though quite a few people pass through the Passy neighborhood right next to the tower, and quite a few people love visiting Paris cemeteries, somehow almost every tourist, except for “advanced Francophiles,” misses this charming cemetery. And that’s a shame.
You’ll find here everything that makes a cemetery fascinating: beautiful tombstones, atmosphere and, of course, “celebrities” buried there. I won’t walk you through every single grave, of course, but in this article I’ll focus on a few that struck me as especially interesting, either because of who’s buried there or because something about the site caught my attention.
Passy Cemetery: Practical Information
Before we start, here are a few logistical details you can’t do without.
Address and getting there
The address of Passy Cemetery is 2 Rue du Commandant Schloesing. The easiest way to get there is by metro (lines 6 and 9, get off at Trocadéro and it’s a short walk from there).
If you’d rather take the bus, lines 22, 30 and 63 will also get you there (get off at Trocadéro).
Here’s a map of the area, which also shows a few hotels in case you want to stay nearby.
Opening hours
Monday to Friday: 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Saturday: 8:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Sunday: 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
In winter the cemetery closes at 5:30 p.m.
The history of Passy Cemetery
For those who don’t know, Passy began as a village on the western edge of old Paris. Like anywhere people live, there was a need to bury the local dead, so a small cemetery was established here, which remained in use until 1802. In the late 18th century, following a “population explosion” in the cemeteries at the heart of Paris, the city decided to empty them out and move the remains to the Catacombs of Paris.
At the same time, a series of more modern cemeteries were established outside Paris, the most famous of which was of course Père Lachaise. To serve the population of western Paris, a cemetery was established in Passy in 1802. In 1826 and 1854 Passy Cemetery was expanded to its current size, and in 1860 the village of Passy was annexed to Paris and became part of its 16th arrondissement.
In the following years, more and more of Paris’s elite moved into the 16th arrondissement, making it one of the city’s most prestigious neighborhoods (a status it still holds today). Since wealthy people die too, and since most of them wanted to be buried close to home, Passy Cemetery became very popular among the high society of France and earned the nickname “the aristocratic necropolis of Paris.”
Today Passy holds about 2,700 graves, and since quite a few wealthy people are buried there, you’ll find sculpted tombstones and impressive family tombs. In the next section, let’s take a look at some of them.
Famous graves
The tomb of Marie Bashkirtseff
This is without a doubt the most impressive tomb in the cemetery, and since it sits close to the entrance, it’s hard to miss.
In her 25 years (Marie Bashkirtseff lived from 1858 to 1882), Marie managed to experience and create as much as someone who lived to a ripe old age. She was born not far from Poltava, in what is now Ukraine, into a local noble family. Her parents separated, and she found herself traveling across Europe by train with her mother, until the two settled in Paris.
Coming from a wealthy family, she received an excellent education, which allowed her many talents to flourish. She first turned to singing, but a lung disease she suffered from made it impossible for her to continue in that field. Marie didn’t let that stop her, and with remarkable determination she turned to another field: painting.
Marie excelled at this too, and in her short life she painted wonderful works, some of which you can find at the Musée d’Orsay. Her most famous painting is “A Meeting,” but my personal favorite is “The Umbrella,” which you see here.
Alongside painting, Marie Bashkirtseff also turned to writing, and starting at age 13 she kept a diary that described her life in great detail, through which we can learn about the lives of the upper bourgeoisie and the nobility in Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Marie was not only a writer and a painter but also a committed feminist, who wrote in various newspapers about women’s rights.
All of this made Marie Bashkirtseff a famous and beloved figure in the literary salons of Paris, and she even corresponded with some of the most famous writers of her time, including Guy de Maupassant. But on October 31, Marie died of tuberculosis, leaving us only to imagine the heights she might have reached had her life not been cut so cruelly short.
Marie Bashkirtseff was buried in Passy, and her family built her a magnificent tomb, shaped like a painter’s studio, as a reminder of just how brilliant a career she had, and how brilliant a career she might have had.
The graves of Manet and Berthe Morisot
Speaking of painting, no art lover’s visit to Passy Cemetery is complete without stopping by the graves of Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Berthe Morisot (1841-1895).
Manet, along with Claude Monet (1840-1926), is one of the founding fathers of French Impressionism. While Monet gained fame in the last decades of his life, Manet faced harsh criticism from most art critics during his lifetime and died of syphilis at age 51.
Berthe Morisot, a highly talented painter in her own right and a close friend of Manet, is also buried at Passy Cemetery. If you’d like to read the story of Morisot and Manet’s lives and their art, I highly recommend Dr. Orna Liberman’s article: Édouard Manet and Berthe Morisot: The Passion in Art.
Claude Debussy
Let’s stay in the world of art and go visit the grave of one of the greatest musicians of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, none other than Claude Debussy (1862-1918).
Even if you, like me, aren’t a huge fan of Debussy’s music, you’ve surely heard parts of it in all sorts of films without realizing it. Here’s an example of a melody that will probably sound familiar to quite a few of you.
Whether you love his music or not, one thing is beyond dispute: he lived a colorful life that included a string of extramarital affairs, his wife’s suicide attempt (after he decided to go on vacation with another woman), and more.
It’s no surprise that a man whose mistress and second wife was named Emma Bardac (1862-1934) would have a turbulent life and an equally chaotic death. He died of cancer in March 1918, near the end of World War I, and since the Germans were shelling Paris at the time, a proper funeral where the musical and artistic elite could pay their last respects was impossible. He was hastily buried at Père Lachaise.
Only a year later he was reburied at Passy Cemetery, in the same grave as Emma and their daughter Claude-Emma (1909-1919), who died a year after the composer from improper treatment of diphtheria.
Fernandel
Having visited the graves of painters and composers, let’s end the artists’ portion of this walk at the grave of one of France’s greatest actors, the man known as “the French Charlie Chaplin,” none other than Fernand Joseph Désiré Contandin (1903-1971), known to us as Fernandel.
It would take far too long to describe Fernandel’s long and glorious career in full. It began in the 1920s in France’s vaudeville theaters, continued through a long string of French-language films (the most iconic being the ones in which he played Don Camillo, a small-town priest at odds with the local Communist Party representative), and eventually reached Hollywood, where he appeared in a number of films, most famously in a cameo role in “Around the World in 80 Days.”
And if that weren’t enough, Fernandel also became a famous singer in his own right and left us no shortage of classics. Here’s one of my favorite songs of his, for the perfect combination of music and comedy (the video includes English subtitles so you can understand and laugh along with me).
Leila Pahlavi
Now that we’ve finished visiting the “celebrities,” let me take you to the grave of an Iranian princess whose life was short and sad. I’m talking about Leila Pahlavi (1970-2001).
Leila was the youngest daughter of Iran’s last king, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919-1980). At age 9, she and her family were forced to flee Iran following the Islamic Revolution, and a year later she lost her father to cancer.
Fortunately for her, the Pahlavi family had amassed a significant fortune, estimated at around a billion dollars (in 1980 terms), which allowed her to live a life of wealth and comfort. On the surface, she lacked for nothing, and she even began a modeling career, but the mental illness she suffered from gave her no peace and led to drug addiction, which caused her death at age 31.
Henri Houssin
I’d like to end this “visit” at the grave of an unknown boy named Henri Houssin (1886-1902), found in the 1st division of the cemetery. I’m not sure what made me peek into his family’s tomb, since they weren’t particularly famous people, but curiosity led me inside, and that’s where I discovered Henri’s grave.
Inside the family tomb you’ll find several plaques telling us that the boy attended the Janson de Sailly school in the 16th arrondissement, and that he died in the town of Cambo-les-Bains, in southwestern France near the Pyrenees. This was a town where people with lung disease used to go, so it’s reasonable to guess he died there, most likely of tuberculosis. His parents’ grief is captured on a small plaque that reads (in my own translation):
“My God, watch over the health of my parents.” So prayed the boy every night at age 16. And yet, he was struck down without mercy and cruelly taken from the father and mother who loved him so much.
In my opinion, even though it’s not the most beautiful grave or the grave of a “celebrity,” this is the one that touched me the most, and so, to me, it’s the most important grave in Passy Cemetery.
Want to read about more famous cemeteries in Paris?
Feel free to check out the article Paris Cemeteries: If Only the Dead Could Talk to read about other cemeteries in the City of Light.
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