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IAN MORTIMER |
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The Paris CatacombsThe Catacombs in Paris is one of the most thought-provoking places I have ever visited. You pay your fee and descend a spiral staircase. You pass along long, low passages – the remnants of eighteenth century quarries – noticing perhaps the black mark along the ceiling which once directed visitors to the ossuary. You see a couple of model cityscapes along the way, carved out of the rock in the 1770s by a man called Décure, who was killed in these tunnels by a rockfall. There are steps down to a well – you peer over and inspect the clear water. And then you turn a corner and see a doorway with a large white diamond painted against a black background on either side. Above, it says in a plain script: Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la mort (Stop! Here is the empire of death). The modern mind baulks at what follows. Walls of bones and skulls. Hundreds of walls of bones and skulls. Each cavity in the old quarry has been filled with bones from the old cemeteries of Paris. But the bones have not just been thrown there. Thigh bones have been selected out, and, like stones in a dry-stone wall, they have been arranged and linked together, in rows and rows, on top of one another. Each wall has a row or two of skulls set within the thigh bones. Most are jawless. Unlike most places where one sees skeletons these remains are not behind some protective glass; they are before you; you can touch them. And that is what stuns you. They have a reality, and that reality has so many connotations – this really is the empire of death – and yet they have been neatly arranged as if they were flowers in a church hall.
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And so you walk on. More and more walls of bones and skulls. More and more. And more. There are more than six million people buried down here. Six million – you only need to hear that number in relation to the dead and you think of the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. You mentally see the piles of dead people’s spectacles in the concentration camps, the mountains of dead women’s hair, and you feel a sort of pall come over you – that natural horror which each successive generation feels about that number of dead people. But then you shrug off that pall; this is not the product of some atrocity. There are victims of Robespierre’s Terror here, for sure, but most of these six million people died of natural causes. These six million do not amount to horror. They represent normality. Normality? No sooner has that realisation hit you than you reject it. No! This is not normality – the exact opposite! The dead should be buried neatly away from sight, with just the occasional desiccated cadaver from ancient Egypt on show in a glass case. This is an outrage - to see the thigh bones and skulls of six million corpses. And then you pause, and you think to yourself... Where are the other bones? When they emptied the Paris cemeteries, by night, from 1785 onwards, what did they do with the rest of the bodies they dug up? So you take a deep breath, you peer over the top of one of the thousands of walls of thigh bones and skulls – and you see the rest.
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If this was the soft matter of the dead bodies, this would be human salami. This knuckle here belonged to a man whose arm is a hundred yards further on along the tunnel; whose foot, pelvis and skull bones are smashed and scattered throughout the length of a tunnel, and whose thigh is now in the wall on the other side of the ossuary. Everything is mixed up. And you yourself have to struggle to make sense of it. It is normal that the bones of the dead remain; it is just not normal that you see them. It is normal, although shocking, to have to consider six million corpses. But what is so very strange is to see the remains of the dead scattered – or, rather, scrambled like eggs – through underground corridors. The contents of each old cemetery is collected in a single identified series of tunnels but within those tunnels bodies are dislocated, broken, disparate. The skulls of a husband and wife might be side by side, in theory, but in reality these people were mostly strangers to those with whom they now lie so intimately. The mixture of respect and apparent disrespect – of honour and anonymity – creates a huge clash, an enormous disjuncture in our ‘normal’ values of life and death. It is the equivalent of taking all the inhabitants of modern Paris, and mincing them up, and distributing the resultant human soup beneath the city of their descendants in a massive sacred vault. You start to think about death, obviously, and what death means. And that inevitably leads you to think about what life means. For the only sense of death we have is that of the antithesis to life. Likewise you start to think about individuality, for here it is lost entirely. Unless you are a pathologist or osteoarchaeologist, you have no chance even of sexing the individual bones. All individuality here is lost. These are not people, this is the empire of death. Or, rather, this is Paris from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are Molière’s audiences, these are the victims of the ancien regime, the bodies of the French Revolution. These are the boys and girls who played in the streets, in the Seine, who lived under Louis XIV. Here are butchers, and bakers, all mixed together with the remains of candlestickmakers.
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How does a historian begin to make sense of this? The first time I saw these bones, I had the most vivid realisation of the vast difference between history and past reality. Forget postmodernism, forget everything you have ever read about the past. Here is the human past of Paris – that is undeniable - and yet you can say nothing about any one of these bones historically. No amount of research will let you know that this crumbling skull on your left belonged to a man who once crept up some stairs and made love to a woman with a similarly crumbling skull three hundred yards away, thereby creating a third skull around the corner. You have no way of recovering any of these people’s individual passions or pains, their loves or fears. You can pick up a skull and stare into the place where the brain once lodged; but you cannot hear the person speak, or see him haul a bucket up out of a well, or scrub clean her family’s clothes on a washing board. The first time I entered the Catacombs was thus one of the key moments of my life as a historian. I saw with my own eyes how much of the truth, which I struggle and yearn to attain and describe, is unattainable and undescribable; and how little history can be wrought of the remains of even six million men and women. That day I knew that the line historians so often come up with ‘there is no evidence that...’ is a trite piece of argument, unsophisticated and unmeaningful. Academic history, I realised there and then, is not the study of the past but the study of evidence. The study of the past is an altogether more human, more profound and more challenging endeavour. This year, I had different thoughts and feelings. All these bodies mixed up – how can individuality exist outside the present moment? How can we reach reality, or anything of the past which is meaningful?
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As I wandered through those long tunnels of the Underworld, I came across a line by a French poet, whose name I wrote down simply as ‘N. Gilbert’. I presume this is Nicolas Gilbert (1751-1780), who thus died shortly before the tunnels received their piles of bones. The line translated as ‘The vanity of such a huge silence’. And therein I saw, or realised, something powerful. Surrounded by so many aspects and elements of death, and mindful of our inability to see it in any terms other than the antithesis of life, death becomes an impermeable black mirror, a two-dimensional reflection: nothing in itself. It becomes a mirror in which we see ourselves and our lives reflected; what is meaningful in that mirror is what is meaningful to us in the present. In that mirror we can see only humanity, ourselves; and after a while of staring at ourselves, we have to start taking ourselves a little less seriously. We start to mock what we see – for we are weak, immoral, over-respectable, proud, pompous... And yes, these dead people were all these things too. And yes, it is a vanity, on the part of the dead, in our minds at least, to provoke us to such thoughts with their morbid silence. I don’t know what other people think of the Catacombs. But to me the place remains truly inspiring. I have seen the dead, whose vacant eye sockets tell me that history is a feeble thing, a mere rumour. I have seen my own name eradicated and my bones separated and neatly arranged in rows under the feet of my children’s grandchildren. And I have looked into the blackness of an anonymous skull’s eyes, and struggled to see something meaningful in that dead face, and seen life look back at me. Ian Mortimer
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