Père Lachaise: Birthplace of the Modern Resting Place

Père Lachaise is the world-famous resting place of countless luminaries of the arts, politics, and science. Few realize that the cemetery is of equal importance for the manner in which those figures were memorialized. At its creation in 1804, Père Lachaise radically altered Parisians’ relationships to the deceased. Most significantly, the cemetery offered the middle class its first opportunity to acquire permanent plots and to mark the graves of their families. Those commemorative practices would eventually render Père Lachaise an informal national necropolis, with monuments raised to mark the heights of human achievement and the depths of collective tragedy. Sited on the former country retreat of Louis XIV’s confessor “Father Lachaise,” the cemetery’s bucolic landscape was also the world’s first “garden cemetery.” Its park-like setting and elaborate funerary architecture would define cemetery design across Europe and the Americas to the present day. Prior to the creation of Père Lachaise, a permanent burial place — generally within a Catholic church — was a privilege reserved for only the most elite Parisians. The rest of the population was consigned to the open pit, a rude patch of earth beside the church, and only for the time a cadaver required to decompose. Their bones were then collected and placed in anonymous ossuaries…