Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury

It was a storage problem masquerading as a memorial, and it was in desperate need of organization.

That changed in 1810 when a man named Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury took charge.

Héricart de Thury was the inspector general of quarries, the head of the EGC, and he was a man with a particular combination of qualities that the situation demanded—administrative competence, engineering expertise, and a deeply felt sense that the dead deserve something more than a pile.

Under his direction, the chaotic heaps of bones were systematically reorganized into the architectural formations that are visible in the ossuary today.

Workers, laborers, and masons working by candlelight in the narrow, damp corridors of the quarry sorted the bones by type and began stacking them in arrangements that were simultaneously structural and decorative.

The EGC has been mapping the tunnels for nearly two hundred and fifty years, and they have not given up.

The cataphiles have been exploring the tunnels for decades, and they have not given up.

Héricart de Thury arranged the bones into patterns because he believed that the dead deserved more than a pile, and the patterns he created have survived for more than two centuries.

It was easy for visitors to get lost or even injured.

So in 1810, a famous engineer named Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury decided something had to change.

It wasn't fair to the deceased to leave them lying in a hole, or to make their loved ones wander through the dark maze-like mine shafts when they wanted to pay their respects.

Unfortunately, he couldn't give these skeletons traditional burials.