Buried under a Bridge in Paris The Misfit Mausoleums of Montmartre

At the foot of Montmartre under a heavy wrought-iron bridge that skims the tips of blackened mausoleums, forgotten souls are spending their after lives in perpetual darkness– not exactly what they might have had in mind when they reserved the best plots in the house for their final curtain call…

Cemeteries are usually curious places to begin with, but the Cemetière de Montmartre is a very particular sort of misfit in the Parisian urban landscape. The clunky industrial blue iron bridge and the intricately carved stone mausoleums from another era are like mismatched puzzle pieces trying to fit together in this evolving city. But of course, the cemetery was here first, dating all the way back to the French revolution when it was first used as a makeshift mass grave.

It was built below street level, in the hollow of an abandoned gypsum quarry located west of the Butte near the beginning of Rue Caulaincourt. Renowned local artists of Montmartre such as Degas were buried here, and many families of the 19th century Parisian elite paid top dollar for prime plots near the entrance of the cemetery where the sun would always shine on the graves of their ancestors and honour their family legacies for centuries to come.

Baron Haussmann, the man responsible for the transformation of Paris as we know it today, had other ideas. As part of his urban planning that saw wide and straight avenues cut through the chaotic mass of small streets of which Paris was then composed, he wanted to build a road to Montmartre that would open it up to the West of Paris.

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