Père Lachaise and the garden cemetery

• Autores: Richard Etlin
• Localización: Studies in the history of gardens and designed landscape, ISSN 1460-1176, Vol. 4, Nº 3, 1984, págs. 211-222
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The Cemetery of Père Lachaise is the first and most celebrated garden cemetery in the western world. Opened in 1804, it was developed over the next two decades into a splendid landscape garden that sustained reveries of death as a sweet rest and so banished reminders of the gruesome, physical reality of human mortality. By the 1830s the cemetery had become so famous that a visit to Père Lachaise was de rigueur for any first visit to Paris. So great was the reputation of Père Lachaise that nineteenth-century tourists would sometimes explore the cemetery before sightseeing in the city. The legendary status of Père Lachaise throughout the nineteenth-century, a popularity that lingers on today, albeit in a much reduced fashion, should not obscure the cemetery's pivotal role in the crystallization of attitudes toward death, remembrance, and commemoration at the time of its origin. On the one hand, the opening of Père Lachaise signalled the victory of a 60-year-old French reform movement to banish burials from the heart of the city. At the same time, this cemetery was the first garden cemetery to be realized after two decades of French proposals for this type of burial ground. These projects, in turn, followed a half century's evolution in both the aesthetics of the English and French landscape garden and the role of memorials and tombs in such settings. Finally, in the early nineteenth century, the Cemetery of Père Lachaise became the point of reference for establishing new cemeteries in the Anglo-Saxon world. This paper will outline the main features of this rich and vanegated cultural situation.