A small park over the Barrière d'Enfer
Square de l'Abbé-Migne is a small garden on Place Denfert-Rochereau, Paris, laid out in 1891 on ground once occupied by the Barrière d'Enfer, an 18th-century toll gate. It holds a column bearing a bronze medallion of painter Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet and sits above the entrance to the Paris Catacombs.
A toll gate's ground became a garden named for a priest
square de l'Abbé-Migne is a small green square on Place Denfert-Rochereau, now open day and night with no gates. It covers barely a third of an acre, planted with roses, tulips, irises, a plane tree, and a ginkgo. It was built in 1891 on ground that once lay inside the Barrière d'Enfer, a toll gate built in the 1780s by the architect Claude Nicolas Ledoux to tax goods entering Paris. The square takes its name from Jacques-Paul Migne, a priest and publisher who ran a printing works in nearby Petit-Montrouge and died in 1875.
A single stone column stands in the square, carrying a bronze medallion portrait of Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, a French painter and writer who died in 1845. The sculptor Alexandre Charpentier made the medallion in 1896, six years after the square itself opened. The column once held more bronze figures around its base. In 1941, under orders from the Vichy government during the German occupation, those statues were pulled down and melted for metal. Only Charlet's portrait survived.
Rol-Tanguy ran the Paris uprising from beneath this square
Below the square, under the old Ledoux toll pavilion, Henri Rol-Tanguy set up a command post in a wartime shelter. Henri Rol-Tanguy led the Paris Resistance forces, the FFI. On August 19 and 20, 1944, he directed the uprising against the German occupation from that bunker. Five days later, Paris was free. The avenue beside the square, Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, carries his name today.
The square sits almost on top of the Catacombs of Paris. Workers began moving bones there in 1786, clearing out Paris's overflowing cemeteries, starting with the Cimetière des Innocents. Millions of skeletons ended up stacked in old stone quarries under the street. The entrance to the ossuary opens right onto the same avenue that borders the square.
The square stands open day and night without gates
The square today holds no gates and no fixed hours. Visitors walk through it freely, day or night, past the roses and the ginkgo tree, within sight of the line for the catacombs.
The square's lone column, its statues long melted down, still faces the entrance to six million buried Parisians.
Every person, building and event in this story opens into its own dig in the app — and Strata will dig the ground under your feet instead, wherever that is, in about a minute, with every source shown.