The Montmartre Cemetery, officially called Cimetière du Nord, was created on the site of former gypsum quarries where the dead, including the fallen Swiss Guards of 10 August 1792, began to be secretly buried as early as the end of the 18th century.

It was then, in the shadow of the French Revolution, that the idea of creating modern, secular necropolises outside the city walls was born. It was both an expression of a revolutionary re-evaluation of attitudes to religion and ecclesiastical institutions and a need arising from dramatic sanitary and urban problems. Overcrowded church cemeteries in the centre of Paris were becoming a threat to public health, which, combined with Enlightenment ideology, led to a new model of memorial space - the cemetery as an organised, orderly enclave outside the urban fabric.

In 1798, the first cemetery on the site, named Champ du Repos, was opened. Although initially small, it underwent numerous transformations over time and was reopened in 1825 as one of the city's three main cemeteries (alongside Père-Lachaise and Montparnasse). This moment symbolically ended the era of chaos and anonymity of revolutionary death, and ushered in a new order of individual and collective memory.

It is no coincidence that Montmartre became the resting place for many outstanding figures: artists, composers, writers and thinkers who gave shape to French and European culture. Edgar Degas, the master of Impressionism, Jacques Offenbach, the composer of operettas, as well as Jeanne Moreau, François Truffaut, Hector Berlioz, Dalida, France Gall, Michel Berger or Alexandre Dumas's son, rest here. Some tombstones are true works of art - such as the full-figure sculpture of Dalida by Aslan, whose melancholic pose and radiant halo recall classical motifs reinterpreted in the spirit of pop culture, or Emil Zola's cenotaph - an empty tomb as a manifestation of the duration of an idea.

The Montmartre cemetery also provides a fascinating example of sepulchral art as a space for the synthesis of styles. Among the numerous artistic testimonies, two chapels occupy a special place: the neo-Gothic Potocki chapel designed by Jacques Ignace Hittorff and the classicist Fournier chapel with its monumental sepulchral niches (enfeules). The first, soaring and altar-like in form, evokes the spirit of medieval sacrality, while fitting in with the 19th-century fashion for Romantic Neo-Gothic. The second, austere and monumental, exemplifies classicist art as a language of eternal duration, harmony and order. Both buildings are protected as monuments and are among the most outstanding examples of sepulchral architecture of the 19th century in France.

Montmartre was and is also an important point of reference for the Polish diaspora. Among the hundreds of graves one can find names familiar to Polish history: Maria Szymanowska, Bohdan Zaleski, Julian Ursyn Niemcewicz or members of the Kamienski family. Their presence in the cemetery was not accidental - for many Poles in exile, Montmartre became the final resting place, a symbol of dignity and continuity of national identity beyond the borders of the homeland. It was here that Polishness persisted as a memory and cultural space, often more vividly than in lands occupied or divided by the partitioners.

No less fascinating is the architectural and urban history of the cemetery. It was here, at the end of the 19th century, that Paris's first steel bridge - the Pont Caulaincourt - was built, cutting across the necropolis. Although its construction was controversial, today it is an integral and recognisable part of Montmartre's landscape.