Eighty Staff for Forty-Four Hectares

Every morning at seven o'clock, before the gates open to the public, a team of 80 staff spreads out across the 44 hectares of Père-Lachaise. Thirty-three reception and security staff patrol the alleys — they know the cemetery's layout by heart and answer visitors looking for the grave of Jim Morrison or Édith Piaf. Twenty general maintenance staff trim hedges, sweep up fallen leaves and clean the alleys. Eight gravediggers prepare the vaults for that day's burials. Five gardeners look after the 4,134 trees. Eight administrative staff handle plot files, renewal requests and work permits. Père-Lachaise operates 365 days a year — it never closes.

Benoît Gallot has been the curator of Père-Lachaise since 2010. Gallot is the son of a monumental mason — a trade he watched being practised since childhood. A law graduate who joined the City of Paris through competitive examination, Gallot ran other Paris cemeteries before being appointed to Père-Lachaise. The curator lives on site, in staff accommodation inside the cemetery. In the evening, once the gates are shut, Gallot finds himself alone among the graves — with the foxes that hunt pigeons and the tawny owls that nest in the old trees. In 2022, Gallot published La Vie secrète d'un cimetière with Les Arènes, a book in which he pays tribute to the keepers, gravediggers, groundsmen and other unseen workers of Père-Lachaise.

Eight gravediggers work at Père-Lachaise. Each can dig a vault in three hours. The trade still passes from father to son in certain families within the City of Paris workforce.

Among the trades of Père-Lachaise, the gravedigger remains the oldest and least visible. The cemetery's eight gravediggers dig the vaults, lower the coffins, and close the graves again. The work is physical — a vault two metres deep takes three hours to dig. The two site supervisors oversee restoration projects and work on listed monuments. The gardeners manage a considerable arboreal heritage: Père-Lachaise has 4,134 trees, nine of them listed as remarkable. Since pesticides were banned in 2015, the gardeners' work has changed: weeding is done by hand, biodiversity is encouraged, and mowing is spaced out to let wild orchids grow.

A visitor entering Père-Lachaise does not see the 80 staff who keep the cemetery running. They do not see the gravedigger who dug the vault at seven that morning, or the gardener who pruned the cedar of Lebanon, or the reception officer who has already directed 300 people since opening. Every year, during the Printemps des cimetières, the City of Paris offers tours devoted to the trades of the cemetery — gardeners, keepers, gravediggers. These tours are among the most popular. Père-Lachaise is an open-air sculpture museum, an ecological park, a place of memory — but first of all it is a cemetery, and it is 80 staff who keep it alive.