The Invisible Women of the Hill

Père-Lachaise is presented as the cemetery of great men. The official visitor trails run from Molière to Chopin, from Balzac to Jim Morrison, from Proust to Oscar Wilde. Of the twenty most visited graves, almost all belong to men. Yet the cemetery holds dozens of women whose fame, talent or fate left a mark on history: Édith Piaf in Division 97, Sarah Bernhardt in Division 44, Colette in Division 4, Rosa Bonheur in Division 74, Isadora Duncan in the columbarium, Maria Callas in the columbarium, the Comtesse de Castiglione in Division 28. These women's presence at Père-Lachaise is considerable. Their visibility is next to none.

Some of these women were pioneers at a time when the word did not exist. Rosa Bonheur, born in Bordeaux in 1822, was the first woman artist to receive the Légion d'honneur, awarded in 1865 by Empress Eugénie herself. Bonheur obtained a police permit to wear trousers — a permission de travestissement — needed for her work as an animal painter in slaughterhouses and cattle markets. Sarah Bernhardt, born in 1844, is regarded as the first international star of the performing arts: she played on five continents, ran theatres, appeared in silent films and kept performing after her right leg was amputated in 1915. Colette, elected to the Goncourt academy in 1945, was the first woman to preside over the Académie Goncourt and the second woman in France to be given a state funeral — the first having been Victor Hugo, a man.

Other women at Père-Lachaise have fallen into near-total obscurity. The Comtesse de Castiglione, born Virginia Oldoïni, sent to Paris by Cavour in 1856 to seduce Napoleon III and advance Italian unity, rests in Division 28. La Castiglione was the most photographed woman of the nineteenth century — more than four hundred posed portraits, which she staged herself in elaborate costumes, prefiguring the art of performance. Juliette Drouet, Victor Hugo's companion for fifty years, the woman who saved the poet's manuscripts during his exile, rests in Division 52. Germaine Tailleferre, the only woman in Les Six alongside Poulenc and Milhaud, a composer of more than one hundred and twenty works, rests in Division 89 in near-complete anonymity. Père-Lachaise is not short of famous women: what it lacks are visitors who go looking for them.

Rosa Bonheur was the first woman artist awarded the Légion d'honneur, in 1865, by Empress Eugénie in person. At Père-Lachaise, Bonheur's grave in Division 74 is rarely visited.

Since the 2010s, visitor trails devoted to the women of Père-Lachaise have been created — by associations, independent tour guides, historians. These trails highlight around thirty women's graves scattered across the cemetery's forty-four hectares. But the structural imbalance remains: Père-Lachaise reflects two centuries of French society, in which access to fame — and to the perpetual plot — was overwhelmingly male. The women present in the cemetery often arrived there as wives, mothers or daughters, their names carved small beneath their husbands'. To rediscover the famous women of Père-Lachaise is to read the stones differently — to look for the names that were not carved first.