JESUITICA: Père Lachaise

One of Europe’s best known cemeteries takes its name from Père François de la Chaise SJ (1624-1709), confessor to Louis XIV, who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt in 1682 on the site of a chapel on the outskirts of Paris. Napoleon I established the cemetery there  in 1804. The administrators marketed it by moving there the remains of Moliere and La Fontaine, Abelard and Eloise, who were joined by many other literary and political (especially left-wing) corpses, and some 300,00 others. It has become a place of pilgrimage and protest for the Lovelorn (recalling Abelard) and Lefties.