Morbid Fact Du Jour for May 29, 2015

Today’s Voyeuristic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A kind of dark tourism was commonplace in the nineteenth century, with a variety of different spectacles and events associated with violence, death and deformity often becoming framed or experienced as macabre and sensational forms of entertainment. Every fight or brawl, anonymous suicide, railway accident, murder or infanticide became not just an event to be reported in itself, but also a story of the community’s engagement with trauma, death and violence. News reports of the large crowds that flocked to the sites related to notorious crimes such as cemeteries, court houses, prisons and murder scenes confirmed the sensational nature of a case and, in turn, helped to draw increasing numbers of onlookers. [What perfectly HORRIBLE people! – DeSpair]
The Paris morgue was one of the most famous international sites for this kind of macabre voyeurism in the nineteenth century. From 1864 until 1921 the morgue was located on the quai de l’Archevêché near Notre Dame, nearly within jumping distance of the Seine (from the waters of which many of its subjects were retrieved). The bodies of the anonymous dead were displayed on black marble slabs behind a large glass window for members of the public to view, day or night, seven days a week. Green curtains were hung at either end so that authorities were able to obscure the public’s view when changing the exhibits, intensifying its resemblance to a stage show. Comparisons to waxworks, the theatre and even department store windows were made regularly in sensational newspaper commentaries, which always accompanied the appearance of a new corpse, while the morgue itself was included along with the city’s other tourist attractions in all the guidebooks of Paris.

The Morgue at Paris. The Last Scene of a Tragedy. — Image by © CORBIS

Vanessa R. Schwartz has written extensively on the Paris morgue in Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siecle Paris (1998), and describes the way that ‘behind each corpse’s mysterious identity lay an untold story that readers searched out in a press that offered them up for wide-scale consumption’. As Schwartz points out, the thousands of people who visited the morgue every day were able to justify their desire to view the dead in the name of civic duty—on the remote chance that they may assist in identifying one of the bodies—all the while satisfying (or at least titillating) a range of darker sensibilities.

Culled from: Meanjin
Generously submitted by: Mike Marano

Aw, man!  Why can’t we have nice things like this anymore?  Now we just have websites with photos to provide our morbid entertainment.  It’s just not the same…

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

And I see that our beloved Madame Talbot has a poster dedicated to the glorious thing that was the Paris Morgue!

And while you’re there check out Madame Talbot’s entire site.  It’s brilliant.  I wish I had her talent…

Madame Talbot’s Victorian Lowbrow