Père-Lachaise Before Photography

In 1817, the engraver Guignet published a view of Père-Lachaise taken from the tomb of the Abbé Delille, after a drawing by Courvoisier. It shows a cemetery still sparsely filled — a few hundred graves scattered across a hilly landscape, poplars lining the paths, no chapels, no walls. Père-Lachaise was thirteen years old. The image belongs to a private collection and exists nowhere else. Here lies the paradox of Père-Lachaise's early engravings: they document a cemetery that photography, invented twenty years later, never knew. The earliest daguerreotypes date from the 1840s — by which time the cemetery had already changed beyond recognition.

Two collections of engravings stand as references. In 1832, the artist Quaglia published an album of engravings of Père-Lachaise's funerary monuments — detailed plates showing the tombs as they stood under the July Monarchy, complete with their railings, statues and inscriptions. Some of the monuments Quaglia drew no longer exist: his engravings are the only visual trace left of graves that vanished two centuries ago. In 1839, Lassalle and Rousseau published a further collection of engravings of monuments — a work that complements Quaglia's, with a more Romantic style and wider views of the cemetery. Both collections are now held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, in its Gallica digital archive.

In 1832, the artist Quaglia published a collection of engravings of the monuments of Père-Lachaise. Some of the tombs he drew no longer exist — his engravings are the only visual traces of monuments gone for two centuries.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the postcard had taken over from the engraving. Père-Lachaise became one of the most photographed subjects in Paris — postcard publishers offered views of the cemetery, its famous monuments, its paths under snow, and scenes from All Saints' Day. Among the photographers, Fernand Fleury stands out for a systematic collection of postcards of Père-Lachaise monuments. Fleury photographed the tombs one by one, head-on, with a documentary rigour that turns his collection into a genuine photographic inventory of the cemetery at the turn of the twentieth century. The APPL has digitised and published part of this exceptional collection on its website.

The visitor who compares the 1832 engravings with today's Père-Lachaise gauges the scale of the transformation. Guignet's sparse cemetery has become a miniature city of ninety-six thousand six hundred plots. The poplars have given way to horse chestnuts, then to maples and limes. Some of the tombs Quaglia drew have vanished — reclaimed by the City, demolished, replaced. Others are still there, almost unchanged. The engravings, lithographs and old postcards of Père-Lachaise make up an irreplaceable pictorial heritage — the visual memory of a place that has never stopped changing in two hundred and twenty-two years.