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Origin and history

The cemetery of Clamart, created in 1672 in the suburb of Saint-Marcel in Paris, was intended to replace the closed cemetery of the Trinity. It was bordered by the streets of Fossés-Saint-Marcel and Fer-à-Moulin, and was approximately 140 metres long. This cemetery of the poor, without monuments or tombs, housed about 265 bodies per year, buried in mass graves. It was managed by the Hôtel-Dieu de Paris and other hospitals after 1780, following the closure of the Innocent Cemetery.

In 1783, the widening of Rue du Fer-à-Moulin reduced the cemetery, but it was enlarged by an equivalent area near the Hotel Scipion. The Clamart cemetery had a sinister reputation: the bodies, often transported without beer in wagons, were thrown into common pits with living lime. It was also known to be a place where young surgeons came to dig up corpses for dissections. Louis Sébastien Mercier made it a living description in his painting in Paris in 1782.

The cemetery was finally closed in 1793 after the transfer of the remains to the Catacombs of Paris. It was replaced by the Sainte-Catherine cemetery, and part of its site is now occupied by the amphitheatre of the hospitals of Paris, built in 1833. Among those buried are victims of the September massacres, the poet Nicolas Gilbert and the revolutionary Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti de Mirabeau.

The name Clamart comes from the proximity of the hotel of Clamart, located on Rue du Fer-à-Moulin, and the lords of Clamart who owned gardens there. A cross bearing the name of their fief had been erected on the Place Pulleau, today the place of the Emir-Abdelkader. The cemetery was also associated with the torturers, reinforcing its macabre image among the Parisian population.

In Compiègne, Oise, a gate to the cemetery (registered with the Historical Monuments in 1947) remains rue de Clamart. This site is distinct from the cemeteries of the city of Clamart in the Paris region, often confused because of the similarity of names. Historical sources, such as Jacques Hillairet's works, document its importance in Parisian funeral history.

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