Paris launches lottery for burial plots among famous artists

Parisians are being offered the chance to win a burial spot among some of history’s most famous artists, including the Doors’ Jim Morrison, author Oscar Wilde and legendary French singer Edith Piaf.The city of Paris has launched a lottery to restore funerary monuments within the overcrowded cemeteries of Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse and Montmartre.Ten gravestones in need of repair at each cemetery are being offered for €4,000 (£3,500) each, on the condition that purchasers restore them and acquire a burial plot beside them.The scheme “presents a compromise” between respecting the dead and giving residents a chance to be buried within the city, the Paris council said.

There are very few burial plots currently available at cemeteries within the city limits, with cemeteries mostly full since the start of the 20th Century,the council added.Maintenance of gravestones and monuments in Parisian cemeteries are the responsibility of families – not the city. Therefore some graves can become abandoned and decrepit over time.

But removing derelict monuments can prove difficult because the cemeteries are classified as protected heritage sites.The city hopes this new programme, which was unanimously approved by the council in April, will help to restore monuments within the famous burial grounds.The cemeteries have also become popular tourist destinations in part due to those who rest there.As well as Morrison, Piaf and Wilde, French novelist Marcel Proust and Polish composer Frederic Chopin are buried at Père Lachaise.Writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett and singer Serge Gainsbourg were laid to rest at Montparnasse, while actress Jane Birkin’s ashes were interned there.Painter Edgar Degas, writer Emile Zola and French New Wave director Francois Truffaut are buried at Montmartre.There is no suggestion that any of these monuments are up for grabs under the scheme.The 30 available gravestones, many now without distinguishable inscriptions, date back to the 19th Century.

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