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The Holy Innocents' Cemetery (French: Cimetière des Saints-Innocents or Cimetière des Innocents) is a defunct cemetery in Paris that was used from the Middle Ages until the late 18th century. It was the oldest and largest cemetery in Paris and had often been used for mass graves. It was closed because of overuse in 1780, and in 1786 the bodies were exhumed and transported to the unused subterranean quarries near Montparnasse known as the Catacombs. The place Joachim-du-Bellay in the Les Halles district now covers the site of the cemetery. The cemetery took its name (referring to the Biblical Massacre of the Innocents) from the attached church of the Holy Innocents that has now also disappeared. ==History== Sources describe the burial ground, then called ''Champeaux'', and associated church in the 12th century.〔 It was located next to the central market (the origin of ''Les Halles''). Under the reign of Philip II the cemetery was enlarged and surrounded by a three-meter-tall wall. Les Innocents had begun as a cemetery of individual sepulchres, but had become a site for mass graves by then. People were buried together in the same pit (a pit could hold about 1,500 dead at a time); only when it was full would another be opened. In the 14th and 15th centuries, to relieve the overcrowding of the mass graves, citizens constructed arched structures called ''charniers'' or charnel houses along the cemetery walls; bones from the graves were deposited here. Between August 1424 and Lent 1425, during the Anglo-Burgundian alliance when John Duke of Bedford ruled Paris as Regent after the deaths Henry V of England and Charles VI of France, a mural of the Danse Macabre was painted on the back wall of the arcade below the charnel house on the south side of the cemetery. It was one of the earliest and best-known depictions of this theme. It was destroyed in 1669 when this wall was demolished to allow the narrow road behind it to be widened.〔〔 In the 16th century, the prominent Renaissance anatomist Andreas Vesalius studied the bones of corpses in the Holy Innocents cemetery. During the reign of Louis XV, inspectors recorded accounts of the difficulties in conducting business in the area due to the unsanitary conditions of the cemetery, caused by overuse and incomplete decomposition of bodies. Two edicts by Louis XVI to move the parish cemeteries out of the city were resisted by the church, which profited from burial fees. To reduce the number of burials, the price of burials was increased. After a prolonged period of rain in spring 1780, conditions became untenable. On 4 September 1780, an edict forbade burying corpses in Les Innocents and in all other cemeteries in Paris. Bodies were exhumed and the bones were moved to the Catacombs in 1786. Many bodies had incompletely decomposed and had reduced into deposits of fat. During the exhumation, this fat was collected and subsequently turned into candles and soap.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=You (posthumously) light up my life )〕 The church was destroyed in 1787 and the cemetery was replaced by a herb and vegetable market. The ''Fountain of the Nymphs'', which had been erected in 1549 next to the church, was dismantled and rebuilt in the center of the new market. Now known as the "Fountain of Innocents," it still stands on the place Joachim-du-Bellay today.〔 With the final closing, it was estimated that from the Middle Ages until the eighteenth century, the Holy Innocents' Cemetery hosted corpses from 22 parishes in Paris, died from the Hôtel-Dieu, sick with the plague and various unknown (some of which are: drowned in the Seine, deaths on the roads and crippled the nearby crossroads "Court of miracles"), for a total of about two million Parisians. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Holy Innocents' Cemetery」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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