Saints Innocents Cemetery: A Medieval Burial Ground in Paris
Site at a Glance
- Popularity
- Very High
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Burial
- Remains
- Necropolis
On this page29 sections
History
Early burial and the parish church
Saints Innocents Cemetery was a medieval burial ground beside a church dedicated to the Holy Innocents, in what is now Place Joachim-du-Bellay in Paris, France. Burials in the area reach back to the Merovingian period, when Frankish kings ruled between the fifth and eighth centuries. A small chapel dedicated to Saint Michael was associated with the site by the tenth century. The church’s early history is uncertain: tradition attributes a larger church, intended to replace the chapel, to an order by Louis VI around 1130. The earliest secure evidence for a church dedicated to the Holy Innocents dates to 1156. The church was an example of early French Gothic architecture.
A cemetery took shape beside the church during the twelfth century. At first it served priests from the parish of Saint-Germain-l’Auxerrois. After that parish was divided and a parish of the Holy Innocents established, other Paris residents were also buried there. The church’s dedication referred to the children killed on Herod’s order in the biblical account. Louis IX gave it a reliquary containing bones attributed to those children, and Louis XI later gave the church the intact body of one of the child martyrs. Richard of Pontoise, a child venerated as a saint, was also buried in the church.
Expansion and changing use
The opening of Paris’s central market at Champeaux in 1137 helped raise the cemetery’s importance. Between 1185 and 1190, during Philip II’s reign, the church and cemetery precinct underwent major reorganization. The cemetery was enlarged and enclosed by a wall about three metres high. Construction of Philip Augustus’s city wall later placed the precinct within the city’s defences. In 1218, a donation from the Bishop of Paris, Pierre de La Chapelle, brought a further enlargement.
Burials eventually came from 22 Parisian parishes. The cemetery also received people who died at the Hôtel-Dieu, Paris’s historic hospital, plague victims, unidentified bodies found in the Seine or on roads, and people discovered near the area known as the Court of Miracles, associated with poor and marginalized residents. The number buried there is estimated at about two million. During efforts to address epidemics, the city acquired the cemetery and part of the enclosure belonging to the Hospital of the Trinity.
Burial, devotion, and public life
As the ground filled, burial practices shifted. Wealthier people were placed in wooden coffins, while poorer people were initially wrapped in shrouds and buried individually. From the late fourteenth century, large communal pits became increasingly common. Each could hold as many as 1,500 bodies before another pit was dug; graves and coffins were also reused. Burial layers sometimes extended about ten metres deep, and the ground rose more than two metres above nearby streets. A local tradition claimed that the soil reduced a body to bones in nine days and credited it with magical properties.
From the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, bones taken from graves were placed in charnel galleries built above arcades around the cemetery. Parisian citizens, including Bertrand de Rouen and the scribe Nicolas Flamel, financed galleries. Guillaume Tireverge, Guillaume d’Orchies, Guillaume Le Roy, and Arnoul Estable, known as the Carpenter, were also associated with their foundation. The precinct maintained two small enclosures for religious recluses, people who lived in isolation there. Recluses are recorded from 1350 to 1421, and the practice continued in later decades. In 1486, Charles VIII changed the sentence of death by burning imposed on the French noblewoman Renée de Vendômois to forced confinement at the cemetery.
The cemetery and church also held religious and artistic works. Flamel commissioned a sculpture for the Small Ossuary in 1407, and in 1408 John, Duke of Berry, ordered a group for the church entrance depicting the Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead. Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, a Dance of Death mural was painted beneath the southern gallery while John, Duke of Bedford, governed Paris as regent. The Dance of Death was a medieval theme in which Death summoned people of different ranks, presenting mortality as shared by all.
From the fourteenth century, Parisian religious associations were active in the precinct, and fifteenth-century festivities and gatherings took place there. Shops stood against its outer walls. By the early modern period, milliners and public letter writers used the galleries, while alchemists and people interested in the occult were drawn to the cemetery. In the sixteenth century, anatomist Andreas Vesalius used bodies from the cemetery for study and visited at night to examine bones. In 1535, a merchant accused of selling heretical German books was burned there.
A stone monument of atonement, the Cross of Gastine, was transferred to the cemetery around 1570–71. It had stood on the site of the house of Philippe de Gastine, a merchant who converted to Protestantism; Catholics demolished his house, and moving the cross provoked unrest. In 1572, during the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, Catholics interpreted the out-of-season flowering of a hawthorn near an image of the Virgin as divine approval of the killings. The cemetery received thousands of the massacre’s victims. During the siege of Paris in 1590, starving residents reportedly attacked the precinct in an attempt to make flour from human bones.
Overcrowding and closure
Concern about sanitation grew as burials accumulated. After Henry IV was assassinated on Rue de la Ferronnerie in 1610, Louis XIV ordered that street widened in 1669 at the cemetery’s expense. The work removed the southern charnel gallery and its Dance of Death mural, opened a new entrance through the cemetery wall, and replaced the gallery along the street with a building about 120 metres long.
In the eighteenth century, municipal inspectors continued to describe severe overcrowding and poor conditions. Many bodies had not fully decomposed, and the cemetery was reputed to emit odors strong enough to sour milk and wine; nearby business was also affected. Louis XVI issued orders intended to move Parisian parish cemeteries outside the city, but church authorities resisted and received funds to renovate the precinct. Burial fees were increased in an effort to limit new interments. A decree dated 10 March 1776 set December 1780 as the deadline for closing the cemetery.
Prolonged rain in spring 1780 worsened conditions. On 7 May, a wall beside a burial pit collapsed into the cellar of a restaurant on Rue de la Lingerie, where bodies were found. The collapse involved decomposing matter and the accumulated weight of bones and bodies. On 4 September, Jean-Charles-Pierre Lenoir, the senior Paris police official, obtained a decision from the Parlement prohibiting further burials at the cemetery. The ban was extended to other Paris parish cemeteries and confirmed by the king. Burials continued in an already crowded charnel gallery until Saints Innocents closed on 1 December 1780.
Clearance and later redevelopment
On 9 November 1785, authorities decided to move dry bones from the galleries and from the upper 1.5 metres of burial deposits to former quarries at Tombe-Issoire, near Montparnasse. The operation lasted fifteen months, with daily processions accompanied by priests. Some remains were still decomposing; collected body fat was made into candles and soap. Deeper remains stayed beneath the former cemetery. On 15 November 1785, the Archbishop of Paris, Antoine-Éléonore-Léon Le Clerc de Juigné, merged the parish of the Holy Innocents with Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie. Funeral slabs that survived the clearance were transferred to Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie.
The cemetery was cleared in 1786, and material from it was used in the Louvre’s contemporary renovation. The church was demolished in 1786–87, and a market opened on the site in 1788. Later redevelopment as part of the Halles project associated with architect Victor Baltard transformed the former cemetery precinct; the present Place Joachim-du-Bellay occupies its area. Architect Charles-Louis Bernier made numerous drawings before and during the demolition.
People buried at the cemetery included Pernelle Flamel, wife of Nicolas Flamel; Jean le Boulanger, first president of the Parlement of Paris, the monarchy’s high court; the writer and poet Jean de La Fontaine; composers and musicians Louis Marchand and Jean-Baptiste Barrière; Louise Julie de Mailly, eldest of the five de Nesle sisters; and sculptor Edme Dumont. La Fontaine’s remains were moved to the Museum of French Monuments during the Revolution and later to Père-Lachaise Cemetery.
Remains
The cemetery occupied a roughly rectangular area about 130 by 65 metres, close to a hectare in size. A high boundary wall enclosed its burial ground, while arched, vaulted galleries lined the perimeter and stored bones removed from graves. The church stood at the northeastern corner, and entrances connected the precinct with the surrounding streets and the nearby market.
Ground plan and burial deposits
Boundaries and entrances
The cemetery’s sides followed Rue Aux Fers to the north, Rue Saint-Denis to the east, Rue de la Ferronnerie to the south, and Rue de la Lingerie to the west. Rue Aux Fers is now Rue Berger. The enclosure wall stood about three metres high. There were originally four entrances: three at the corners and one on the north side along Rue Aux Fers. From the northern entrance, the church was on the visitor’s left. Saint James Gate stood where Rue Saint-Denis met Rue de la Ferronnerie; Saint Germain Gate was at Rue de la Ferronnerie and Rue de la Lingerie; and Saint Eustace Gate, which connected directly with the Halles market, was at Rue de la Lingerie and Rue Aux Fers. A further entrance was cut into the middle of the southern wall in 1669, and its arches remained visible.
Burial layers
Successive burials formed layers that could reach about ten metres in depth. The cemetery’s surface rose more than two metres above the adjoining streets. These deposits included graves and reused burial places, as well as the communal pits used from the late fourteenth century. The upper level and gallery bones were transferred during the cemetery’s clearance, while deeper remains lay beneath the former burial ground.
Charnel galleries
The perimeter galleries were arched and vaulted, with upper spaces used as ossuaries, places for storing human bones. Their circuit was described as extending across more than 80 arches. Four principal galleries had distinct names and positions around the enclosure.
Old Ossuary
The Old Ossuary, with 19 arches, ran along the northern side on Rue Aux Fers.
Small Ossuary
The Small Ossuary, also called the Ossuary of the Virgin, had four arches along Rue Saint-Denis. Its outer wall carried the Flamel Arch, a sculpted relief showing Flamel and his wife praying before Christ, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul, with angels around them. The initials NF appeared on writing desks. Five lower panels included a winged lion, angels, a Resurrection scene, and two fighting dragons; a further three-panel band depicted the Massacre of the Innocents.
Ossuary of the Linen Workers
The southern gallery, known as the Ossuary of the Linen Workers, had 27 or 28 arches. Beneath its seventeenth arcade began the Dance of Death mural, which combined painted scenes with verse. It included a narrator, four dead musicians, pairs of living and dead figures, and a dead king. Living figures appeared in order of social rank, marked by their status, while the dead were anonymous. Their emaciated, decomposing bodies contrasted with the distinctions among the living. Popular engravings preserved in the Blois manuscript at the National Library of France show the composition.
Writers’ Ossuary
The Writers’ Ossuary, with 17 arches, occupied the western edge along Rue de la Lingerie.
Church and associated spaces
Church of the Holy Innocents
The church stood at the northeastern corner of the precinct on an east–west axis. Its early French Gothic design had three aisles and a gallery beside the southern aisle. Pointed arches rested on substantial piers, while flying buttresses, exterior supports that carried structural force away from the walls, reinforced the area around the apse, the curved eastern end. Side chapels occupied the northern aisle and gallery. The choir was in the apse, with the Chapel of the Virgin to the south and the sacristy to the north. A projecting entrance structure contained a communion chapel, a baptismal font, and a small sacristy.
Other chapels
Three chapels named Orgemont, Villeroy, and Pommereux stood along the Rue de la Lingerie boundary on land allocated to the Hôtel-Dieu. After 1550, a small wall separated the church from the cemetery, and a caretaker’s house was built against it. Both appear on an 1780 plan.
Reclusory spaces
Two small enclosures for religious recluses, people who lived in isolation, stood on opposite sides of the precinct. One lay between the church and the fountain; the other was across the cemetery.
Fountain and other precinct structures
Fountain of the Nymphs
A fountain was probably installed during the cemetery’s late-twelfth-century redevelopment. In 1549, the Fountain of the Nymphs replaced it. Designed by Pierre Lescot and sculpted by Jean Goujon, the fountain was originally an open-sided structure against the church, about 40 metres from its present position. Three arches were framed by Corinthian-style pilasters, shallow supports attached to a wall, and topped by a frieze, an upper band of decoration, and an attic with a triangular pediment. Five freshwater nymphs decorated the arches: two on the face toward Rue Saint-Denis and three on the faces toward Rue Aux Fers. Water flowed from masks set in the base. After the church and cemetery were cleared, the fountain was dismantled, converted into a four-sided neoclassical monument, and re-erected in the market. It now stands in Place Joachim-du-Bellay.
Preaching structure
A small rectangular structure with a steep pointed roof served for funeral preaching and for itinerant preachers.
Tower of Notre-Dame-des-Bois
The Tower of Notre-Dame-des-Bois was an octagonal structure with three storeys and a niche holding a statue of the Virgin on one side. Its original purpose is uncertain; it may have served as a lantern for the dead.
Commemorative works and inscriptions
Church portal sculpture
The church portal carried a sculpted Meeting of the Three Living and the Three Dead, a subject in which living people confront the dead.
Stone crosses
The large stone Cross of Bureau was placed in 1451 by Jean Bureau, the provost of the merchants, a senior municipal official, on his parents’ tomb. The precinct also held the stone Cross of Gastine, shaped as a cross-obelisk.
Obelisk of the Innocents
The Obelisk of the Innocents was made as a funerary monument for Parisian citizen Nicolas Hennequin, who died in 1556. At the request of Maria Caterina Brignole Sale, Princess of Monaco, it was moved in 1780 to the grounds of the former castle at Betz in the Oise. It was damaged during the French Revolution and both world wars, but remains largely intact.
The Great Death
The Great Death, a sixteenth-century alabaster statue, is the surviving part of the cemetery’s former macabre sculptural and painted decoration. It is now held at the Louvre.
Epitaphs
One cemetery epitaph commemorated Yolande Bailly, who died in 1514 at the age of 88, in the forty-second year of her widowhood. It said she had seen, or might have seen, 295 children descended from her. Another inscription commemorated Macé de Viexmont, a squire from Anjou who died in July 1517, and Jean Girard, who died on 27 January 1551, together with Girard’s wife, Madeleine de Viexmont.
