Statement 64

Death in Europe is still very much colored by the legacy of the Napoleonic era. Before the 19th century people were buried in church plots if they could afford it, otherwise, they were consigned to pauper’s graves or charnel houses. Napoleon, in his effort to exalt the idealism of the empire and garner support among the military changed the rules. His 1804 Imperial Decree on Burials ordered that each person should be buried separately. A coffin was mandatory, and everyone had the right to erect a tombstone over a loved one’s grave. If a soldier fought for the nation, the nation would provide the burial and cemetery free of charge. Death was democratized and secularized, and it was also ennobled; Soldiers became heroes, and caskets were draped with the national flag. Père Lachaise, a garden necropolis in the hilly suburbs of Paris and laid out in the same year as the decree, was the prototype of the new cemetery design. Trees which were once thought to restrict the circulation of air in cemeteries were now introduced to serve “as a somber and religious veil” over the grounds.[1] Tombstones were no longer decorated with skull and bones indicating the immanent and perhaps not all too pleasant day of reckoning, as had been the case for centuries, but adorned with smiling angels. In fact, the cemetery was envisioned as an Elysian Field, the mythological resting place of heroes and the virtuous. By 1825, guidebooks published maps with itineraries that led the visitor through a tour of the cemetery pointing out its architectural features and the tombs of illustrious personages.[2] On Sunday afternoons, families would stretch out a blanket for a picnic. The following lines, found penciled on the cemeteries terrace wall in 1813 convey the sentiment.

At this peaceful site, amid trees and flowers,

Sorrows and laments come to cry their tears:

Here they can find a sympathetic shade:

Death hides from their eyes its hideous scythe.

As it spreads its subjects throughout a vast garden:

For the home of the dead has become a new Eden.[3]

But there was a Faustian deal. Graves were to last only five years unless the plot was bought by the deceased relatives. The body that began its journey to the hereafter as a part of the public sphere was suddenly thrust into the private sphere. And worse yet, if there were no family members to claim the body, it and its grave were made to disappear. There were in essence two deaths; the first one promised a mixture of public acclaim and heavenly bliss; the second one – five years later – promised, or at least threatened, obscurity. Eternal dignity, as it turned out, was a short-lived affair. With the stroke of a clock the body changed from a glorious metaphysical proposition to a dusty burden. First at Père Lachaise then in places across Europe and even in the United States, the dual – and one should say bizarre – nature of modern death slowly came into shape. 

[1] Richard Etlin, The Architecture of Death: the Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984.), p. 300 [2] Margaret Fields Denton, “Death in French Arcady: Nicolas Poussin's The Arcadian Shepherds and Burial Reform in France c. 1800,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36/2 (Winter 2003), pp. 195-216. [3] Etlin, p. 303.