There’s no doubt that one of the greatest pleasures of a trip to Paris is wandering through the gardens and parks of the City of Light. But Paris has other “gardens” too, ones where, alongside the oak trees and benches, you’ll find unusual statues you won’t see anywhere else. I’m talking about the cemeteries of the City of Light, which stopped being places of sadness and mourning long ago and became tourist attractions that combine tranquility, beauty, and of course plenty of celebrities. And speaking of famous people, no cemetery in Paris packs as many celebrities per square meter as Père Lachaise.
Today I’ll tell you the story of this remarkable cemetery. But first, I recommend watching this lovely video:
Give Us Celebrities: How Père Lachaise Became Paris’s Most Famous Cemetery
The cemetery is named after Father François de la Chaise (1624-1709), who served as confessor to Louis XIV. Father de la Chaise owned an estate on the land where the cemetery now stands, built in 1682, which the city of Paris purchased in 1804.
The cemetery’s design was entrusted to the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart (1739-1813), and Napoleon was so pleased with his work at Père Lachaise that he asked him to design another cemetery, one where the savings of many Parisians would be buried. I’m talking, of course, about the Paris Bourse, located in the 2nd arrondissement.
But despite its architectural success, Père Lachaise was a financial failure in its early years and struggled to attract “clients.” There were two main reasons for this. The first was that, for some unclear reason, the church decided not to consecrate the cemetery grounds with holy water, which bothered quite a few religious Parisians (it didn’t bother Jewish residents at all, which is why, to this day, you’ll find a fair number of Jews, as well as people of other faiths, buried at Père Lachaise).
The second reason was its location in the poor and distinctly unfashionable eastern part of Paris, which led wealthy residents of western Paris to prefer being buried elsewhere (at Passy Cemetery in the 16th arrondissement, for example).
The cemetery’s managers quickly realized that if no one wanted to be buried there, their huge investment would go to waste, so they borrowed a marketing trick from the real estate world. Every developer knows that a great way to promote a luxury project is to give an apartment to a famous actor, or at least a reality TV star, so why not try something similar with a cemetery?
Since no living celebrity agreed to be buried there (certainly not before their time), the managers decided to acquire dead celebrities instead, since they weren’t likely to object to the forced “move.” And so, with great ceremony and plenty of publicity, the remains of Molière and La Fontaine were reburied at Père Lachaise in 1817, together with the remains of Abelard and Heloise, the legendary medieval lovers.
And the trick worked. In 1806 the cemetery had only 62 graves and in 1812 just 833, but by 1830 it already had 33,000. As a result, the cemetery grew and was expanded five times between 1824 and 1851, eventually reaching 439,000 square meters and about 70,000 graves. Over the years, plenty of other celebrities were added to the cemetery, including Édith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Honoré de Balzac, Jim Morrison, and many others. What can I say, Parisians (and plenty of others) are simply dying to get into Père Lachaise!
A Walking Route Through Père Lachaise
As I mentioned, Père Lachaise is a huge cemetery, and the number of famous people buried here, or beautiful graves worth seeing, is enormous. So there’s no way to design a route that lets you see everything (certainly not on your first visit).
Still, I couldn’t leave you with nothing, so I put together a route that, in my opinion, lets you see at least a few of the most important or interesting graves at Père Lachaise. We’ll start from the northern side of the cemetery and make our way toward its center. To reach the starting point, take metro line 3 and get off at Gambetta station.
Exit the metro station and walk along Avenue du Père Lachaise until you reach the entrance. Near the cemetery entrance you’ll find quite a few flower shops, and next to them you can buy a map of Père Lachaise. It costs next to nothing and is well worth it, since it will likely help you find other graves that interest you near the ones mentioned in this route.
So I hope you have a bottle of water, comfortable walking shoes, and a map of the grounds, because we’re about to get started.
Our Walking Route Map
So you don’t lose your way, I built a Google map from scratch. To open it, click the image below.
As you’ll see on the map, there are two kinds of crosses marking the different graves. A cross inside a burgundy circle marks a grave that’s part of the route, while a cross inside a blue circle marks an interesting grave that’s not on the route but might be worth a short detour.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was Irish and is considered one of the greatest poets and playwrights England ever produced. But after having a homosexual relationship with the son of the Marquess of Queensberry, he was sentenced to several years of hard labor. His health deteriorated badly in prison, and he came out a broken man.
Not wanting to stay in his home country, he moved to Paris, where he died in a cheap hotel room on November 30, 1900. That shabby little hotel has since become a luxury hotel with the grand name L’Hôtel, and if you’d like to stay there, you can check out this link.
His grave remains one of the most popular at Père Lachaise, even though a few years ago someone broke off the genitals of the statue standing over it. (Oscar Wilde would probably have had something witty to say about that.)
Victor Noir
And speaking of… certain body parts (or at least a very obvious hint of one), we can’t skip the next grave on our tour: that of Victor Noir.
Noir was a fairly obscure figure, a converted Jew and a struggling journalist who was shot dead by a relative of Napoleon III. As luck would have it, sometime after his death his body was moved to Père Lachaise, and Jules Dalou, one of the great sculptors of the late 19th century, was chosen to create his tombstone.
If you look closely at the photo, you’ll notice one very specific part of the statue has been polished to a shine. If you’d like to find out why, read the article Victor Noir’s Erection.
Amedeo Modigliani
Paris wasn’t exactly good for Modigliani’s health. The Italian-Jewish artist arrived in the City of Light and immediately started living like a rock star, drinking absurd amounts of absinthe and taking every drug he could get his hands on. Combined with tuberculosis, it brought him to an early grave in 1920.
If you’d like to read more about Modigliani, take a look at Dr. Orna Liberman’s in-depth article Amedeo Modigliani and Chaïm Soutine: The Last Bohemians of Montparnasse.
Édith Piaf
Not far at all from Modigliani’s grave, you’ll find the grave of Édith Piaf (1915-1963), perhaps the most famous French singer of all time. She was born in Belleville, not far from the cemetery. Like Modigliani, she also died far too young, from a combination of alcohol, drugs, and liver cancer. So it’s no surprise that her last words were reportedly, “Every damn fool thing you do, you pay for.”
If you’d like to learn more about Édith Piaf’s life, you can read the article The Men in Édith Piaf’s Life or check out the walking route in her footsteps.
The Communards’ Wall (Mur des Fédérés)
This one isn’t a specific grave but a mass grave. On May 28, 1871, Père Lachaise became the last battlefield of the Paris Commune. 147 Communards were brought here, lined up against the wall, and shot by the army of the Third Republic. This was the climax of “Bloody Week” (La Semaine Sanglante), which crushed the Commune that had been established only a few months earlier.
Ever since that day, the spot has become a symbol of the French left, so there’s a decent chance that when you visit, you’ll see people laying red roses, or even a political rally held by one of the left-wing parties (or what’s left of it).
Jim Morrison
Possibly the most popular grave at Père Lachaise, even though the tombstone itself isn’t particularly beautiful. Jim Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, arrived in Paris in 1971 and lived in the Marais. One day he was found dead in his bathtub (most likely from an overdose), and since he died in Paris, he was buried at Père Lachaise, in one of its more out-of-the-way sections.
Morrison’s fans had no trouble finding the grave, and at one point they even stole the original bust from the tombstone. That was the first of many acts of vandalism against it, which is part of why the current gravestone is made of plain stone, and quite a few tourists actually walk right past it.
Abelard and Heloise
Remember when I mentioned earlier the celebrities whose remains were moved here to make people want to be buried at Père Lachaise? Well, here’s a great example. Abelard and Heloise’s tragic love story took place back in the 12th century, and their remains were moved from place to place over the centuries until they finally found their (final?) resting place at this cemetery in the early 19th century.
As you can see, it’s a grand Neo-Gothic tomb that has become a pilgrimage site for lovers. If you’d like to read a bit more about Abelard and Heloise, take a look at these articles:
- Abelard and Heloise: The Great Love Story of the Middle Ages
- Abelard and Heloise: Love Letters That Survived a Thousand Years
The End of Our Route
That’s where my walking route through Père Lachaise ends. Of course, it covers only a tiny fraction of the interesting graves you can find here. If you want to dig deeper and discover more fascinating graves, I highly recommend taking a guided tour of Père Lachaise. In the next section, you’ll find a few good options.
More Famous People Buried at Père Lachaise
Of course, you can’t cover every important grave in a single visit, so for those who want to do their “homework” before heading to the cemetery, here are more historical figures buried at Père Lachaise who have their own article on this site:
- Jean-Charles Alphand: the landscape designer responsible for the look of the Tuileries Garden, the Luxembourg Gardens, and Parc des Buttes-Chaumont.
- Guillaume Apollinaire: one of the greatest poets of the 20th century. You can read his poems in the article French Poetry in Translation.
- Alphonse Bertillon
- Fulgence Bienvenüe: the engineer who built the Paris metro.
- Jean-François Champollion: the man who deciphered the Rosetta Stone and created the field of Egyptology. You can read about him in the article Paris and Ancient Egypt: A Love Story.
- Félix Faure: president of France during the Dreyfus Affair. You can read about his “interesting” death in the article The President’s Deadly Mistress.
- Théodore Géricault: the famous French painter whose painting The Raft of the Medusa you can read about on this site.
- Henri Menier: the French chocolate manufacturer whose grand mansion you can read about in the article Hôtel Henri Menier: Paris’s Secret Chocolate Palace.
- Camille Pissarro – one of the great painters of the 19th century.
- Dominique Vivant Denon: the first director of the Louvre Museum.
- Maria Walewska – one of Napoleon’s famous mistresses.
If you’d like to see the full list of “celebrities” buried at Père Lachaise, you can find it at this link.
Guided Tours in French and English
The Francophile Explores Père Lachaise with Thierry Leroi
As I mentioned in the previous section, one of the biggest challenges anyone visiting Père Lachaise faces is the sheer wealth of famous graves, beautiful graves, and graves with remarkable stories behind them. There’s no way that one visit (or even dozens of visits) to this cemetery will let you exhaust all the stories it holds. That’s exactly why you need Thierry Leroi!
I first heard about Thierry Leroi from a fellow francophile who told me flat out that if I really wanted to discover Père Lachaise, I had to do it with Thierry and no one else. When I met him at the cemetery gate, I found an impressive man, dressed to the nines, with a great sense of humor. Exactly the right partner for a walk through a cemetery!
Thierry has spent years researching the cemeteries of Paris and knows almost every grave, whether it belongs to a nobody or a household name. We walked for several hours among the graves, and I discovered someone with incredible knowledge who can improvise routes among thousands of graves to suit the interests of whoever he’s walking with.
Once he found out a bit about my background, Thierry took me straight to see the grave of the terrorist Mahmoud Hamshari, one of those responsible for the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, who was assassinated by Mossad agents in 1973. As it turns out, Hamshari’s neighbor is none other than the famous Jewish writer Marcel Proust, and both of their tombstones are made of black marble.
One day, a few people tried to take revenge on Hamshari’s memory, but since they’d never met Thierry Leroi and hadn’t consulted him, they ended up accidentally blowing up Proust’s tombstone instead, even though he was completely innocent.
From there we continued along the cemetery’s winding paths and reached famous graves like those of Théodore Géricault and Victor Noir, as well as lesser-known graves that each had a fascinating story. Thierry even went a step further and took me to two graves belonging to people who are still very much alive but decided there was no point waiting, and that they might as well prepare the place where they intend to rest forever while they’re still around to enjoy it.
The first man built himself a small pyramid, which he sometimes goes inside for a few hours at a time (you can imagine how visitors react when the pyramid door opens and the guy steps out). The second grave belongs to a photographer and features a giant sculpture of his favorite camera, complete with a QR code linking to a website about his life.
A few hours later, I wrapped up the tour with Thierry, carrying more than a few stories I’ll share another time, along with real admiration for a man who has dedicated himself to telling the life stories of the dead. Needless to say, I highly recommend Thierry, and you can book a tour through his website.
Looking for a Guided Tour of Père Lachaise in English?
Thierry Leroi is simply a wonderful guide, but the catch is that all his tours are conducted in French. Want a guided tour of Père Lachaise with an English-speaking guide? Here are a few solid options:
Visitor Information (Opening Hours and Getting There)
Address
Entrance: Rue du Repos 16, 75020 Paris. Metro: Père Lachaise, lines 2 and 3.
Getting There
The best and fastest way to reach Père Lachaise is by metro. Here are your three options:
- Gambetta station: line 3.
- Père Lachaise station: lines 2 and 3.
- Philippe Auguste station: line 2.
Opening Days and Hours
- Saturday: 08:30–17:30
- Sunday: 09:00–17:30
- All other days: 08:00–17:00
Done Exploring Père Lachaise and Want to Explore the Area?
I highly recommend the article Secrets of the 20th Arrondissement by Fanny Rothstein. It covers a route that’s mostly culinary (I promise you, all that death at Père Lachaise will leave you hungry), and it starts not far from the cemetery.
Want to Visit More Cemeteries in Paris?
If this tour “whetted your appetite” and you’d like to visit more cemeteries in Paris, check out the article Paris Cemeteries If Only the Graves Could Talk…
Enjoy!
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