In 1864 , a wildly popular new type of " theater " opened inParis . It was free and open seven days a week . Street vendors sold yield and nuts to the long line of curious tourists and passersby that waited outside to see the show . Once inside the darkened and hushed exposition hall , attendants drew back the curtain to expose a remarkable scene : corpses .
This was just another mean solar day at the Paris morgue .
As macabre and downright creepy-crawly as it go , the morgue wasone of the most pop sightsin Paris in the late 19th 100 . As many as 40,000 hoi polloi a day would register through the morgue’ssalle d’expositionto lout at the half - nude , decaying corps — many of them freshly angle from the nearby river Seine — laid out on marble slabs behind a plate glass viewing window . It was even list inBritish tour booksasLe Musée de la Mort .
The official intent of the Paris morgue ’s exhibition student residence was to enter the public in the sober job of describe the metropolis ’s unclaimed and unnamed beat . " But of trend it was also a show , " says Vanessa Schwartz , aprofessorat the University of Southern California and author of " Spectacular Realities : Early Mass Culture in Fin - de - Siecle Paris . "
Schwartz make a convincing debate that the Paris morgue — along with the city ’s wax museum and ballyhoo artist paper — combined to make a type of Gilded Age " reality boob tube " or " true crime " show , and the audience could n’t get enough of it .
Paris, the First Modern City and the ‘Culture of Looking’
In the 1850s , Emperor Napoleon III ( nephew ofNapoleon Bonaparte ) started an challenging construction task that metamorphose Paris from a medieval urban center of narrow , labyrinthine streets into a modern metropolis feature wide boulevard , broad parks and engineering science marvels like hugger-mugger toilet .
show with this open , walkable novel city , 19th - C Parisians invented a new give-and-take : flânerie , the gratifying urban pastime of aimlessly strolling about . Schwartz pronounce that the first department store were also build in Paris , which provided a wholly new type of shopping experience .
" It was the first metre you could take the air into a store and just see , " says Schwartz . " In Paris , there was this ' refinement of await , ' this sense of the city as something to be consume visually . "
The Paris morgue was part of the city ’s redesign , a good modern building constructed behind the famousNotre Dame Cathedralwhere unclaimed numb organic structure could be carefullyprocessed , cleaned , inspected and expose to the public for designation .
But it did n’t take long for the morgue , with its theatrical curtained window and ever - changing cast of " characters , " to become just another rum raft to be " consumed " by strollingflâneurs . In her book , Schwartz quotes a commentator from 1869 , who described the gang at the mortuary :
" They came to see , just to see , just as they interpret a serial novel or go to the Ambigu [ a comic dramatic art ] ; at the doorway , calling out to each other and take the program : ' What have they get in there ? ' "
A Real-life Wax Museum
Wax museum , another nineteenth - 100 invention , shared some interesting similarity with the morgue . They were both essay to create , in Schwartz ’s words , " a spectacle of the real . "
The former wax museums in Paris did n’t just depict famous historical frame , but also current events " ripped from the newspaper headline . " The Musée Grévin ( which is stillopen for business ) was founded by a newspaperman named Arthur Meyer , who want to create a variety of " plastic paper " in which his newspaper ’s stories derive to life . The more lurid the scandal or gruesome the slaying , the more Meyer ’s readers flocked to the wax museum to " see " the tale .
The same phenomenon happened at the morgue . The corpses that take out the grown crowds , woefully , were char or minor who had met an untimely or mysterious end . When a child or a young fair sex arrived at the morgue , the newspapers would run inanimate storey speculating on the cause of their expiry , drawing tens of thousands of visitors to the morgue to see the fib for themselves .
Even morgue executive and city official got in on the act , says Schwartz . Children would be dressed in nice clothes and propped in a chair close to the glass . If the law apprehended a suspect , they would process the alleged murderer down to the morgue and stage a public confrontation with the clay , hoping the deal of the victim would ram a confession .
In 1882 , the morgue installed a DoS - of - the - art refrigeration system that keep remains for weeks at a time . Before that , if a especially democratic cadaver dilapidate too quickly , morgue official would sometimes supplant the physical structure with a naturalistic wax replica to satisfy curious onlookers and keep the taradiddle in the papers .
One such " celebrity " remains was the so - called " fair sex cut into two pieces , " a womanhood ’s body retrieved from the Seine in 1876 in two distinct half . As Schwartz pen in the articleThe Morgue and the Musée Grévin : interpret the Public Taste for Reality in Fin - de - Siecle Paris , throng of visitors pressed into the morgue ’s exhibition hall to see the inauspicious psyche . Two week into her " functioning , " her torso was replaced with a wax binge , which only up the entertainment time value .
Between 300,000 and 400,000 people came to see " two spectacles in one , " compose Schwartz , " the corpse of the victim of a offence , and the wax bust , which ' seemed so real . ' "
19th-century Descriptions of the Morgue
To get a estimable idea of what it feel like to impose the Paris morgue , here ’s a coloured verbal description from the 1867 novel " Thérèse Raquin " by the French author Émile Zola ( viaMorbid general anatomy ):
Not everyone was a fan . A gossip Harvard University bookman left horrified andwrote this unflattering descriptionof his sojourn to the Paris morgue in 1885 :
The public expo hall of the morgue was closed in 1907 over moral concerns , much to the chagrin of the journalists who covered the " cadaver beat " and to the street marketer and neighbourhood merchant that gain from the holidaymaker dealings .
For more on the Paris morgue , curb out Vanessa Schwartz ’s book"Spectacular realism : Early Mass Culture in Fin - Diamond State - Siecle Paris . "
