The morgue as a favorite place for meetings and walks of Parisians in the 19th century

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Today in Paris about 30 thousand people visit Notre Dame de Paris daily, but in the 19th century, the main attraction of the French capital was another place. The place that so attracted Parisians and visitors to the city was … the morgue.

The Parisian morgue in the 19th century was a popular entertainment destination for Parisians and tourists. Naturally, the original purpose of the morgue, built in 1864 near Notre Dame on the southern tip of the Ile de la Cité, was not tourism. The morgue, as it should be, was used to store and possibly identify the bodies of unknown persons who were found in the city, fished out of the Seine or committed suicide. The remains of these unfortunates were laid out on tilted marble tables behind glass so that the deceased could be seen and identified.

However, soon streams of ordinary curious passers-by and city gossips were drawn to the morgue. This is understandable - visiting the morgue gave them a topic for a week to gossip about who the deceased were during their lifetime, and from what they died.

Outside, on the Quai de l'Archevêché, street vendor chests were set up to serve the morgue-goers' crowds by selling them biscuits, gingerbread, coconut slices and other sweets.

By 1888, the morgue began to be included in virtually every travel guide and tourist tour in Paris. Up to 40,000 people visited it per day. Despite the fact that Notre Dame was located nearby, the morgue became one of the most popular attractions in Paris, and the identification of corpses turned into a show that attracted people of various social strata. For example, a frequent visitor to this establishment was Charles Dickens, who in his notes called the morgue his "old acquaintance", as well as "a strange sight that he has watched many times over the past ten years."

The morgue was open daily from early morning until 6pm. It was always very cold in the three-story building, and in order to slow down the decomposition of bodies, cold water was continuously dripping onto them from special taps above the marble tables. The clothes and belongings of the dead were hung on pegs behind the corpses. People seemed to enjoy the swollen faces, mouths wide open in the last death cry, dead whitish eyes and faces that seemed to come out of Dante's Hell. Some of the corpses were pulled out of the water a couple of weeks after death, you can imagine what they looked like. Some of the dead were clothed, others were naked; some were missing an arm, leg or head, while others were left with one arm with rags of meat on it.

In 1907, the morgue was closed to the public for reasons of morality. Today, a park is located in its place.

When traveling in France today, it is worth stopping by the Museum of Miniatures and Cinema in Lyon. Artists do a tremendous painstaking job to accurately recreate large-scale originals.