LE CIMETIÈRE DE MONTMARTRE

Cimetière où reposent en paix des personnes célèbres comme Dalida, Michel Berger, France Gall, Dick Rivers et plus récemment Bertrand Blier, mais aussi des personnes non célèbres.

Le cimetière est assez vaste et accueille aujourd'hui plus de 21 500 sépultures.

La particularité de ce cimetière est qu'un pont, nommé le pont Caulaincourt, permet le franchissement du cimetière de Montmartre.

À aller voir !

In Paris, where the dead reside with more panache than most cities house the living, Montmartre Cemetery offers a quieter alternative to the celebrity-packed pathways of Père Lachaise. Nestled in a former gypsum quarry below street level, this 11-acre necropolis feels like stumbling upon a secret garden of stone and memory—if gardens typically featured 20,000 graves and the occasional startled cat sunning itself on a faded epitaph.

Among the cemetery's residents—Degas, Berlioz, Zola (though he later moved to more prestigious posthumous digs at the Panthéon)—none makes quite the same visual statement as Jean Bauchet, former Moulin Rouge impresario and eternal bronze nudist.

Bauchet's monument in Division 29 delivers perhaps the most audaciously modern statement in a cemetery otherwise preoccupied with 19th-century romanticized death. The massive bronze figure—a muscular male nude perched in contemplation atop black marble—looks like Rodin's "Thinker" after six months of CrossFit and a lifetime of exhibitionism.

There's delicious irony here: a man who built his fortune on barely-dressed dancers at Paris's most famous cabaret being memorialized as eternally undressed himself. Before becoming the Moulin Rouge's owner, Bauchet had been an acrobatic dancer in his youth, a biographical detail the sculptor Bertrand Richard winkingly acknowledged through the figure's impossible physique. One imagines Toulouse-Lautrec, buried elsewhere in the same cemetery, appreciating the artistic cheek.

The statue, commissioned before Bauchet's death in 1975 and erected in 1989, reveals something about the vanities of entertainment moguls—that same driving need for posthumous attention that leads some to bronze themselves for eternity. While some cemetery visitors leave flowers for their deceased, Bauchet's monument practically flexes at them.

Montmartre Cemetery itself seems to encourage such theatrical gestures. Opened in 1825 as one of four great Parisian cemeteries established at the cardinal points of the city, it became the final address for the artistic souls who had made the butte of Montmartre their bohemian playground. The burial ground languishes quite literally in the shadow of modern Paris—sit at a sidewalk café on Rue Caulaincourt, and you're dining on a bridge directly above the dead.

Unlike its eastern counterpart Père Lachaise, with its manicured paths and tour groups hunting for Jim Morrison, Montmartre Cemetery maintains a disheveled charm. Maple and chestnut trees push between plots, tombstones list at dubious angles, and paths occasionally disappear into overgrowth. Charles Baudelaire once wrote that "the form of a city changes faster than the human heart," but here, time seems deliciously suspended.

Bauchet's bronze oddity represents something essential about Paris itself—the city's perpetual tension between reverence for tradition and irrepressible innovation. In death as in life, Parisians refuse to follow anyone else's rules about good taste.

For visitors seeking this peculiar monument, the search becomes part of the pleasure. Wind through narrow alleys of stone, past elaborate family chapels and simple tablets, until suddenly—there he sits in all his bronze glory, an anatomically generous reminder that even cemetery tourism in Paris can offer unexpected entertainment.

An afternoon spent here reveals why Parisians have always treated their cemeteries as parks—places for contemplation, unexpected beauty, and occasional encounters with the absurd. Just as he once welcomed guests to his cabaret spectacles, Jean Bauchet now silently invites cemetery wanderers to appreciate his final performance piece: proof that in Paris, one's last statement can still raise eyebrows from beyond the grave.

L'endroit était très propre et cela m'a beaucoup impressionné. Cependant, les toilettes étaient très sales. Il y avait aussi un chat mignon avec lequel nous avons beaucoup joué.

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Siempre que puedo y estoy en París, unas cuantas veces, siempre voy, me gusta es espectacular. Y muy recomendable.