Grave Contamination in Second-Empire Paris
An environmental assessment for a cemetery recently crossed my path. Glossing over the details, the report concluded the main contamination concern was “necroleachate,” decomposing organic material leaching into the ground and, potentially, aquifers. That is to say, the cemetery was contaminated with dead people who just would not stay put.
The conclusion inspires me to revisit a theme of my 2019 novella, Death Train of Provincetown, a sadly miscategorized exploration of modern heroism. You see, the issue of cemetery contamination came to a head with all the people moving to cities in the modern period. Much has been made of the challenges of housing these people in healthy conditions during their lives. The challenges, however, did not end after they shuffled off their mortal coils.
Baron Haussmann, who led the modernization of Paris, the quintessential Nineteenth-Century modern city, wrote at length about the issues in his memoires. Moreover, at the centre of his proposed solution was a train, a key innovation of modern society. If one was prone to literary flourish, one might go as far as to say he contemplated a death train.
Setting the scene from Haussmann’s perspective, Paris had eighteen small cemeteries, attached to churches, no longer officially in use. Three new cemeteries were established and expanded during first half of the Nineteenth Century (Haussmann’s spelling):
- East Cemetery (Père-La-Chaise, 1804)
- South Cemetery (Mont-Parnasse, 1824)
- North Cemetery (Montmartre, 1825)
They were originally located outside the city and at a reasonable distance from residential development, following the law of the time. By the second half of the century, they were surrounded by housing. When Paris annexed neighbouring communes in 1860, they were brought into the city. A fourth cemetery, Ivry, was created in 1853 as a special release valve for the poor in the Hospitals and Hospices service.
1853 was the year Haussmann began his work.
No More Casket Tetris
In 1851, Paris had a population of 1,053,262 and one out of thirty-three died every year (approximately 34,000 people). By 1866, the population had risen to 1,825,271, though, due to improvements in the city’s living conditions, only one out of forty died yearly (approximately 47,000). At that rate, the active cemeteries were filling up quickly and would soon be unable to accommodate the dead.
Haussmann aimed to acquire enough space to handle a population of three million, about 75,000 burials per year. Under the laws in effect, it was calculated that twenty-three hectares would be required yearly, an area larger than any of the three existing cemeteries. The land needed over a span of years would depend on how permanent burials were, which we will come back to.
The most significant change to the rules was Emperor Napoleon III’s 1850 order to do away with common graves for the poor:
Moved, as always, by a sentiment of commiseration for the classes disinherited by Fortune, His Majesty, by a spontaneous decision, had set an absolute interdiction, that a Prefectoral Decree on September 14, 1850 made official, of any further recourse to a system of superposition of caskets, as practised in a portion of each of these cemeteries set aside for the free inhumation of indigents and named “Common Grave.”
This was a point where the moral and physical notions of hygiene, dear to the burgeoning bourgeois state, intersected. Haussmann wrote that the common grave “consisted of digging deep trenches, where one encountered the water table for wells, at Père-La-Chaise, in order to pile up, seven by seven, caskets of the poor, in long, contiguous, parallel lines.” Not only was it not Christian to bury people in such a manner, the practice resulted in direct contact between decaying bodies and drinking water.
The intent of the Emperor was not simply to end piling caskets. The ultimate goal was “the free inhumation, quasi-perpetual, of indigents, in individual graves, separated on all sides.” “Separated on all sides” added additional space per burial and “quasi-perpetual” meant that space could not be re-used anytime soon.
Haussmann viewed fifty years as “the equivalent of perpetuity”:
Because, it is without exception that after 30 years, the grave of a single person receives no visit and is the object of no care. Mausoleums that continue to accommodate the dead of the titular family of perpetual concessions, are maintained and visited periodically; the others lay as if abandoned.
Since the step up from the common grave was an individual site held for five years, any of the options between thirty years and actual perpetuity would have been an improvement. The land needs for thirty and fifty years, along with the permanent option, were calculated and a decision was to be made based on how much land the prefecture was actually able to secure.
So, because of population growth and a desire to lay everyone to rest with dignity, Paris needed a lot of land, between seven and twelve hundred hectares, to cover needs for the next thirty to fifty years. Since the existing cemeteries were in the city after annexation and surrounded by development, it had to be found elsewhere.
Goin’ to the Cem’t’ry and We’re Gonna get Buried.
Prior to the Nineteenth Century, transporting bodies to the cemetery was “abandoned purely and simply to free competition, and this service was not always done with the desired decency and regularity.” The century’s first decree disallowed simply carrying the body in one’s arms. After that came keeping bodies separated, using purpose-made funeral vehicles and not racing. By the latter half of the century, the tradition of a formal funeral procession — very much in line with Second Empire values — had been established.
This created a conundrum. The Emperor, Haussmann and others who shared this notion of “decency” wanted the tradition to continue. Yet, land appropriate for new plots was unlikely to be close enough for a group on foot, following a horse-drawn wagon moving at a walking pace, to reasonably make its way there. This was fairly obvious from the area needed, both because adjacent land was too expensive and because the only large, uninterrupted expanses close to the city were reserved for military use. It became abundantly clear when the engineering reports came back with contamination concerns.
The issues raised by experts during the senate and city council debates focused on the three existing cemeteries. For Père-La-Chaise:
The dead are buried in water, I said. I was in charge of the drainage of a small part of the cemetery, and this is what I saw with my very eyes: the Common Grave, opened the day before, had filled, during the night, with a water loaded with fatty matter, recognisable by the iridescence covering the entire surface of the liquid. The ground of the Common Grave is therefore impregnated with organic matter, when the City takes possession of it. The new graves increase, every five years, these horrible vestiges, and, after a certain renewal of burials, the ground arrives at a state of permanent infection.
Below Père-La-Chaise, the water of the underground reservoir is filled with organic matter that gives off, after a couple days, a very pronounced odour, and marks an elevated hardness. At several points, we even encountered veritable sulfurous water, sufficiently abundant for Public Assistance to consider using it to treat the sick at Saint Louis Hospital!
All three were saturated and leaked contaminants into the water table. Given their locations on both sides of the Seine, the water under much of the city, as well as that of the river itself, was affected. This was significant since, despite certain advances in water treatment and Haussmann’s efforts to find a better source, much of the city’s drinking water came directly from wells and the river.
For present-day context, the “necroleachate” report that recently came to my attention looked for similar things. It noted that the ground was indeed contaminated, though at a much lower level than it would have been at the time of mass burials and five-year grave reuse cycles. It then looked at surrounding uses, which were industrial, and the water source for those uses, piped from a water treatment plant. Had there been housing nearby that used well water, which is not uncommon on acreages and the like, there might have been a conflict.
The argument presented over a hundred and fifty years ago was, first, cemeteries were an ongoing hygiene problem and, second, any new cemetery had to be located so as to not make the situation worse. That meant choosing a site in an adjacent basin, so underground water did not flow into the city, and on ground favourable to absorbing decomposing bodies. In other words, it needed to be far from town.
The ideal location, found to the north in Méry-sur-Oise, confirmed the supposition and meant the death train Haussmann had been contemplating for some time needed to be part of the project:
The only inconvenience of the Parisian Cemetery being established on this marvelous site was its distance of twenty-two kilometers; it could easily provide, by itself, the 1,200 hectares needed to accommodate, according to me, fifty-year burials of Paris’s dead, and still more if needed. However, we would easily resolve this by the construction of a special Railway, the principle of which I had accepted.
The idea was to build funerary train stations at the three cemeteries in town. The lines from those stations would connect, via the general-use periphery railway that circled the city, to a single line heading to the new cemetery. Processions would proceed as relatively recent tradition demanded; on foot following a horse-drawn wagon. Only, once at the cemetery, they would board the train.
The train had to be single-purpose so both stations and cars could be designed with appropriate solemnity. For mourners, the new cemetery would then feel like an uninterrupted extension of the old. More broadly, mixing processions with general passengers or caskets with general freight would have been indecent.
The Very Model of a Modern Major Nécropole
Haussmann believed it critical to have a dignified resting place for the dead “in a Nation claiming to walk at the head of modern Civilization, in a city qualified by its flatterers as the Model City, the Queen of the World.” The fall of the Second Empire as a result of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War put an end to the project. The technical- and value-based issues and solutions nonetheless offer fascinating insight into this “modern Civilization.”
Herodotus, among others, described the importance and variety of funeral practices in the ancient world. Treating the dead with dignity, even if sometimes more in theory than in practice, was nothing new in the Nineteenth Century. The emphasis on individual equality took on new importance after the French Revolution, but was also not exactly novel in a context of final rites and individual salvation.
What was new was the marriage of propriety with technological advances and issues of scale. Cities were larger and more populous than they had even been. Knowledge of pollution, diseases, hygiene and so on was advancing rapidly. As Lola Gonzalez-Quijano noted in a different area, that of sexual hygiene, there was a great deal of overlap in “medical and moral discourse.” Mass graves were as much a moral as a public-health failure. Yet, handling 75,000 burials a year was effectively a form of mass production.
In my novella, the death train was used as a symbol of unsung facets of mid-modernism. Trains brought so many people from the countryside to cities and, in America, to the west to start new lives. They could just as easily — not in crisis or war, but in ordinary times — send people away.
Here, I simply want to reflect on how little some of the fundamentals have changed after a century and a half of grappling with the modern city. Managing death where such a concentration of people live in a way that respects the former and avoids harming the latter is one of them. And experts today, just as in Haussmann’s time, are quick to flag that cemeteries are unquestionably contaminated with the dead.
