Restauration et remontage des murs d’ossements aux Catacombes de Paris

Paris Musées, the body that runs the City of Paris museums including the Catacombs, posted this three-minute film in December 2017. It is in French, and it shows something visitors rarely see: a team dismantling and rebuilding one of the ossuary’s walls of human bones during an autumn conservation campaign.

A member of staff begins with a quick history — the ossuary opened to visitors in 1809 and was laid out by Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, the inspector of quarries, who created its “rather macabre underground landscape,” one of the first museums in Paris. The film then explains why the work matters. The walls are made of organic material, human remains, which react badly to humidity and changes in temperature; sections slump and collapse and must be taken down, sorted and rebuilt on a base that keeps the bones off the soil, following the original shape. The raw materials, a conservator notes, are tibias, femurs and skulls, and the work is done 22 metres underground.

For a place so often sold as spooky, this is a sobering film: the walls are made of the remains of Parisians moved from overflowing city cemeteries from 1786 onwards, and the staff talk about them with care. That respect is worth bringing to the Catacombs’ ghost stories, most of which are recent. The one death in the tunnels that is firmly documented is that of Philibert Aspairt, who went into the quarries in 1793 and whose body was found eleven years later; the famous “lost camcorder” clip of a man panicking in the dark has never been traced to a real person.

The ossuary visitors see is only a small part of a network of old quarries that runs for hundreds of kilometres beneath Paris. The rest is closed, and entering it without authorisation is illegal.