Le Cimetière des Saint-Innocents in around 1550, as visualized by artist Fedor Hoffbauer and published in the book ’Paris: à travers les âges’ in the late 19th century.

Then, in the middle of the 14th century, Holy Innocents' became the cemetery for Hôtel-Dieu, Paris' largest hospital at the time. Soon, the cemetery began to be filled with more bodies than it ...

In gloomy burial tunnels under Paris, workers carefully stacked the bones and skulls of people killed during the French Revolution into a new, neater wall. The Paris Catacombs, the final resting ...

In 18th-century Paris, the cemeteries were overflowing.Having used several large central graveyards for centuries, Louis XV ordered in 1763 that no more bodies be placed inside the capital, given ...

They then moved more when the capital was rebuilt in the 19th century. Catacombs manager Isabelle Knafou said rebuilding this first wall -- a stack 2 metres long and 1.8 metres high -- was a test.