The Morgue of Paris organized “Open doors.” And caused tumults with thousands of daily visits

The bodies in the Paris deposit lie, motionless, completely naked except for small leather shrouds. Each one has died for a different cause, and all impute the reasons. Some have been stabbed in the belly. Another has drowned, he is swollen and his skin exhibits a obscene violet color. Another has been crushed by a heavy machine in one of the factories of the French city, increasingly industrialized and implacable.

They all have something in common. They lie in almost vertical tables, which allow them to contemplate, on the other side of large windows, the thousands of Parisians who spend every day through the morgue. All bodies in the deposit can be contemplated by citizens. And it has become the favorite show of the pedestrians.

In the mid -nineteenth century, walk in Paris to pass in front of the deposit and See the bodies It was the entertainment of fashion among citizens. Of course, there was an excuse: to help identify those who still had no name. But the morbid seized the population and went to see the exposed corpses became an entertainment that went far beyond public service, to the point that appeared in The guides of the time of the Parisian shows that the visitor should not be lost.

Under the name of ‘The Museum of Death’, it was organized an entire industry around the facade of the body depositand it was easy to find actors, juggers and street artists asking for money in the surroundings of the great windows. He French playwright Leon Gozlan He described it like this: “You will see the drowned just like you go to other places to see the latest fashion.” And the very Emile Zola wrote: “The morgue is a show within the reach of all the pockets and that poor and rich passers -by may see free. The door is open, whoever wants to enter”

Paris Danger

At that time, Paris was a dangerous city (like all the great cities of Europe): crimes followed and occupied the first flat of the newspapers. And not only that: at this time when Industrialization grew by leaps and boundsthe mortality in the factories was very high, often the injured did not even have family in the city, but they came from rural areas and had arrived in Paris in search of money to feed their families, so that the bodies remained days in the deposit until they were claimed.

These exhibitions in the morgue was like an extension of the black chronicle: the Parisians read in the newspaper about a crime or an accident and immediately could Expand the information going to see the bodies to the windows of the deposit. 40,000 people came to go to the dead daily (for getting an idea: Before your fireNotre-Dame received 30,000 a day). A true morbid show without a paragon in the history of the city.

An example of what people came to see: on November 8, 1876, two packages containing the dismembered body of a woman were found in the Seine. The body was rebuilt, covered with a canvas and placed its head on it. A grotesque and brutal aging … that four days later of the crimes came to see more than 30,000 visitors, 40,000 on the 13th and 14th, the morgue records reached 68,250 entries. Almost a week after crimes, which makes a state of considerable decomposition.

Finally, the closing of the show arrived: the Morgue of Paris closed the doors to the public in March 1907, when Criticisms won the unstoppable increase in morbid. Many newspapers complained, because their chronicles of which bodies were going to be exposed were among the most read of the daily rotations. The new century had just been born, and they were to come much more terrible shows. Although a little more modest.

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