The Plunderers of Père-Lachaise

On the morning of 22 December 1911, the keepers of Père-Lachaise discovered a broken stained-glass window in the Edwards chapel, in Division 89. Inside, the coffin of Geneviève Lantelme, an actress and Belle Époque figure who had died five months earlier, had been opened and searched. The grave-robbers were after jewels, valued at between sixty and eighty thousand francs, which the press had reported were buried with her. They never found them: the jewels, wrapped in a handkerchief, lay against the dead woman's neck, hidden in the darkness of the vault.

Three years later, suspicion turned to a group the press dubbed the “losange gang.” Over three months, from the start of 1914 to the end of March, these thieves broke into seventy-eight vaults across the cemetery. Their method was methodical: by day, a man named Camille Fournier, an ornamental sculptor by trade, would spot out the richest chapels and chalk a diamond, or losange, on their façades. At night, his accomplices would climb the boundary wall on the Rue des Rondeaux side, force the doors with a jemmy, or slip in through the vents. They made off with Sèvres vases, ivory crucifixes, candelabra and bronze figures of Christ, sold on for a few francs to second-hand dealers along the Seine's quays. Le Matin denounced a gaping hole in security: only four night watchmen looked after the cemetery's forty-four hectares, against thirty-six guards on duty by day. The gang was arrested at the end of March 1914 and tried in June. Louis Geslin was sentenced to four years in prison, Camille Fournier to two. The investigation was never able to pin the desecration of the Lantelme chapel on them.

Four night watchmen for forty-four hectares: the diamond gang operated for three months unopposed.

Bronze theft did not end with the Belle Époque. In November 2006, several busts were torn from their graves within a matter of days. Among them was the bust of Georges Bizet, the work of the sculptor Paul Dubois, which had adorned the composer's grave for more than a hundred and thirty years. The thieves were quickly caught and the bust recovered, but it then sat locked away in the cemetery's archives for nineteen years. On 2 June 2025, to mark a hundred and fifty years since Bizet's death, it finally returned to its place on the restored grave. The bust of Jim Morrison, a white marble work by the Croatian artist Mladen Mikulin installed in 1981 for the tenth anniversary of the singer's death, met a different fate. Stolen in 1988, it turned up by chance in May 2025, during a search carried out by the financial crime squad that had nothing to do with the original theft. Other pieces disappeared for good: two cherubs, signed Barrias, from the Thomas Couture monument in Division 4, and Blanchette the goat from the foot of Alphonse Daudet's chapel in Division 26. Over the decades, chains, cast-iron doors and copper fittings have also been carried off, sometimes sold on for their weight in metal.

The cemetery's other affliction cannot be sold on: it is written. Since Jim Morrison's death in 1971, the walls of the chapels near his grave, in Division 6, have been covered in graffiti, messages and drawings left by the singer's fans. For years the surrounding graves suffered this damage with no protection at all. In 2004, the Mairie de Paris put up security barriers and cleaned the stone of the nearby graves. On the other side of the cemetery, the monument to Oscar Wilde, in Division 89, faced a different scourge: lipstick kisses left by visitors since the 1990s have eaten into the stone of the tomb sculpted by Jacob Epstein. In 2011, a glass screen was fitted around the monument to put a stop to the erosion. The graffiti, though, keeps coming back. The latest fashion around Morrison's grave is sticking chewing gum onto the guards protecting the nearby trees.

Today's visitor passes metal barriers around Morrison, a glass screen around Oscar Wilde, and empty plinths where busts once stood. Bizet's pedestal got its bronze back in 2025; Morrison's remains bare. Marble plaques have vanished, stained-glass windows are missing, chapel doors no longer close. Père-Lachaise remains a forty-four-hectare open-air museum, guarded day and night, yet perpetually exposed. Every restoration sets off the same cycle: the City cleans up, the visitors come back, and the heritage wears a little thinner.