Two Hundred Years of Resisting the Present in the Paris Catacombs

I will discuss how the Catacombs have functioned as a space of reprieve in which visitors to the underground could escape the demands of the present by surrounding themselves with the past (in this case I mean this quite literally as the physical remains of dead Parisians).  After a very brief overview of the Catacombs’ earliest years, I will spend most of this paper examining popular interpretations of the Catacombs as a way to mildly “resist” the Modernization of Paris during the Second Empire as well as Twenty-first century hypermodernity.