Description
Book SynopsisThe dead of Paris, before the French Revolution, were most often consigned to mass graveyards that contemporaries described as terrible and terrifying, emitting "putrid miasmas" that were a threat to both health and dignity. In a book that is at once wonderfully macabre and exceptionally informative, Erin-Marie Legacey explores how a new burial...
Trade ReviewMaking Space for the Dead,[is] a book that will make a deep and long-lasting impact on the cultural history of the French Revolution.
* Leonardo Reviews *
Legacey advances a focused and unusually powerful argument about the changes in Parisian cemetery culture during the Revolution and in its lingering aftermath. [Her] book draws attention to a fascinating aspect of French history, and,,, it holds its place among recent works on material culture in nineteenth-century Paris.
* H-France *
The book is written beautifully and with a light touch, in spite of its somber subject... Legacey is to be congratulated for making a significant contribution to our understanding of how Parisians struggled to reimagine their social and moral worlds after the Revolution.
* Journal of Modern History *
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: The Revolution of the Dead
1. The Problem of the Dead: In which the French Revolution interrupts and intervenes in Paris's preexisting burial crisis.
2. The Solution of the Dead: In which a range of experts and amateurs imagine a new burial culture for Paris after the Terror.
3. The City of the Dead: In which Parisians visit and respond to their city's new burial space, Père Lachaise Cemetery.
4. The Empire of the Dead: In which thousands of visitors descend ninety feet below the city to tour the newly opened Paris Catacombs.
5. The Museum of the Dead: In which the artist and administrator Alexandre Lenoir displays the dead as history in the Museumof French Monuments.
Conclusion: The Historian of the Dead: In which the Romantic historian Jules Michelet resurrects the history of France in Parisian spaces for the dead.
Notes
Bibliography
Index
