ABSTRACT
Paris was a city in flux: familiar social categories had disintegrated, traditional political authority had been overthrown, and a decade of violence left the population exhausted and disillusioned. As Guillon's comment also reveals, two of the ways that Parisians sought to restore order to their city was by reorganizing public space and establishing a coherent new set of burial practices. This chapter addresses the intersection of these two processes by examining the early history of Paris's first two modern spaces for the dead: Pre Lachaise Cemetery and the Paris Catacombs. Despite this uncanny ability, by the early nineteenth century, Paris's new spaces for the dead no longer carried the burden of foreboding. On the contrary, once Parisian burial sites were deliberately constructed and understood as the city's doubles, they were able to foster the reconciliation that the population so desperately sought in the early years of the nineteenth century.
