History
Paris' Cemeteries
Les Innocents cemetery during 1550.
Paris' earliest inhumation grounds were to the southern periphery of the Roman-era Left Bank city. In ruins after the Roman empire's 5th-century end and the subsequent Frankish invasions, Parisians eventually abandoned this settlement for the marshy Right Bank: from the 4th century, the first known settlement there was on higher ground around a Saint-Etienne church and burial ground (behind the present Hôtel de Ville), and urban expansion on the Right Bank began in earnest after other ecclesiastical landowners filled in the marshlands from the late 10th century. Thus, instead of burying its dead away from inhabited areas as usual, the Paris Right Bank resolution began with graveyard near its radius.
The most central of these cemeteries, a burial ground around the 5th-century Notre-Dame-des-Bois church, became the property of the Saint-Opportune parish after the original church was de