Louis XVI responded shortly after his accession by creating an inspection unit for the ‘Quarries Below Paris and Surrounding Plains’, headed by a general inspector called Charles-Axel Guillaumot, and tasked with regulating the quarries for the purposes of public safety. It was Guillaumot who initiated the first mapping of the void network, with a view to consolidating existing spaces and regulating further quarrying activities. A subterranean t ownplanning system was established whereby chambers and tunnels were named in relation to the streets above them, thus creating a mirror-city with the ground serving as the line of symmetry. ‘Paris has another Paris under herself,’ wrote Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, ‘which has its streets, its intersections, its squares, its dead ends, its arteries and its circulation.’
It was also Guillaumot who, in the mid 1780s, oversaw the idea of using the quarry voids for purposes of storage. And what urgently needed storing was Paris’s dead. The city’s earliest significant burial grounds, established during the Roman era, were located on the southern outskirts of the city as it then stood. But as Paris spread it took to burying the majority of its bodies in cemeteries within its bounds, notably in the main Cemetery of Saints-Innocents near the central marketplace of Les Halles. The result over centuries was a growing glut of the dead. Saints-Innocents became the resting place for millions of bodies. In an attempt to maximize the available space, ancient remains were exhumed from the earth and their bones were sorted and packed into galleries known as charniers, built within the curtilage of the cemetery. The main area of the cemetery was also built up with soil carted in from elsewhere, forming a dome of earth up to six feet above the previous ground level. But this, too, soon had a surfeit of rotting bodies.
The Parisian dead were pressing hard upon the Parisian living. In 1780 a basement wall in a property adjoining Saints-Innocents gave way under the weight of the mass grave behind it, and bones and earth spilled into the domestic space. A radical solution was clearly needed – and it was at last seen that the quarry tunnels could be that solution, offering as they did a sepulchre of great volume.
So started one of the most remarkable episodes of Paris’s history. In 1786 the process began of evacuating the city’s cemeteries, crypts and tombs of their dead, and transferring the remains of more than 6 million corpses to the quarry region known as the Tombe-Issoire, soon to become Les Catacombes, on what was then the Montrouge Plain. A grim, ritualized production line was established for this task, involving diggers, cleaners, stackers, drivers, porters and overseers. Every night for years, horse-drawn funerary wagons containing the bones of the disinterred dead, covered with heavy black cloths, preceded by torchbearers and followed by priests who chanted the Mass of the Dead, clopped through the streets from the cemeteries to the Tombe-Issoire, where they disposed of their contents. Down in the tunnels, workers sorted the remains of the dead, filing them by bones into space-efficient ricks and stacks. Minor forms of folk art emerged in the disposition of these bones: serried ranks of femurs, their gleaming lines separated by rows of skulls, all turned eye sockets outwards.
A century later the photographer Felix Nadar would pioneer low-light photography techniques down in these ossuaries. One of his best-known photographs shows a worker pulling a bone wagon. It is an unsettling image. The wagon’s wheels are wooden, its sides made of rough-hewn planks in which the grain stands clear. The man’s face is scarcely visible, bleached out by the flash, and he wears a wide-brimmed leather hat and a loose white smock-shirt which has been – like his trousers – sewn together from patches. Underfoot he tramples ribs and tibias, and from the bone heap in the wagon white skulls stare over his shoulder at the tunnel space ahead. Later, Nadar would step into the basket of a hot-air balloon and photograph Paris from above, becoming also a pioneer of high-altitude photography – the first person ever to make images of a city from a moving vessel above it as well as in shadows deep beneath it.
The deposition of bones into the catacombs continued over the course of the nineteenth century, but quarrying dwindled away as the best limestone deposits became worked out. From the 1820s the quarry voids were put to a new use as mushroom fields: damp and dark, they provided the perfect growing spaces for fungi, which sprouted from rows of horse manure. Adaptable quarrymen made a career move into mushroom farming, and a subterranean Horticultural Society of Paris was founded, its first president being a former general inspector of the mines. By 1940 there were some 2,000 mushroom farmers working underneath Paris. During the Second World War the French Resistance retreated into sections of the tunnels in the months following occupation. So did civilians during air raids – and so, too, did Vichy and Wehrmacht officers, who constructed bombproof bunkers in the maze under the sixth arrondissement.
After the war, the cult of the catacombs began to grow. Increasing numbers of people were drawn down into them for purposes of concealment, crime or pleasure. These users of the network became known as ‘cataphiles’ – ‘lovers of the below’. In 1955 access to the catacomb network was made illegal, outwith a small area of show ossuaries that were kept open for purposes of tourism. Attempts to police the space were formalized: specialist police – quickly nicknamed ‘cataflics’ and ‘catacops’ – were trained in the network’s geography. Barrier walls were built across main subterranean routes, and the entrances to the network (tunnels, gates, manholes) were welded and locked shut. But the cataphiles kept coming. For the labyrinth offered a space where Paris’s subcultures could go to grow. It became – and still is – what the anarchist-theorist Hakim Bey calls a ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’: a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface.
The arrival of the Internet further boosted cataphilia. Chatrooms and websites enabled cataphiles to share and curate information about the network. Cataphiles went by subterranean pseudonyms online – ‘Styx’, ‘Charon’ – and mildly fetishized the pseudo-covert nature of their activities. An unofficial cataphile uniform declared itself: thigh-high waders, small waterproof backpack, hoodie and head-torch. Serious cataphiles carried manhole-cover keys at their belts. There was a street of cafes and pizza establishments where it was – is – usual to see dozens of people in dark-green waders, waddling down the street or sitting at cafe tables, like a convention of trout fishermen far from any river. A commune culture emerged, with its own honour codes. The rules were few, and clear. Respect the past of the catacombs. Take out what you take in. Resources are to be shared, even with strangers. No selling and no buying: barter-exchange or gift are the only acceptable modes of transaction. Help is to be given wherever necessary. Create with care – and do not destroy.
Some of the cataphiles went down to party. Others, though, became fascinated by the layered histories of the space. An unofficial ‘university’ of the catacombs was established, dedicated to the restoration, preservation and mapping of the network, and to the formal archiving of its stories. Once, a pop-up cinema was established in one of the chambers, and themed films were shown over several weeks – Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, Lynch’s Eraserhead – until it was shut down by the cataflics. New rooms continue to be dug by cataphiles and new nameplates added to tunnels. Work groups are established to add fresh layers to the catacomb palimpsest: large graffiti murals, new carvings, a sword buried in a stone, or mosaic works involving thousands of tiles.
Among the most resonant emblems of the contemporary catacombs is a sculpture known as Le Passe-Muraille (‘The Passer-through-Walls’) after a short story of the same name by Marcel Aymé, about a man who discovers he can pass through solid surfaces – only to become trapped when his powers desert him just as he is stepping out of a wall. The sculpture shows the man at this moment of simultaneous liberation and entrapment – his face, torso and one leg pulled clear from the masonry, his back and hands still immured. He is caught between realms, unsure whether to proceed into air or retreat into stone.
I come feet first through the ragged hole and drop into a straight-running tunnel, its ceiling sturdily arched. The limestone walls writhe with graffiti: antifa slogans, zombie skulls with popping eyes, tags, names.
‘The further in we get, the better the wall art gets,’ says Lina. ‘In the Salle de la Plage you’ll see Hokusai’s Wave. Let’s move. We’ve got miles to cover, and it’s good not to linger near the entrance. Plus – there’s the Bangra to negotiate first, which will slow us down.’
‘The Bangra?’
‘You’ll see. We need to find somewhere to sleep tonight, in the next few hours. We’ve a long day moving north tomorrow, which may well bring some obstacles.’
I like the sound of sleep. I am exhausted by nerves and travel. My stomach flips a little at the mention of those obstacles. In the mountains I am used to having full foresight, to laying plans and assessing hazards myself. Down here, I am in Lina’s hands – and the extent of my clairvoyance runs as far as the next turn in the tunnels.
Lina leads off, Jay follows and I bring up the rear. Lina moves fast, settling to a quick march down the dry tunnels. ‘You have to move quickly if you want to cover any ground, get far in,’ she calls over her shoulder. Soon the floor of the tunnel begins to muddy up, then dips into black water.
‘Welcome to the Bangra,’ calls Lina over her shoulder. ‘It acts as a kind of airlock, or water-lock. Stops most people who get this far from coming any further.’
She wades into the murky water. We follow. It deepens rapidly to waist height. Our head-torch beams bob on the water.
‘Feel at the edges of the tunnel with your feet,’ says Lina, ‘there are ridges there you can walk on.’ She’s right, and this lifts me further out of the water but moves my head closer to the ceiling. I have to crook my neck as I edge on through the water, which presses cold on my legs.
We slosh past flooded junctions, with tunnels cutting perpendicular to ours. I glance left and right; they disappear into darkness. I am beginning to comprehend something of the extent of the system.
The water level lessens, then shallows to nothing, and we are on firm ground again. Lina increases our pace. She doesn’t pause at junctions: takes turns without hesitation. The unerring nature of her direction-finding reminds me of Neil’s driving in the undersea maze at Boulby, hammering on with no doubt as to the true course.
We have been moving for a couple of hours when Lina stops, checks a mark on the wall and turns into a narrow side tunnel.
‘Down here,’ she says. ‘This is where we’ll sleep. It’s called the Salle des Huîtres – the Oyster Room. The quarrymen used to shuck oysters down here; easy food for them, kept well in the pocket, all-natural packaging.’
Twenty yards down the tunnel is a roughly square hole cut into the right-hand tunnel wall, about four feet off the ground and about a foot and a half across.
‘Welcome to your first chatière,’ says Lina. ‘Chatière means cat-flap, as well as something less polite than that. There’s a technique to getting through them. I’ll show you.’
She posts her pack through first. Then she leans into the chatière as far as she can go with the top half of her body, feels backwards with her feet until she reaches the far wall of the tunnel, then walks her feet blindly up the wall, bracing her body until she is horizontal: head and shoulders in the chatière, feet against the far wall. Then she bends her knees, braces, and kicks off the wall, like a swimmer doing a turn in a pool, driving herself into the chatière and pulling herself onwards and through. I watch her feet disappear, impressed.
‘After you,’ I say to Jay, bowing. He mimics Lina’s technique perfectly.
Of my own entry, let me say only that it is far less elegant and far more painful.
I pull through and find myself in a low-ceilinged room, five feet high at its highest, with chisel marks visible on the stone. The main chamber has a stone table thick with white candle wax. In its centre stands a plastic bong, bubblegum pink and shaped like a foot-long penis. Oyster shells have been arranged around it. The floor is covered in small spill-heaps of grey powder: the spent waste from carbide lamps. Leading off the chamber is an open doorway to a neighbouring room, off which another room leads. We explore the rooms: a dozen or so, roughly organized around a supporting central trunk of stone.
‘People will probably come to use the party space later in the night,’ says Lina. ‘If we want any sleep we should get as far from it as we can.’
So we set up camp in a distant room. Its ceilings are low, three or four feet high at the most. We move about it on hands and knees. The air swirls with rock dust, which I can taste on my tongue and feel on my eyes. The upper city seems very distant.
On a clean-cut wall of stone close to the entrance to our room are lines of cursive handwriting in black ink or paint. They record the names of quarrymen, the dates of completion of rooms and tunnels, and numbers of metres of stone cut on different days. Years are written by the different lines, starting in the late 1700s and running to the early 1800s. There is a pride to the making of this archive – and care has been taken to preserve it, too.
‘Respect for the ways this place was made is key down here,’ says Lina. ‘The community largely polices itself. If you disrespect the space and its history, word gets around, and life becomes difficult for you.’
In a niche in the chamber’s main wall squat three big, jowled monkeys carved from stone blocks. Their eyes are holes. They regard us, impassive and sightless. A spider crawls out of the right socket of the central monkey, the boss monkey.
Other walls of the room are skilfully decorated with modern graffiti, including animals and human faces. Lina lights six tea-candles, placing one in each of the eye sockets of the monkeys in the niche, and their flames set the graffiti cave art flickering. The russet and black swirls now possess their own movement in the candlelight, seeming to shift within the stone. I can see how the graffiti artists worked the textures and shapes of the rock into features of their images, much as the prehistoric cave artists of Lascaux did: a curve of stone swelling the belly of a creature, an embedded shell serving as the eye or nose of a face.
I crawl to the back of the room and find that it extends into a low cave-like space, a couple of feet high and wide enough for a body. I settle down for the night there, oddly comforted by the sense of enclosure. I found a Hollow place in the Rock like a Coffin . . . exactly my own Length – there I lay & slept – It was quite soft . . . I take the bone owl and the bronze casket-egg out of my pack, and place them near my feet. I already know this isn’t the place to leave the casket, but I am glad to have the owl with me. Sixty solid feet of stone extend above me. I think of passing through the openness of northern France that morning – of the sunset behind the unexplained earthwork.
We talk for a while in the candlelight, struck into closeness by the oddity of our dormitory. Then silence falls as tiredness does, with stealth and force. I drift into Escher-dreams of stairways that lead back on themselves, tunnels folding like Möbius strips, shifting rooms, and monkey gods with flames for eyes.
~
We think of cities as lateral but of course they are also vertical. Cities extend upwards into the air by means of buildings, elevators and controlled airspace, and they extend downwards by means of tunnels, escalators, basements, graveyards, wells, buried cabling and mine workings. Just as a mountain does not end at its summit or its foothills, but extends instead into the weather it creates in the air above it, and the orogeny of the rocks that have raised it, so a city does not cease either at its foundations or the spires of its tallest buildings.
Yes, each city has its invisible city, as Italo Calvino suggests in his great story of that name. Calvino’s story is itself cleverly nested within tellings of tellings, stories of stories, so that the text possesses multiple versions of itself. In what is to me the most memorable section, the narrator describes the impossible city of Eusapia, in which inhabitants of the living city have acc
ompanied ‘an identical copy of their city, underground’, a ‘Eusapia of the dead’ which can be accessed only by a confraternity of hooded brothers – though over time the symmetry between upper and lower cities becomes so acute that ‘in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.’
Long before Calvino wrote his story, in one area of the Parisian catacombs, a quarryman and former soldier named Beauséjour Décure dedicated his spare time to carving intricate scale models of the Minorcan town of Port-Mahon into the living limestone. His work is eerily precise, his imagined edifices grand despite their size. He carved the town’s front walls and main gate, its portal set within five receding frames of stone; he carved one of its great pillared buildings – neoclassical in style, with echoes of Pharaonic Egypt – raised off the rock, but with descending vaulted walkways that zigzag down into the stone, hinting at further depths buried out of sight within it. Seeking to bring more people to view his carvings, Décure set out to open an access stairway – but while carrying out his excavation he was killed by a cave-in.
Cities have long been vertical. When Christopher Wren excavated the foundations of Old St Paul’s after the Great Fire he found a row of Anglo-Saxon graves lined with chalk-stones, beneath which were pre-Saxon coffins holding ivory and wooden shroud pins. At a still greater depth were Roman potsherds and cremation urns, red as sealing wax and embellished with greyhounds and stags, and beneath those were the periwinkles and other seashells that spoke of the ocean that had once covered the area. Below the San Lorenzo Maggiore cathedral in Naples, writes geographer Wayne Chambliss, ‘there is a layer of urban stratigraphy containing an earlier, wholly intact iteration of the city. Streets, apartment complexes, storefronts, all filled in centuries ago and built over, have been unearthed below ground.’
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