Covering area of 43 hactares, or just over 105 acres, the Père-Lachaise cemetery is the largest in Paris.
I the seventeenth century, the jesuits acquired this estate and called it Mont-Louis. They built a hospice on it and one of the most illustrious members of their Society, Father La Chaise, Louis XIV's confessor, retired there.
Following Robert Damien's attempt to would Louis XV, the jesuits were expelled from the kingdom and the buildings on Mont-Louis handed over to the creditors. Napoleon I was responsible for the reacquisition of the property, which from 1804 became knows as the Cimitière de lEst (Eastern Cemetery).
The capital's largest burial-ground is also a splendid park. Although Père-Lachaise is an excellent place for a stroll, it would be wrong to think of a simply as just another tourist attraction, for it has other claims to greatness.
More than a picturesque garden, more than a complex and varied collection of architecture, Père-Lachaise is a truly unusual place. Land of the dead, or rather of Death, its paths and side-paths form a truly phantasmagoric maze.
Mystic enclosure within earshot of the sounds of the city, Père-Lachaise lives on its history, its secrets and its legends(necrophilism, prostitution, black masses).
The cemetery is also a place of pilgrimage for thousands of adepts: some come to meditate at some illustrious person's grave, while others indulge in more obscure rituals.
The visitor will find it hard to resist the beauty of the place and the memories that the famous figures buried there bring to mind: the writers, from Molière and La Fontaine to Gérard de Nerval and Oscar Wilde; the politicians, from Adolphe Thiers to Maurice Thorez; show-business personalities such as Mademoiselle Rachel an Edith; and not forgetting the "doyens" of the cemetery, Héloise and Abélard.
The visitor will surely be moved by the memory of the "Fédérés" of the Paris Commune (1871), whose graves are on the spot where they were actually shot.
In this little corner of history one can almost hear the message of their faith in the future.