Cimetière du Montparnasse is a beautiful cemetery in the Montparnasse quarter. Originally known as Le Cimetière du Sud, it was created in the 19th century. It became a place of burial of the exhumed remains from the closed Saints Innocents Cemetery. It is a popular tourist attraction because many artists and intellectuals are interred there, e.g. Charles Baudelaire and Antoine Bourdelle.
Cemeteries had been banned from Paris because of the health concerns which reasoned from the awful sanitary conditions on the Cimetière des Innocents. Several new cemeteries on the outskirts of the capital replaced all the internal ones in the early 19th century: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise Cemetery in the east, Montparnasse Cemetery in the south and Passy Cemetery on the west.
Montparnasse Cemetery is the eternal home of many of France’s intellectual and artistic elite as well as publishers and others who promoted the works of authors and artists. Notable people interred in the cemetery include Samuel Beckett, Théodore de Banville, Paul Belmondo, Constantin Brâncuşi, Roger Caillois, André Citroën, Emil Cioran, Julio Cortázar, Porfirio Diaz, Émile Durkheim, Carlos Fuentes, Serge Gainsbourg, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Eugène Ionesco, Guy de Maupassant, Max Nordau, Jules Henri Poincaré,Tristan Tzara, Ossip Zadkine. There are also monuments to police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty.