Père Lachaise — the Mur des Fédérés

OVERVIEW

Père Lachaise, in the 20th arrondissement, is the largest cemetery in Paris at 44 hectares and was the first garden cemetery and the first municipal cemetery in the city. It holds the graves that draw the visitors — Chopin, Wilde, Morrison, Piaf — and a great deal else.

HISTORY

The Communards' Wall, the Mur des Fédérés, is inside the cemetery. It was the site where 147 Communards were executed by the French Army during the Semaine sanglante, the Bloody Week, at the close of the fighting between the Army and the Paris Commune in May 1871. Commune soldiers captured in earlier fighting were held in the prisons of Mazas and la Roquette, tried quickly by military courts, sentenced to death, and brought here. The last of the Commune's defenders had fought among the tombs.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The cemetery carries the usual body of Parisian ghost lore — figures among the tombs at dusk, and a long-running tradition around particular graves. What the entry records is the wall: a named place inside a public cemetery where a hundred and forty-seven people were shot against it and buried in a trench at its foot, which is still a site of political commemoration every May.

VISITING

Open free, daily, with maps at the gates. A working cemetery with mourners in it — the celebrity graves draw crowds and the staff have had to police behaviour at several of them.