Parisian Cemeteries

I don't think there is another city besides Paris where tourists so regularly visit the cemeteries. The cemeteries of Pere-Lachaise, Montmartre, and Montparnasse seem to be in every guidebook. Afterall, they are the resting place of many famous people: Oscar Wilde, Chopin, Colette, Marcel Proust, and Edith Piaf in Pere-Lachaise; Stendhal, Berlioz, Degas and Offenbach in Montmartre; Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Baudelaire, Maupassant, Citroen, Saint-Saens and Man Ray in Montparnasse. And they are all fairly accessible from the city center where the tourists stay and my DK guide to Paris has a nice layout of each one.

On the other hand, I remember how fascinating we found the headstones in the cemeteries in Switzerland and how I spent a morning walking through a cemetery in Munich, watching people cleaning and decorating family graves. Perhaps it is like a park and gives the tourist respite from the hecticity of the city.

But what prompted this posting on cemeteries (I did one before on Pere-Lachaise) was a posting on SoundLandscapes about the Cemetière-des-Batignolles called A Parisian Disgrace. In the city's effort to join the modern car culture of the world, it built an encircling Périphérique or beltway around Paris in the years 1958-1973. And they built it right over the cemetery. It is this posting that leads me to believe that Des Coulam, the recorder of SoundLandscapes is a woman:

Just think about it – at some point a city official, a fonctionnaire – overpaid, over-holidayed and over-pensioned – decided to attach his (it could have only been a man!) seal of approval to the building of a multi-lane ring road – known as a beltway in the US I believe – or the Périphérique as it’s known here in Paris, right over the top of the graves in this cemetery.
It is simply outrageous and a disgrace!

And, as you can see from the photo, it is outrageous. On the other hand, we should be thankful they did not just dig up all the bodies and throw them into the catacombs...