A city of the dead, laid out like a citySeen from above, Père Lachaise reads exactly like the metropolis around it: winding cobbled avenues, dense blocks of monuments, grand family chapels on the best corners, and a canopy of some 4,000 trees of more than eighty species that turns the whole hillside green in summer. It is the largest cemetery within Paris proper and, with more than 3.5 million visitors a year, the most visited cemetery in the world. A new idea of burialThe cemetery opened on 21 May 1804, laid out by the architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart on the wooded hill of Mont-Louis in what is now the 20th arrondissement. It was a deliberate break with the overcrowded parish graveyards of the old city: a landscaped garden cemetery on the English model, where families would own their plots and raise their own monuments. The neoclassical entrance and the chapel were added in the 1820s by Étienne-Hippolyte Godde.Parisians were at first reluctant to be buried so far from the centre. The administration responded with a marketing masterstroke, transferring the supposed remains of Molière, La Fontaine, and the medieval lovers Héloïse and Abélard to the new grounds. Fashionable Paris followed, and the cemetery was enlarged five times between 1824 and 1850 to its present 44 hectares, holding roughly 75,000 graves. The famous deadFew places concentrate so much of European culture in so little ground. Among those buried here are the composers Frédéric Chopin and Georges Bizet, the writers Honoré de Balzac, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde — whose winged sphinx by Jacob Epstein is one of the most visited tombs — the singer Édith Piaf, and the American rock musician Jim Morrison, whose modest grave still draws a steady crowd. Père Lachaise also opened the first crematorium in France, in 1889, and its columbarium holds some 26,600 niches. A place of memoryIn the southeast corner stands the Mur des Fédérés, the wall against which 147 fighters of the Paris Commune were shot in May 1871 and buried where they fell. It has been a site of political pilgrimage ever since, and the surrounding section gathers memorials to the victims of the Second World War and the Nazi camps.From the air the logic of the place is unmistakable: the formal grid of the older, flatter sections near the entrance giving way to the romantic, tree-shrouded tangle that climbs the hill — a designed landscape that, two centuries on, remains as much a park and an open-air museum as a burial ground.
Highlights: Graves of Chopin, Wilde, Piaf, Morrison, Balzac, Proust; the Mur des Fédérés; France's first crematorium
