Père Lachaise Cemetery

Père Lachaise Cemetery began as a failure of urban planning. When Napoleon Bonaparte established it in eighteen hundred four, it was considered far too distant from the city center for any respectable Parisian family to bury their dead there. The cemetery contained only thirteen graves in its first year, as citizens preferred the traditional consecrated churchyards within the city walls. To fix this, city officials launched a deliberate marketing campaign to give the grounds prestige. They successfully negotiated the transfer of the remains of the medieval philosopher Pierre Abélard and his tragic lover Héloïse to the site. This move transformed the cemetery into a sought-after destination, and the number of burials climbed to over thirty thousand within a few decades.