The spectacle continued beyond the walls of the morgue. The dead would usually have to be removed after three days due to decomposition, at which point a photograph or a wax cast would take their place. Up to 50 visitors at a time would crowd around great windows overlooking the slabs, to gawk and gossip over the bodies. As the morgue was not refrigerated until 1882, cold water would drip from the ceiling constantly, giving the skin of the dead a bloated and puffy appearance. When arriving at the morgue, the bodies were first stripped, inspected, frozen and then wheeled out on black marble slabs for public display. The morgue became one of the places to see and be seen and, since the morgue was open seven days a week, from dawn to 6pm, many Parisian residents became regular visitors right along with the tourists. People of all ages and classes were beginning to socialise on the streets of Paris and in its local attractions. Sigmund Freud described it in 1885 as a place where, “I don’t think they know the meaning of shame or fear the women no less than the men crowd round nudities as much as they do round corpses in the morgue”. Many of the bodies, which were picked up off the streets or fished out of the Seine, were unidentifiable, so the public were ostensibly allowed in to help with their identification.Īt the time, Paris was changing it was becoming a more social, less divided city. The location of the morgue was no accident: being in the epicentre of Paris and right next to the Seine, the morgue was in a good position to receive both the dead and the living. The morgue first opened its doors to the public in 1804 on Île de la Cité, before moving to a new and larger building behind Notre Dame in 1864, where a memorial now sits. The “only free theatre in Paris”, otherwise known as the La Morgue. If you were in Paris in the 1880s, there would be an altogether different attraction that you would almost certainly have found yourself in. If you were visiting Paris today, you’d probably find yourself walking past the love padlocks on the Pont des Arts, walking through Notre Dame and a mile on from there you’d be at the Louvre.
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