“Being Buried at Père-Lachaise Is Like Having Mahogany Furniture”

In Les Misérables, published in 1862, Victor Hugo describes the burial of Father Goriot at Père-Lachaise and observes that the rich are buried in the upper divisions, where the paths are paved and hearses can climb, while the poor are buried in the lower divisions, where the mud rises to the knees. Hugo sums it up in a single line: “Être enterré au Père-Lachaise, c'est comme avoir des meubles en acajou. L'élégance se reconnaît là” (“To be buried at Père-Lachaise is like having mahogany furniture. Elegance is recognised there”). The line says everything about the fashion for funerary chapels in the nineteenth century — those small temples of stone, marble or granite that bourgeois families built on their plots to display their social rank, even in death.

The first funerary chapel at Père-Lachaise appeared in 1810, in Division 43: the Greffulhe chapel, a neoclassical aedicule modelled on an ancient temple. The idea spread quickly. The funerary chapel offered a practical advantage — it protected the family vault and allowed coffins to be added over several generations — and a social one: it displayed the family's wealth. The most sought-after architects in Paris designed chapels: Visconti, Baltard, Viollet-le-Duc. Styles followed one another — neoclassical under the Empire, neo-Gothic under the Restoration, eclectic under the Second Empire, Art Nouveau at the turn of the century. Some chapels are genuine works of architecture, with stained glass, mosaics, statues and wrought-iron gates.

In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo wrote: “To be buried at Père-Lachaise is like having mahogany furniture. It marks a certain elegance.” The line dates from 1862 — by then the fashion for chapels was already half a century old.

The funerary chapel reached its peak between 1850 and 1914. Père-Lachaise filled with small stone buildings — thousands of chapels packed tightly together in the central divisions. Families competed in splendour: stained glass commissioned from master glaziers, bronze sculptures on the façades, finely wrought iron doors. After the First World War, the fashion declined. Perpetual plots were expensive, families moved away from Paris, and heirs stopped keeping up the maintenance. The keeper, Benoît Gallot, notes in La Vie secrète d'un cimetière (“The Secret Life of a Cemetery”) that many chapels stand abandoned today — doors broken in, windows shattered, walls cracked. Some are reclaimed by the City of Paris once the plot's term has expired.

The visitor who walks through the central divisions of Père-Lachaise — Divisions 4, 10, 11, 28 and 39 — passes between rows of funerary chapels lined up like the houses of a miniature town. Some are immaculately kept, with fresh flowers and intact stained glass. Others stand abandoned, overrun by ivy and moss. The funerary chapel is Père-Lachaise's most distinctive monument — the one that gives the cemetery its air of a city within the city. Victor Hugo was right: the chapel was the mahogany of the nineteenth century, the outward sign of a wealth people wanted to display even in death.