Interview: French forensic pathologist on groundbreaking Paris Catacombs study

Philippe Charlier talks about leading the first scientific study into the millions of skeletons buried there and ponders why the Western world is both fascinated and terrified by death

Author, anthropologist and archaeologist Philippe Charlier: 'I am naturally drawn to rituals related to death'
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“What have you got in your bag?” I asked Philippe Charlier upon meeting for our interview at Le Petit Cardinal brasserie in the heart of Place Monge in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. ‘Bag’ is a misnomer. 

He is pushing what is colloquially known as a granny cart or trolley, and it is stuffed full.

“Books,” he answered, which is fitting when you consider the place is known for being the intellectual, academic and cultural nucleus of Paris. 

You cannot move for all the prestigious universities, schools, libraries and laboratories.

“They’ve come from home but I’m taking them to the university, my second home really.”

Mr Charlier holds three PhDs, in medicine, science and archeology, has written 33 books, and heads the Anthropology, Archeology and Biology Laboratory (LAAB) of Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines’ university. 

He curates numerous museum exhibitions, as well as many other projects that keep him busy.

Catacombs Paris
Layers of skulls and bones in the Catacombs

Catacombs skeletons study

This includes the Catacombs of Paris, where his team was commissioned to carry out the first comprehensive study on the millions of buried skeletons, an exhibition on zombies which ended last February, and his first novel, which won the 2024 Du Guesclin prize.

His name has also regularly appeared in mainstream media over the past 15 years whenever a historical figure needs to be autopsied, from King Francis I to Joan of Arc, Honoré de Balzac to Pablo Picasso.

“I am naturally drawn to rituals related to death,” he said, having also written books on our fascination for vampires, ghosts, spirits and zombies.

He likes to explore what he calls “the dead that do not stand still” and Westerners’ relationship with death, which he says is ambivalent.

The Connexion met him to talk about the Catacombs, zombies, death rituals and the dual fascination with and repulsion for death in Western societies.

 Three years into your work, what are your findings at the Catacombs? 

 The Catacombs can be considered a cohort, in other words an immense ossuary of individuals spanning the 9th to the late-19th Centuries.

We have noticed that some diseases, such as rickets, appear more frequently or on a much bigger scale than for a normal population. We have found that there are individuals from Africa and Asia, identified through genetics.

There are diplomats, traders, ambassadors, slaves…

How can genetics reveal someone’s job? Did you rely on historical documents or was this the result of medical findings?

We can figure out what we call ‘occupations’ in English. There are some activities that imply repeating the same movements which eventually give us traces and indications. For example, coopers, horse riders and prostitutes, among many others.

You were sceptical about the estimated figure of six million bones. How many are there, according to your initial findings?

Probably around 10 to 12 million. But our findings will be tested over time. And that is the beauty of it. It is not a definite figure. 

Please visit the Catacombs because, as you roam its corridors, you will come across walls of bones. Can you imagine that they are 17m thick? We did not imagine there to be that many. This is the biggest ossuary. I prefer that term over ‘mass grave’ because it carries too much emotion.

Why did public officials wait so long to open them for medical and historical study?

I do not know, but I would not say it was because of any taboos. It is mainly because these are not the dead from one period, but rather millions of dead people spread out over 10 centuries. What exists, however, is immense respect toward them. 

I, as a medical professional, treat them as patients, not skeletons. I think the absence of any study is due to how monumental the task was perceived to be by Paris’s mairie, and how inaccessible it seemed from an archival, historical and scientific standpoint. 

The amount of bones was so immense that they thought there was nothing that could be done.

“The task is enormous. It is work without an end,” you told The Guardian. Is it the most monumental study of your career? Do you think it will outlive you?

Even my students' students would never be able to process all the bones in the Catacombs. And that's not the point. It is not desirable and it would not make sense. Like Pompeii, where it's an illusion to want to excavate everything.

You travel a lot in France and have said that cemeteries are the first places you go to when you visit a village. What do they say that churches don't?

Sometimes the cemetery is next to the church, sometimes the tombstones are on the floor of the church. When I go into a church building, I don't look at the stained glass windows but at the floor. I'll probably get osteoarthritis in my neck from looking down so much (laughs). 

Cemeteries tell us a lot about both the living and the dead, the relationships those who have survived keep with them or not, the way in which the dead are still a tangible presence in the world of the living. 

It tells us a lot about the permeability, the porosity that exists between both worlds.The first time I visited Milan, I went to the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano, the biggest cemetery in the city. When in London, I went to Temple Church to visit the sepulchres of the Knights Templar. I am naturally drawn to rituals related to death.

Exhibition on zombies
Exhibition Zombies: Is Death Not an End?

 You were director of an exhibition on zombies at the Musée du quai Branly – Jacques-Chirac. What interests you about them? What message did you wish to share with visitors?

Specifically that porosity, what I call “the dead that do not stand still”. 

Phantoms, spectrums, spirits, vampires and zombies are part of that qualification. I studied all of them, including zombies, with the eye of the doctor, the anthropologist and the archeologist. Zombies are not living-dead creatures. They are non-dead creatures.

Definitions of a zombie include a “fictional character”, “a revenant”, and “an inanimate cadaver that feeds on people’s flesh”. You say you've come across zombies in Haiti. What does one look like?

 It is a body without a soul, an individual drained of its intellectual substance. Either by drugs or by psychological pressure or shock. These individuals will be in this state for the rest of their lives, which I consider to be survival, because they have done evil. The punishment, the zombification, is considered worse than death.

This is the first type of zombie. There are three others. The second is the criminal zombie, the criminal not being the zombie itself but the one who provokes it. It is the mother-in-law who zombifies you because she does not think you are good enough for her daughter, it is the husband who poisons you because he wants to leave with his mistress and you, his wife, refuses to divorce him. I have met both these types of zombie.

The third type is the psychiatric. There are no drugs. It is the person with Cotard’s syndrome, a psychosis that makes you think you are dead – in the Haitian context, a zombie. Fourth is the social zombie, a person who takes the place of someone who has died. The zombie here is a metaphor.

These four types represent an estimated population of 50,000 people in Haiti.

 Where does medicine come into play here?

Look at what we have just talked about. Drugs, psychiatry, identity… Medicine intertwines with anthropology. As for archeology, it stems from where the drugs come from, originating from local populations who have shared secrets about their effects. This exhibition was the result of a 15-year project.

Michel Ney, Richard I of England, Hitler, Napoleon, Henri IV, Descartes, Robespierre, Diane de Poitiers…

The list of autopsied humans goes on. Versailles-Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines’ university will open a museum in 2027 to exhibit many of these historical figures in an attempt to learn about prehistory, history and medico-legal science through the ability to touch bodies.

 Is every new personality autopsied a childhood dream come true?

 No. I rather see it as a puzzle that is ongoing.

What is the point of, say, autopsying Hitler’s skull? Surely everything has already been said and written about these people?

 There are two types of history, one with a capital H and one with a lower-case h. I do not place one over the other. They are the same to me. Everything is of interest.

Catacombs are lower-case h. Capital H are figures from history, the stuff of biographies, the part you can put a name to, an identity and a face on it.

The goal is to take the king out of a painting or a sculpture and turn him into a living figure, much like the two of us speaking right now over a coffee. The idea is to turn them into something palpable and real.

The Catacombs work is on a large number of individuals. On historical figures, the work is about confirming what has already been painted, sculpted or written. Some of the findings help highlight that several historical sources cannot be reliable, for instance.

There is, ultimately, a significant interest for us, the future dead. When we compare historical and artistic sources with forensic realities, it allows us to develop, refine, and enhance forensic techniques, particularly in anthropology, for identifying individuals. 

I now have a Richard the Lionheart protocol, a Joan of Arc protocol, and so on. We apply these protocols in the service of French justice.

 What relationship does the Western world maintain with death?

 An ambivalent one. We remain fascinated, we almost want to touch it, but it scares us as well, and we want to distance ourselves from it. It has gone back and forth, oscillating between fascination and revulsion since the 17th century.

Very few people admit they slow down on the highway when they pass by a crash scene…

 But everybody does it. Dying at the hospital has become the new norm while people used to die at home, and this visibility was a way of preparing others to face it themselves.

 Before, suffering was a part of it. Nowadays, you have talks around euthanasia or medically assisted death. The Western world goes back-and-forth when it comes to death.

Covid changed our perspective, too. Each night, the death toll was publicly communicated to the population. We were confronted with it every day. It was lurking as a daily occurrence, a routine event.

Real death, for me, is what I call social death. Until I forget my grandmother's perfume, smell and voice, she will never be totally dead to me.

There is biological death, encephalic death, social death and, a more sentimental and philosophical one: oblivion, being forgotten.

What is your opinion on the companies out there which look to preserve ‘souvenirs’ of people, the voice and smell of loved ones for example?

 I do not know a lot about it but I would not call it ‘life’. What you mention is an attempt to preserve life that traps survivors and makes it harder to grieve. This is not very healthy. 

When someone dies, he or she needs to change state. Maintaining a false vitality is a recipe for the creation of a generation of neurotic people.

You wrote your first novel, La Dame du Jeu d’Echecs (2024), after 33 non-fiction, science-related ones. You said it was “because life and dreams need to be maintained”...It was exactly for that reason. The book is about this image that kept resonating with me since I was 19. It was time to write about it. I am a scientist. I looked into using the resources science gives but I opened a new door instead, a new window, and let my imagination run freely.