France Tourist Attractions - Père Lachaise Cemetery
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Père Lachaise Cemetery
Cimetière du Père Lachaise is the largest cemetery in Paris, and one of the most famous cemeteries in the world.
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In the grounds there is also the Communards' Wall (French Mur des
Fédérés) against which 147 communards, the leaders of the Paris Commune were shot on May 28, 1871 after the fall of the commune.
Jim Morrison's headstone
Bill Richardson wrote a book called Waiting for Gertrude which is set in the cemetery. The characters in the book are cats, reincarnated from those buried within.
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Practical
Information for the Père Lachaise Cemetery
Métro : Gambetta, Père Lachaise, Phillipe Auguste
Main entrance: boulevard de Menilmontant
Telephone : 01 55 25 82 10
Hours :
6 Nov to 15 March
Mon-Fri: 08h00-17h30
Sat. : 08h30-17h30
Sun. Holidays: 09h00-17h30
16 March to 5 Nov
Mon-Fri : 08h00-18h00
Sat. : 08h30-18h00
Sun. Holidays : 09h00-18h00
No entrance 15 minutes before closure
Tarifs: Free
Credits
: This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the
Wikipedia article
"Père Lachaise Cemetery".
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Père-Lachaise Cemetery
is Located in the 20th arrondissement and is reputed to be the most visited cemetery in the world, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year to the grave sites of artists and writers.
Frederic Chopin's Tomb
The cemetery is a veritable roll-call of the great and good who have illuminated all facets of French and Parisian life over the past 200 years or so. It is also the location of five Great War memorials.
The name has its origins in Père François de la Chaise (1624 - 1709). He was the confessor of Louis XIV, and lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of the chapel.
The property, situated on the side of a hill from which the king, during the
Fronde, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne, was bought by the city in 1804 and laid out by
Brongniart, and later extended.
It was established by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804, where cemeteries had been banned in 1786 after the shutting down of the Cimetière des Innocents, on the fringe of Les Halles food market, on the grounds that it presented a health hazard.
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Several new cemeteries replaced all the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital, in the early 19th century, Cimetière de Montmartre in the north, Le Père Lachaise in the east and Cimetière du Montparnasse in the south.
At the heart of the city, and today, sitting in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Cimetière de Passy.
At the time the cemetery opened, it was seen as too far from the city and attracted very few interments. As such, the administrators devised a marketing strategy and with great fanfare, organized the transfer of the remains of La Fontaine and Molière, in 1804.
Then, in another great spectacle in 1817, the purported remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine.
Oscar Wilde's Tomb
All this marketing strategy resulted in a great many people clamoring to be buried with such famous citizens. Records show that within a few years, the cemetery went from a few dozen permanent residents to more than 33,000.
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There are many famous people buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery. Some of them are:
- Antonio de La Gandara, painter
- Guillaume Apollinaire , Poet
- Jean-Pierre Aumont, actor
- Honoré de Balzac , writer
- Henri Barbusse , writer
- Paul Barras, statesman during the French Revolution
- Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, musician & more
- Gilbert Bécaud, singer
- Vincenzo Bellini, composer of operas
- Sarah Bernhardt, actress
- Georges Bizet, composer
- Alexander Brogniart, architect
- Ettore Bugatti automobile manufacturer
- Gustave Caillebotte, painter
- Maria Callas, Opera singer
- Jean-Joseph Carriès, sculptor
- Pierre Cartellier, sculptor
- Jean-François Champollion, Egyptologist, decipherer of hieroglyphic text
- Frédéric Chopin , composer (although his heart is entombed in a pillar in the Church of the Holy Cross in Warsaw, Poland)
- Colette, Writer
- Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, painter
- Thomas Couture, painter, teacher
- Edouard Daladier, statesman
- Jacques Louis David, painter
- Eugene Delacroix, painter
- Gustave Doré, graphic artist, lithographer
- Michel Drach, film director, producer, screenwriter
- Paul Dukas, composer
- Isadora Duncan, American-born dancer
- Paul Eluard, poet
- Max Ernst, Surrealist and Expressionist artist
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Jean de la Fontaine, poet and writer of fables
- Théodore Géricault, painter
- Stephane Grappelli, Jazz violinist
- Samuel Hahnemann, creator of homeopathy
- Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, painter
- Jean-Baptiste Isabey, painter
- Allan Kardec
- Rene Lalique, artist in glass
- Nestor Makhno, Ukrainian anarchist, revolutionary
- Constance Mayer-Lamartinière, painter
- Amedeo Modigliani, painter and sculptor
- Molière, Dramatist
- Yves Montand, actor
- Jim Morrison, American singer, songwriter, and poet.
Morrison moved to Paris in March 1971 with the intention of
concentrating on his writing and to quit drinking. He died in Paris
on July 3, 1971, in his bathtub at the age of 27; many fans and
biographers have speculated that the cause of death was a drug
overdose, but the official report listed "heart attack" as the cause
of death.
- Anne de Noailles, writer
- Charles Nodier, writer
- Victor Noir, journalist
- Édith Piaf, France's most famous singer
- Christian Pineau, Resistance worker, statesman
- Camille Pissarro, "Father of Impressionism"
- Francis Poulenc, composer, member of "Les Six"
- Marcel Proust , writer
- Mlle Rachel, (Élisabeth Rachel Félix) Swiss actress at Comédie-Française
- Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, painter
- Norbert Rillieux, inventor
- Georges Rodenbach, Symbolist poet and novelist
- Gioacchino Rossini, Italian composer
- Georges Seurat, artist, founder:pointillist style of post-impressionist
- Simone Signoret, actress
- Alexandre Stavinsky, notorious embezzler
- Gertrude Stein, American writer
- Alice B. Toklas, American writer
- Marie Trintignant, actress
- Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, Dominican dictator
- Charles Henry VerHuell, Dutch Admiral
- Oscar Wilde, Irish writer
- Richard Wright, American writer
- Achille Zavatta, circus operator and famous clown
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