Necrotourist

<--Tracy in the Paris Catacombs

We chained our pushbikes to the railings, and trotted across the bright late afternoon road, bought tickets at the tiny ticket booth in the entrance, then clattered unattended down an iron staircase deep down into the chilly damp depths of Catacombs that burrow innumerable labyrinths underneath the streets of Paris.

Briefly, these Catacombs had been most extensively used during the French Revolution by aristocrats evading the guillotine. After the revolution they were used to store the bones from surface cemetries which were cleared to create land for building. More recently, it is said that they were used by the Resistance during the Nazi occupation to hide fugitives. During the 1950s, the Parisian Situationists accidentally discovered a previously unknown entrance in to the Catacombs and spent sometime exploring the disused and unlit sections as part of their Psychogeographical research. Guy Debord makes references to this Situationist activity in his 1958 essay "The theory of the derive", claiming that "slipping by night into buildings undergoing demolition, hitch-hiking non-stop and without destination through Paris during a transportation strike in order to add to the confusion, wandering in subterranean catacombs forbidden to the public" were typically seen as revolutionary acts by the Situationist participants. Later, (in another essay "The Adventure" December 1960) Debord re-uses the Catacombs as a metaphor for the subversive nature of the Situationist ideology "The Situationists are in the catacombs of the visible culture".

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