Père Lachaise Cemetery
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Père-Lachaise Cemetery (French: Cimetière du Père-Lachaise) (officially, cimetière de l'Est “eastern cemetery”) ( ) is the largest cemetery in the city of Paris, France at 118 acres[1] (48 ha), though there are larger cemeteries in Paris suburbs.
Père-Lachaise is one of the most famous in the world. Located in the 20e arrondissement, it is reputed to be the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years. It is also the site of five Great War memorials.
Père-Lachaise is located on Boulevard de Ménilmontant. Métro station Philippe Auguste on line 2 is next to the main entrance, while the station called Père Lachaise, on lines 2 or 3, is 500 metres away near a side entrance. (Many tourists are reported to prefer the Gambetta station on line 3 as it allows them to enter near the tomb of Oscar Wilde and go downhill to visit the rest of the cemetery.)
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[edit] Origins
The cemetery takes its name from Père François de la Chaise (1624-1709), the confessor of Louis XIV, who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property, situated on the hillside (from which the king, during the Fronde, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne) was bought by the city in 1804, laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, and later extended.
The cemetery was established by Napoleon in 1804. Cemeteries had been banned inside Paris in 1786, after the closure of the Cimetière des Innocents on the fringe of Les Halles food market, on the grounds that it presented a health hazard. (This same health hazard also led to the creation of the famous Parisian catacombs in the south of the city). Several new cemeteries replaced all the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital, Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père-Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. At the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Passy Cemetery.
At the time of its opening, the cemetery was seen as too far from the city and attracted few funerals. So the administrators devised a marketing strategy and with great fanfare organised the transfer of the remains of La Fontaine and Molière, in 1804. Then, in another great spectacle in 1817, the purported remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine (by tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love) (see disputation).
This strategy had the desired effect when people began clamouring to be buried among the famous citizens. Records show that, within a few years, Père-Lachaise went from a few dozen permanent residents to more than 33,000. Today there are over 300,000 bodies buried there, and many more in the columbarium, which holds the remains of those who had requested cremation.
The Communards' Wall (Mur des Fédérés) is also located in the cemetery. This is the wall against which 147 Communards, the last defenders of the workers' district Belleville, were shot on Sunday, 28 May 1871—the last day of the "Bloody Week" (Semaine Sanglante) ending the Paris Commune.
Since that execution, Père Lachaise gained a special emotive role for the political "left" in France, manifested in annual processions sometimes drawing tens or even or hundreds of thousands of participants (some 600,000 in 1936) and led by the main leaders of the left parties and organizations (see article on the Communards' Wall).
Various prominent left-wing leaders are buried in the vicinity, where a monument was also erected honouring the French Brigadists (volunteers in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War).
[edit] Burials at Père-Lachaise
- Jean-Pierre Aumont — actor, father of Tina Aumont and husband of Maria Montez.
- Claude Bernard — Famous French physiologist, known for several advances in medicine, as the introduction of the scientific method to the study of medicine, and the study of the sympathetic nervous system.
- Sarah Bernhardt — famous French stage and film actress.
- Sophie Blanchard — first professional female balloonist and the first woman to die in an aviation accident.
- Gustave Caillebotte — French Impressionist painter.
- Maria Callas — The opera singer's ashes were originally buried in the cemetery. After being stolen and later recovered, they were scattered into the Aegean Sea, off the coast of Greece. The empty urn remains in Père Lachaise.
- Jean-Joseph Carriès — sculptor, ceramist, and miniaturist.
- Frédéric Chopin — Franco-Polish composer. His heart is entombed in a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw.
- Édouard Daladier — French Radical-Socialist politician of the 1930s, signatory of the Munich Agreement in 1938 and Prime Minister of France at the outbreak of the Second World War.
- Jacques-Louis David — Napoleon's court painter was exiled as a revolutionary after the Bourbons returned to the throne of France. His body was not allowed into the country even in death, so the tomb contains only his heart.
- Cecile De Brunhoff — folk figure
- Nancy Cunard — English poet, writer, anarchist activist.
- Eugene Delacroix — the great Romantic artist.
- Pierre Desproges — French humorist.
- Antonio Drove — director
- George Enescu — Romanian composer, pianist, violinist and conductor, buried in 1955.
- Suzanne Flon — actress
- Thierry Fortineau — actor
- Joseph Fourier — French mathematician and physicist
- Theodore Gericault — the Romantic painter, whose major work The Raft of the Medusa is reproduced on his tomb.
- Zenobe Gramme — Inventor of the Direct Current (DC) Dynamo. There is a statue on the grave of Zenobe sitting and looking at a dynamo rotor.
- Sadegh Hedayat — was Iran's foremost modern writer of prose fiction and short stories.
- Ticky Holgado, actor
- Allan Kardec — Born Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, he was the founder of Spiritism. His grave is often "protected" by followers who try to keep tourists from photographing it.
- Clarence John Laughlin — American Surrealist photographer from New Orleans, Louisiana. His most famous published work was "Ghosts Along the Mississippi".
- Charles Messier — French astronomer, publisher of Messier's catalogue.
- Yves Montand — film actor
- Jehangir Ratanji Dadabhoy Tata — aviation pioneer and important Indian businessman.
- Jim Morrison — American singer, songwriter, author, and poet. Permanent crowds and occasional vandalism surrounding this tomb have caused tensions with the families of other, less famous, deceased. The cemetery has been forced to hire a full-time security guard for the grave. Many other parts of the cemetery have been defaced with arrows purporting to indicate the direction toward "Jim", though even these defacements have in many cases been defaced themselves, resulting in arrows that point in two directions.
- Michel Ney — marshal of the French army who fought in the French Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic Wars.
- Victor Noir — journalist killed by Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte in a dispute over a duel with Paschal Grousset. The tomb, designed by Jules Dalou is notable for the realistic portrayal of the dead Noir, and for the fact that he appears to be at least partially sexually aroused, his large penis pushing his part-unbuttoned fly open. In consequence, the sculpture has become a fertility symbol. His lips are kissed, the genital area is rubbed and flowers are left in his hat. In 2005 a fence was erected around his tomb to prevent people rubbing said area, as this was damaging the sculpture, but it has subsequently been removed.
- Virginia Oldoini, Countess of Castiglione — famous Italian courtesan
- Édith Piaf — famous French singer.
- Camille Pissarro — French Impressionist painter.
- Elvira Popescu — Romanian-born actress
- Marcel Proust — French intellectual, novelist, essayist and critic.
- Gioacchino Rossini — Italian composer. In 1887, Rossini's remains were moved back to Florence, but the crypt that once housed them (now dedicated to his memory) is still in Perè Lachaise.
- Countess Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry — The Salvadoran writer who was married to Comte Antoine de Saint-Exupéry who is the author of The Little Prince (Le Petit Prince).
- Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon — Famous sociologist who founded the "Saint-Simonian" movement
- Georges-Pierre Seurat — French painter of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, and father of neoimpressionism.
- Isaac Titsingh — Dutch surgeon, scholar, VOC trader, ambassador to Qing China and Tokugawa Japan
- Alice B. Toklas — American author, partner of Gertrude Stein, Toklas's name and information is etched on the other side of Stein's gravestone in the same sparse style and font. As they were inseparable in life, so too are they in death.
- Louis Verneuil — French playwright.
- Marie, Countess Walewski — Napoleon's mistress, credited for persuading Napoleon to take important pro-Polish decisions during the Napoleonic Wars. Only her heart is entombed here; her other remains were returned to her native Poland.
- Eduard Wiiralt — Estonian artist
- Oscar Wilde — Irish novelist, poet and playwright. By tradition, Wilde's admirers kiss the art-deco monument while wearing lipstick.
- Richard Wright — African-American author, wrote Native Son and other American classics.
- Samuel Hahnemann — German physician, formal founder of homeopathy.
[edit] Gallery
 Memorial to the dead. |
 Père Lachaise in spring. |
 Jim Morrison's grave. |
 Marcel Proust's grave. |
 One of the many beautiful winding paths through the cemetery. |
 Amazing artwork in the form of the graves themselves. |
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- Père-Lachaise Cemetery - virtual tour in French and English
- Cimetière du Père-Lachaise
- Photographs of Cimetière du Père-Lachaise
- Sensuality revealed by the funerary sculpture in Père-Lachaise Cemetery
- Cimetière du Père-Lachaise - current photographs
- Information and news about Père-Lachaise In English
- Photographs of Père-Lachaise Documenting funerary statuary in Paris cemeteries; on pariscemeteries.com
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- Satellite image from WikiMapia or Google Maps
- Street map from Multimap or GlobalGuide
- Aerial image from TerraServer
| Popular visitor attractions in Paris |  |
|---|---|
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