A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924 by Kaylee P. Alexander

Funerary traditions have been a compelling subject for scholarly inquiry across disciplines since Philippe Ariès applied a history of mentalities methodology to Western attitudes and conventions surrounding death in his 1977 study, L’Homme devant la mort (published in English as The Hour of Our Death). A recent contribution to the literature, Kaylee Alexander’s A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris, 1804–1924, pursues this field of study with an innovative examination of modern French funerary monuments that realizes the potential of the digital humanities to convey new understandings of the past, even upturning some of Ariès’s own findings. Despite its clinical title, this volume is an approachable, engaging, and effective consideration of urban and suburban visual culture in the long nineteenth century.

The developments examined in A Data-Driven Analysis of Cemeteries and Social Reform in Paris follow from the Enlightenment’s emergent concepts of selfhood and the autonomy of the individual and new notions of private property proposed by the Napoleonic Code (1804). These developments are a direct result of France’s Imperial Decree of 23 Prairial, Year XII (June 12, 1804), which democratized burial practices by granting every deceased a free, private plot for five years (the time it presumably took for a corpse to decompose), upon which the deceased’s loved ones could choose to erect a temporary monument. Representing a considerable shift from the anonymous burials in common graves that characterized most early modern French interments, Alexander asserts that the decree gave rise to a popular culture of memorialization that created an entirely new market for gravestones, elevated the work of marbriers (stonecutters) and marbreries (stonework enterprises), and transformed landscapes around the city as cemeteries opened to accommodate an emergent material culture of death.

This book is, in a way, about absence. The Decree of 23 Prairial, Year XII sanctioned the removal of tombstones from temporary plots after the designated period, compelling Alexander to ask, “how long do funerary monuments last?” (3) and to call attention to the current-day physical absence of the majority of funerary monuments erected in the nineteenth century. While such markers are referenced in historical ledgers, their fate was tied to the provisional lifespan of temporary plots. The author argues that prior analyses of funerary practices—notably that of Ariès—relied on existing monuments to derive and support hypotheses. But those structures have endured because of the deceased’s wealth and status and therefore represent a survival bias that ignores the hundreds of thousands of temporary monuments actually erected—and then effaced—in the course of the long nineteenth century. This book seeks to fill gaps in knowledge by using textual sources as proxy evidence for lost material evidence.

Alexander’s volume is a timely argument in support of utilizing digital humanities methodologies—in this case, the compilation and analysis of large datasets drawn both manually by the author from archives and printed material and from digitized records with software assistance—to challenge past assumptions and propose new conclusions about the history of art. Alexander’s study relies in large part on the four datasets she compiled that concern, respectively, annual burials in Paris’s three primary cemeteries (Père Lachaise, Montmartre, and Montparnasse); marbriers and marbreries operating in Paris; monuments known to have existed in Père Lachaise Cemetery in 1815; and the business records of a single, surviving Paris marbrerie that dates back to at least 1830. While acknowledging the limitations of her aggregated data, Alexander uses it effectively to contest and to refine Ariès’s foundational ideas, not as an impeachment of traditional scholarly methodologies, but as an invitation to broaden our scholarly approaches to better understand the past.

The first chapter utilizes a vast dataset of burial records to challenge Aries’s theory that the purchase of perpetual plots grew to outpace demand for free plots (granted for five years) and temporary concessions (renewable for up to thirty years) in the course of the nineteenth century, ostensibly demonstrating that the middle classes came to accept the idea of permanent resting places for common people as their wealth and numbers grew. Alexander’s data reveals instead that demand for each type of plot remained quite stable across the century: the space required for perpetual plots simply compounded while the reuse of space for temporary plots—and the removal of their monuments—created the appearance of the triumph of perpetual plots. The persistence of nineteenth-century grave monuments on perpetual plots today represents a survival bias, she argues, that skews historical reality. Additionally, Alexander’s discussion of Jewish burial practices in this chapter shows how 23 Prairial, while seemingly democratic, did not impact all populations equally. A contradiction to Jewish law that prohibits exhumation after burial, temporary plots in civic cemeteries posed a spiritual obstacle to observant Jews who lacked the means to secure expensive permanent plots and gave rise to a private foundation established to buy perpetual plots and sell subsidized burial compartments to members of the Jewish community in Paris.

The growth in publications of contemporary advertisements and commercial almanacs for funerary markers in this period points to the rapid development of a specialized workforce to accommodate the popular demand for this new commodity—a market created entirely from public law. Chapter 2 paints an absorbing picture of funerary marker-makers as rising—and often risible—specialists among marbriers. Popularly lampooned by writers and caricaturists—including Honoré Daumier—as calculating salesmen preying on the bereaved, funerary marbriers produced individualized monuments and provided ongoing grave maintenance for both temporary and perpetual plots. Alexander examines the particular disdain architects such as Jean Marie Boussard and César Daly expressed towards marbriers: as collaborators working to execute the architect’s designs for building decorations and public monuments since ancient times, marbriers were freed by the new culture of memorialization to work directly with customers on individual tombstone designs, thereby cutting architects out of projects and profits and incurring their ire. Here, a more detailed discussion of the specialized training marbriers received relative to architects and sculptors would have been welcomed to better appreciate the skill and learning of these maligned professionals.

The third chapter further explores the marbrier’s services and wares, specifically the customization of monuments, through the lens of Kelvin Lancaster’s theory of characteristics demand. Far from standardized, tomb monuments could be assembled from a number of different materials, and buyers could select among a variety of distinct elements, ornaments, and styles that appeared in catalogues and marbriers’ model books, with prices reflecting the quality and complexity of each semiunique creation. Alexander’s investigation relies on three categories of printed source materials to infer what types of monuments might have populated the nineteenth-century cemetery: quick-reference handbooks for marbriers, sales catalogues targeted at consumers, and elaborate model books valuable to both. The chapter engages in informed speculation about the characteristics of monuments based on the options available to clients and marbriers in these publications, such as letter sizing and choice of stone. A fascinating aspect of the author’s discoveries is that consumers of all walks of life could and did engage marbriers to create bespoke grave markers—even those seeking a monument that would be removed after a mere five years. (What, the reader is curious to learn, became of discarded gravestones created on demand for temporary plots?)

The final chapter explores stylistic currents in funerary monuments in the first part of the nineteenth century based on an incomplete record of memorials captured in Roger and Roger’s Le Champs du Repos (1816), an illustrated volume of select tombstones extant in Père Lachaise Cemetery (then on the outskirts of Paris) more than a decade after the cemetery opened and after the earliest free plots had already been turned over (and their monuments presumably removed to make way for newer remains and gravestones). Applying a visual analysis to more than two thousand depictions of individual monuments, the author links design trends to concurrent developments in architectural eclecticism and to the emerging consumerism of the growing middle classes, whose aesthetic taste influenced—and was in turn influenced by—elite preferences in a “trickle-round” phenomenon. One of the most interesting findings in this chapter concerns the prominent use of railings around distinct plots—even around free, five-year plots featuring inexpensive wooden crosses as markers—to demarcate the plot as private property, further evidence of the high value ascribed to individuality and private space in the cemetery.

The epilogue offers a delightful micro-case study of an extant Paris marbrerie that has been in operation since at least 1830 on the outskirts of the Auteuil cemetery.

Alexander’s forceful and persuasive reassessment of nineteenth-century cemeteries in and around Paris broadens our understanding of not just the memorialization of death but also notions of individualism, consumerism, the mutual influence of class on design, and urban development during a century of cultural regeneration in France. It demonstrates how a legislated, democratizing action—such as the universal provision of private burial plots—equally reinforced and subverted existing social hierarchies as France’s lower classes strove to emulate elite traditions and its upper classes found inspiration in the stylistic choices of the common people. One of the book’s most valuable contributions is its scholarly consideration of the rise of stonecutters who specialized in funerary monuments. That these marbriers were often derided in popular culture as predators obtruding on the grieving—and that they were disparaged by architects for the supposedly more mechanical nature of their work—adds a layer of interest to the marbrier’s role in the history of the culture of death.

Some readers may object to the author’s reliance on aggregate data to draw conclusions in a discipline so often intent on the particular, but it is precisely the distance afforded by a wide lense that allows Alexander to detect patterns that have escaped earlier studies. That the author’s scholarship is robust and her writing engaging makes it especially unfortunate that the book presents a fair number of typos. Similarly on the editorial side, in many of the illustrations that promise valuable data, the text is simply too small and of reduced quality to read, rendering the images inadequate as visual aids. The book’s data tables are far more helpful to the reader.

Unique in both subject and methodology, this book will be of interest to scholars of memorialization, consumption, the history of Paris and its urban development, death, and the evolution of classes. The author’s methods could be applied broadly in art history to thoroughly analyze extensive written data and to formulate conclusions that have previously eluded scholars. It is an important contribution to the study of the visual culture of nineteenth-century Paris that demonstrates the value and limitations of applying digital humanities methodologies to the study of ephemeral objects, one that leads the reader to wonder just what else more traditional studies have missed by looking only at the evidence that remains.