This is the most visited cemetery in the world.

It is the hub of Paris' dead rich and famous. The list of famous corpses now buried there includes Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, and Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani. Wilde's tomb is one of the garden cemetery's most famous and is covered in the lipstick kisses of admirers.

The cemetery of Père Lachaise opened in 1804 and takes its name from the confessor to Louis XIV, Père François de la Chaise (1624–1709), who lived in the Jesuit house rebuilt during 1682 on the site of the chapel. The property, situated on the hillside from which the king watched skirmishing between the armies of the Condé and Turenne during the Fronde, was bought by the city in 1804. Established as a cemetery by Napoleon during that year, plans were laid out by Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart; the property was later extended. Napoleon, who had been proclaimed Emperor by the Senate three days earlier, had declared during the Consulate that "Every citizen has the right to be buried regardless of race or religion".

After the closing of the Holy Innocents' Cemetery on December 1, 1780 and as the city graveyards of Paris filled, several new, large cemeteries, outside the precincts of the capital, replaced them: Montmartre Cemetery in the north, Père Lachaise in the east, and Montparnasse Cemetery in the south. Near the middle of the city is Passy Cemetery

The French officials approved the transformation of 17 hectares of Mont-Louis into the Cemetery of the East in 1803 and the work was given to neoclassical architect Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart. He would use English-style gardens as inspiration, designing the cemetery with uneven paths adorned with diverse trees and plants and lined with carved graves. He anticipated various funerary monuments but only one was finally built: the grave of the Greffulhe family, in a refined neo-Gothic style.

At the time of its opening, the cemetery was considered to be situated too far from the city and attracted few funerals. Moreover, many Roman Catholics refused to have their graves in a place that had not been blessed by the Church. In 1804, the Père Lachaise contained only 13 graves. Consequently, the administrators devised a marketing strategy to improve the cemetery's stature: in 1804, with great fanfare, they organized the transfer of the remains of Jean de La Fontaine and Molière to the new resting place. The next year there were 44 burials, with 49 during 1806, 62 during 1807 and 833 during 1812. Then, in another great spectacle of 1817, the purported remains of Pierre Abélard and Héloïse d'Argenteuil were also transferred to the cemetery along with their monument's canopy made from fragments of the abbey of Nogent-sur-Seine. By tradition, lovers or lovelorn singles leave letters at the crypt in tribute to the couple or in hope of finding true love.

The Communards' Wall (Mur des Fédérés), located within the cemetery, was the site where 147 Communards, the last defenders of the workers' district of Belleville, were shot on 28 May 1871 when Paris refused to capitulate to the Prussians in the brief Franco-Prussian War.That day was the last of the Semaine Sanglante ("Bloody Week"), during which the Paris Commune was crushed. Today, the site is a traditional rallying point for members of the French political Left. Ironically, Adolphe Thiers, the French president who directed "Bloody Week", is also interred in the cemetery, where his tomb has occasionally been subject to vandalism.