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Père Lachaise cemetery was consecrated and opened on the first day of spring, 20 May 1804.

The cemetery takes its name from the confessor to Louis XIV, the Jesuit François d'Aix de la Chaise (1624–1709), known as Père de la Chaise. He lived in the Jesuit estate on this site from 1675-1709. The site was then known as Mont-Louis either in honour of Saint-Louis, patron saint of Jesuits, or because King Louis XIV came to this estate on 2 July 1652 to watch the battle of the Battle of the Faubourg St Antoine (part of the Second Fronde).

The property, situated on the Mont-Louis hillside, from which the king during the Fronde, watched skirmishing between the Condé and Turenne, was bought by the city in 1804. Established by Napoleon in this year, the cemetery was laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart, and later extended. Père Lachaise Cemetery was opened on 21 May 1804. The first person buried there was a five-year-old girl named Adélaïde Pailliard de Villeneuve, the daughter of a door bell-boy of the Faubourg St. Antoine. Napoleon Bonaparte as a consul declared that “Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion”. [2] Several new cemeteries replaced the Parisian ones, outside the precincts of the capital: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. At the heart of the city, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, is Passy Cemetery. At the time of its opening, the cemetery was considered to be situated too far from the city and attracted few funerals. Moreover, the Roman Catholics refused to have their graves in a place that had not been blessed by the Church. In 1804, the Père Lachaise had contained only 13 graves. Consequently, the administrators devised a marketing strategy and in 1804, with great fanfare, organised the transfer of the remains of La Fontaine and Molière. The following year there were 44 and 49 in 1806, 62 in 1807 and 833 in 1812. Then, in another great spectacle in 1817, the purported* remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse were also transferred to the cemetery with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine (by tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love) (*see disputation).