Paris’s Most Illustrious Dead: Luc’s Cemetery Tour – Part 2

Miles smaller than Père Lachaise or Montparnasse, Montmartre Cemetery is the perfect “starter cemetery.”

Located near Pigalle and Place de Clichy, it opened in 1825 on the site of a former gypsum quarry which was used as a mass grave during the French Revolution.

Notable residents include leading names from French cinema such as actress Jeanne Moreau and new wave director François Truffaut. Also interred here are Russian dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky and 19^th-century Naturalist novelist Émile Zola. Zola was originally buried here but his remains were subsequently moved to the Panthéon; the family grave, however, is still in Montmartre.

Montmartre is also part of my Romantic tour of Paris, featuring as it does the final resting places of a number of leading musicians, writers and artists of the Romantic movement such as Ari Scheffer, Alexandre Dumas Fils, Alfred de Vigny, Théophile Gautier, Hector Berlioz, Léo Delibes and Jacques Offenbach.

Tucked away in a quiet, largely residential district in the 14^th arrondissement with the Montparnasse Tower rearing dramatically up in the background, Montparnasse is Paris’s second largest cemetery – but less than half the size of Père Lachaise, so you can easily do a tour of it in a couple of hours.
Built in 1824, it’s separated into two parts by the Rue Emile-Richard. Like Père Lachaise, it features a memorial to the victims of the communards killed during the Semaine Sanglante, as well as to those who died in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. Another notable feature is the 17^th-century flour mill, the only vestige of the farm which previously stood here.

Man and woman of letters, fervent anti-conformists and tireless activists, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were King and Queen of the Left-bank intelligentsia. They were together for over half a century and lived and worked in the Montparnasse area, frequenting local cafés such as Le Dôme and Les Deux Magots: the house where Beauvoir spent the last thirty years of her life is a stone’s throw away in rue Victor Schoelcher. It is therefore entirely fitting that they be buried in this cemetery – and side by side. As you can see from the photo here, their tomb has had the Oscar Wilde treatment.