Fontaine des Innocents

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Between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries, there was a cemetery, called the cimetière des Innocents, on the spot you see pictured in this photograph, near the current location of the Forum des Halles. Over the years, some two million corpses were buried or simply stored in this location. Despite this, the area was popular with vendors, strollers, and writers.

Near the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was closed and replaced by a fruit and vegetable market. To facilitate this, all two million bodies were exhumed and transported to unused subterranean quarries near modern-day Montparnasse, which today are called the Catacombs (at least the Parisians didn't make the mistake made in Poltergeist: the Parisians did move the bodies before they built over the graves!). At this same time, a fountain that had been set against a wall near the cemetery was transported to the new site, and it was enhanced to add the missing sides that it did not have when it was set into the wall. That's the fountain you see here, named the Fontaine des Innocents after the cemetery that used to be here.

I've been told by archaeologists who work in Paris that there are signs of human and pre-human habitation at this location going back more than 600,000 years.

Photographed on August 11, 2000.