If Montparnasse Cemetery is considered the cemetery of the intellectuals, then Montmartre Cemetery is considered, fairly or not, the cemetery of actors, dancers and artists, even though great minds such as Heinrich Heine are buried there too. It’s a relatively small cemetery compared to Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, and it sits in a lively neighborhood where you can also find the Moulin Rouge.
When you walk in, you’ll feel like you’ve stepped into a huge pit in the ground, and honestly, that feeling isn’t far from the truth, because Montmartre Cemetery sits on the site of former gypsum mines. These mines were abandoned during the 18th century and turned into a cemetery, but not before they gave the nearby square its name, Place Blanche (“the White Square”, named for the white dust that came out of the gypsum mines in the area). The gypsum mines didn’t become the cemetery you know right away: they first became a large mass grave for victims of the French Revolution, and only at the start of the 19th century did it become an organized cemetery.
The feeling of walking into a pit in the ground, combined with the bridge that crosses over the cemetery, makes a visit here a slightly claustrophobic experience. The dense gravestones and statues add to the melancholy atmosphere, especially if you visit in winter or fall. If you think about it, Montmartre Cemetery is a cemetery the way a cemetery is supposed to be. Not some giant garden like Père Lachaise, but a sad, dark and somewhat depressing place. In short: the perfect cemetery 🙂
If this introduction hasn’t made you grab your legs and run back to the land of the living, I invite you to join me on a visit to one of the most interesting cemeteries in Paris.
A bit of logistics before we start
How do you get there?
The best way to get to Montmartre Cemetery is to take metro line 2 and get off at Place Blanche. From there, walk and enter through Avenue Rachel. Another option is to get off at the Place Clichy station, where lines 2 and 13 both stop, and walk along Boulevard Clichy until you reach Avenue Rachel.
Opening hours
Montmartre Cemetery is open every day until 6:00 p.m. On Saturdays it opens at 8:30 a.m., on Sundays at 9:00 a.m., and on all other days at 8:00 a.m.
Cemetery map
At the entrance to the cemetery there’s a map where you can find the graves of all the “celebrities”. You can also buy a map at one of the flower shops nearby. If you want a digital version of the map, feel free to follow this link and download the map as a PDF. You can print the file at home before you travel, or read it on your phone (a bit less convenient).
The cats of Montmartre Cemetery
While researching this article, I discovered that this cemetery serves as a kind of shelter for stray cats. Even though the city of Paris isn’t exactly thrilled by the idea, the people who live nearby feed and care for them, so much so that the cats have become the unofficial rulers of the cemetery. Personally, I don’t remember seeing many cats when I visited in August 2019 (maybe they were off on their own traditional vacation too), but I was told that if you do run into a cat, it’s best to leave it alone, because while some of the cats are friendly, others might scratch.
If you want to read more about the cats of Montmartre Cemetery, feel free to check out this article.
A walking tour of the most interesting graves at Montmartre Cemetery
In place of a map: the cemetery’s address above is a link. Click it, and the location will open right away in Google Maps. Inside the cemetery, find your way using the plot numbers mentioned in this article.
Start your walk on Avenue Principale until the roundabout, and from there head to Avenue Dubuisson. Before you continue, I recommend peeking into plot number 19, where the empty grave of Émile Zola stands (if you want to visit his actual grave, you’ll need to go to the Panthéon).
Dalida 1933-1987
After visiting what used to be Zola’s grave, continue straight on Avenue Dubuisson until it crosses Avenue Hector Berlioz. Turn right, and you’ll reach the grave of the singer Dalida.
Dalida was one of the most successful pop singers in the history of French pop music. Despite her huge success, life wasn’t always kind to her (especially in her relationships). As a result, in 1987 she decided to take her own life, and she was buried in Montmartre Cemetery (the square named after her is also in Montmartre, about a 20-minute walk from the cemetery). Given the devotion she earned during her life, it’s no surprise that her grave is very well kept, and you’ll find a few flowers and potted plants left by fans.
If you want to read about her fascinating life and enjoy all her greatest songs, feel free to read Dr. Orna Liberman’s article Dalida Forever: The Dramatic Life of the Singer Who Became a Legend.
Hector Berlioz 1803-1869
Go back to the intersection where you turned right onto Avenue Hector Berlioz, and this time turn left into plot number 20. There you’ll find the grave of the composer Hector Berlioz, after whom the avenue is named.
Hector Berlioz was a brilliant symphonic composer who found great success early in his career, but he didn’t have much luck in love. His wedding to his first love was called off because the bride’s mother strongly opposed the match. A desperate Berlioz decided to murder both the mother and the bride, but he forgot the disguise he’d planned to wear while committing the murder in their carriage…
From there things only got worse. During a routine walk through a cemetery, he discovered that one of the women he’d loved had died, stumbling suddenly upon her grave. When he finally managed to find a woman named Harriet Smithson who neither ran away nor died before their wedding, he discovered she was an alcoholic. But every cloud has a silver lining: this woman, after all, was the inspiration for Berlioz’s greatest work, the “Symphonie fantastique”. Before we continue with the story of unlucky Berlioz, I invite you to listen to my favorite part of this symphony, the ball scene.
If you thought Berlioz’s troubles ended there, you’d be wrong. He managed to divorce his alcoholic wife and marry his second wife, Marie Recio, who died of a stroke at age 48, not long after their wedding. At least Berlioz gained a wonderful mother-in-law, who stayed with him after her daughter’s death and cared for him until his own death in 1869. His last words, by the way, were, “Now, at last, they will play my music.”
François Truffaut (1932-1984)
Not far from Berlioz’s grave, in plot number 21, rests the renowned director François Truffaut. The gravestone itself, as you’ll see, isn’t particularly interesting, but it’s definitely worth pausing here for a moment to pay tribute to one of France‘s greatest filmmakers of the 20th century.
He actually began his career as a film critic at the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, which still exists today. Contrary to the famous saying that those who can’t do, criticize, Truffaut put all the theoretical knowledge he’d gathered, along with his love of cinema, to use in creating some of the greatest films of the New Wave, including The 400 Blows and Jules and Jim, which features a wonderful song performed by Jeanne Moreau.
Gustave Guillaumet 1840-1887
Go back to Avenue Hector Berlioz, and at the intersection this time turn left onto Avenue Cordier. There, in plot number 3, you’ll find the painter Gustave Guillaumet.
He was one of the lesser-known painters of the 19th century, famous in his time for his paintings of North Africa. Unfortunately for him, not long after he died, the Impressionists rose to fame and his romantic painting style became outdated almost overnight. If this beautiful gravestone, which we’ll talk about next, has sparked your interest in his art, you’ll be happy to know you can find several of his paintings at the Musée d’Orsay.
Look at this beautiful gravestone. The young woman you see scattering flowers over a medallion with the painter’s portrait is dressed in traditional Algerian clothing. Is she sad? Or perhaps a bit indifferent? I’ll leave that mystery for you to solve…
Adolphe Sax 1814-1894
Continue to plot number 4, where you’ll find the next grave I wanted to show you. This is the grave of Adolphe Sax, a Belgian musician who invented the saxophone in 1846.
What not many people know is that Adolphe Sax gave humanity more than just the famous instrument named after him: he also significantly improved how quite a few wind instruments worked. But, as noted, it was the saxophone that brought him fame, and even though a lot of time has passed since its invention, the instrument hasn’t changed much from the original model.
Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-1895)
He’s known, of course, as the son of the famous writer Alexandre Dumas, who wrote, among other works, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. But the son more than earned his own place in French literary history. In fact, surprisingly, by the time Alexandre Dumas fils died, he was even more famous than his father.
The reason for that was his work “The Lady of the Camellias”, which tells the story of the short life of the courtesan Marie Duplessis, perhaps the most famous courtesan of the 19th century. The play was a huge success in its own right, but after the composer Giuseppe Verdi turned it into the opera “La Traviata”, Alexandre Dumas fils achieved worldwide fame. Marie Duplessis, by the way, is buried just a short distance from his grave.
And where is Alexandre Dumas the father, you might ask? He’s buried at the Panthéon. If you’d like to read a bit about his relationship with his son (and with quite a few women in his life), feel free to read the article The Three Musketeers of Alexandre Dumas.
Vaslav Nijinsky 1889-1951
Without a doubt, one of the graves with the most beautiful headstones in the entire cemetery. This is the grave of the dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, who amazed Paris in the early decades of the 20th century.
The ballet that made Nijinsky famous was, without a doubt, “The Rite of Spring”, whose music was written by Stravinsky and whose choreography was created by Diaghilev. It’s a revolutionary work that shocked the Parisian audience but very quickly entered the “canon” of classical music. If you’d like to read more about this piece, you can do so in Ronit Groman’s article The Rite of Spring: The Ballet That Became Paris’s Biggest Scandal.
Let’s go back for a moment to the figure sitting on the gravestone. Does his gaze convey tenderness? Or do we see in it the madness that accompanied Nijinsky his whole life and that caused him to spend most of his last 30 years in psychiatric hospitals? I’ll leave you to think about that question as we move on to the next grave.
Godefroy Cavaignac 1853-1905
I really love this grave, thanks to the gravestone showing Godefroy’s figure, life-sized, lying on top of it. To me it’s a very photogenic gravestone, and I enjoyed photographing it a lot. What do you think?
But who was this Cavaignac, whose gravestone caught my curiosity? It turns out he was none other than the man who read out, in court, the letter that convicted Dreyfus. Cavaignac later discovered that the letter had been forged by Colonel Henry, and yet he continued to argue, until the end of his life, that Dreyfus was guilty of treason and opposed a retrial.
Heinrich Heine 1797-1856
Let’s end our tour of Montmartre Cemetery with the grave of Heinrich Heine, one of the most important Jewish (though he converted to Christianity) poets and intellectuals of the 19th century.
Heine, who had been persecuted for much of his life in his native Prussia, moved to live and create in Paris in 1831, where he worked as a correspondent for the newspaper “Allgemeine Zeitung”. In 1848, right around the time of the revolution that toppled Louis Philippe, Heine apparently fell ill with multiple sclerosis or muscular dystrophy. As a result, he was forced to spend the last eight years of his life in bed, which he called his “mattress grave”. Despite his difficult physical condition, he continued creating and writing almost until his final day.
An interesting anecdote: if you visit Heinrich Heine’s grave, you’ll notice that even though he died in 1856, his neighbor is a Jew named Boukobza, who died during the 20th century. You might wonder how the plot next to such a great poet stayed empty for about a hundred years. The answer is much simpler than you’d think. The plot next to Heine didn’t stay empty for long after his death; it was taken by an unknown person. But according to cemetery rules, if you haven’t paid enough money to secure burial rights for all generations, then after a few decades, your remains will be removed from the grave, the gravestone will be taken down, and someone else will be allowed to be buried there in your place.
Was Mr. Boukobza a sharper real estate dealer than Heine’s previous neighbor, which is how he got to become neighbor to the famous poet? Let’s meet there again in a few more decades and find out…
Other famous people buried at Montmartre Cemetery
Of course, no single tour can cover every important grave. For those who want to do their “homework” before visiting the cemetery, here are a few more historical figures buried there, each with an article here on the site:
- Michel Berger: one of the greatest figures of 20th-century French pop music. His wife, France Gall, who became famous for, among other songs, “Ella elle la” and died in 2018, is buried in the same cemetery.
- Nissim de Camondo: one of the most beautiful museums in Paris is named after him (in my opinion, at least).
- Jeanne Moreau: a beloved actress, famous in part for Truffaut’s film Jules and Jim, which we discussed earlier.
- Ary Scheffer: a wonderful painter, in my opinion, though not very well known to the general public. You can enjoy his work at the Musée de la Vie Romantique.
- Charles-Henri Sanson: a member of a family of executioners, who was responsible for the execution of Louis XVI. You can read about him and his family in the article Sanson the Hero. If you’d also like to discover where his family’s mansion once stood, feel free to read the article Square Montholon: A Charming Parisian Corner with a Fascinating Story.
Want to visit more cemeteries in Paris?
If this tour has “whetted your appetite” and you’d like to visit more cemeteries in Paris, feel free to read the article The Cemeteries of Paris: If Only the Graves Could Talk…
More articles about Montmartre that might interest you
Finished your visit to Montmartre Cemetery and want to keep exploring? Here are a few articles that might interest you:
- The Story of Montmartre: Martyred Saints, Prostitutes and Artists: an in-depth article that gives you all the historical background you need for a tour of Montmartre.
- Montmartre of the Great Artists: a classic walking tour created by my dear friend Yoel Thamanlis that will let you see all the most important sites in Montmartre (especially those connected to the artists who lived there, like Picasso).
- Recommended Bars in Paris, Rooftops and Other Trendy Spots: want to look down on Montmartre Cemetery from above? Check out this article and you’ll find a hotel whose rooftop offers a panoramic view of the cemetery and other parts of Paris.
- A Historical, Artistic and Culinary Walking Tour Through the Montmartre District of Paris: if you’d like to get to know the culinary side of Montmartre (after all, a walk through a cemetery can definitely work up an appetite), feel free to read this article.
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