Paris Cemeteries

The Travel Pages visits Paris’s cemeteries, including Père-Lachaise, Cimetière Montparnasse, and the Cimetière de Montmartre, to see the graves of famous names like Jim Morrison, Samuel Beckett, Edith Piaf, Proust, and Degas.

Graveyards have a strange fascination for people, for the curious as well as for people who want to pay their respects. The curious want to see the graves of famous people, and in Paris you could spend an entire weekend merely visiting its cemeteries. Here are the best three, and they’re all free to visit.

Père-Lachaise

This is the largest of them all, Père-Lachaise, at almost 100 acres (40 hectares) in size. It definitely needs a map, and you can get one at the cemetery office by the main gates. Some names to seek out include Balzac, Proust, Oscar Wilde, Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Rossini, Delacroix, Colette, Chopin, Isadora Duncan, Maria Callas, Gertrude Stein… the list of celebrity residents is almost endless.

Chopin's Tomb in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris — Chopin’s Tomb in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

Cimetière Montparnasse

There are several other cemeteries worth seeking out too, where it’s not just a case of celebrity gravewatch but also enjoying the wildlife, the greenery, the peace and the artwork on some of the tombs. At the Cimetière Montparnasse, for example, there’s a delightful sculpture on the grave of Charles Pigeon, the man who invented the gas lamp, showing him and his wife sitting in bed reading by the light of his invention.

There is an open book on the grave of Guy de Maupassant, and literature lovers may well want to seek this cemetery out. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Samuel Beckett, has a strikingly simple tomb, totally in keeping with the reticence of the man, while Jean-Paul Sartre and his inseparable companion Simone de Beauvoir lie together touchingly in a large joint grave.

Other people buried here include Man Ray, Ionesco, Baudelaire, Brancusi, Serge Gainsbourg and sculptor Frédéric Bartholdi who built the Statue of Liberty (thankfully not decorating his grave).

Cimetière de Montmartre

The Cimetière de Montmartre is another good mix of history, nature and fame. Here you have the empty grave of Emile Zola, as his body was later removed and taken to the Panthéon. Nearby lies Louise Weber, better known to the world as La Goulue, one of the first can-can dancers at the Moulin Rouge and subject of some of Toulouse-Lautrec’s most popular posters. Stendhal is also buried here, the grave bearing his real name, Henry Beyle. Other more recognisable names include Offenbach, Nijinsky, Degas, Berlioz and François Truffaut.