Tourism is always focused around the sun, sea and sand, and exploring nature and history, but there is also another type of tourism, which is dark tourism, which is far from fun or happiness, but it focuses on exploring something ugly and dangerous, which is the morgue.

This disturbing phenomenon spread in the nineteenth century when many English visitors to Paris changed their plans and instead of discovering the famous sights of Paris they would go with the crowds to see a show of Mahani in the morgue! Thérèse Raccoon Zola says in describing this phenomenon: (The morgue is within reach of all the poor and the rich, where the door is open for anyone who wishes to enter and it has fans who roam the streets to watch the death, and when the panels are empty visitors feel disappointed and when there is a display of the human body crowd visitors To offer cheap feelings of joy and fear, then clap or mock as if they were in the theater, then leave, announcing that the morgue was a success today!).

The Paris morgue was regularly displayed in magazines and travel books, and this matter rarely received any moral refusal to peek at the dead and violate the sanctity of death, but how did this place become a public shrine, and was there another purpose in creating this most terrifying place in the world?

In Paris during the Middle Ages, there was a problem about what to do with unknown corpses, but later, specifically during the reign of Louis XIV, the practice of displaying the dead was established to identify them, and in 1718 AD the Shalit prison was transformed into the Paris morgue, where it was used To put the corpses of the dead found in the streets or shipwrecked, and in fact most of the morgue inmates were shipwrecked.

But the mortuary officials were the same prison officials, who had no idea how to preserve the dead, and therefore the bodies were often dumped in people on the ground, and they were exposed to decomposition, while the unfortunate visitors were exposed to harmful fumes while trying to identify their zombie. During the French Revolution, Shalit prison fell due to its relationship with the French monarchy and was closed in 1792 AD, but before it hosted the bodies of the seven guards who fell during the storming of the Bastille prison and their condition was horrific.

After urbanization increased in Paris in the nineteenth century, the emigration of many people to Paris increased, and this in turn led to an increase in unknown bodies among strangers, and this in turn led to the emergence of an administrative problem again about how to identify the owners of unknown bodies that continued to appear in the streets of Paris and in Seine River.

So in 1804 AD a new morgue was built by order of Napoleon, and the new morgue was built in a location near the Seine - the main resource for corpses, and a classic building was built in the middle of the administrative district, and it was very clear and located on a busy road close to the police headquarters, and because this new building It was better than before, attracting thousands of viewers, but it was still in trouble, as there was no private entrance to enter the corpses far from the entrances to visitors, and it was filled with a terrible chemical smell, also with mice.

But in 1850 AD, after Baron Georges Haussmann took over the rule of Paris, he decided to redevelop the city, demolishing the old morgue, and building new ones in 1864 CE that were better off behind Notre Dame Cathedral, and the new was more spacious than the old one, and it was provided with more advanced facilities, including rooms for dissection And registration staff, laundromat and more, a back entrance to the bodies.

In 1870 AD, photography was used to display corpses instead of direct display, and in 1880 AD, cooling technology was introduced to the morgue, yet visiting the morgue remained linked in the public's mind to entertainment, and the local press fed this matter, as it spread stories of suicide, murder and human tragedies Which was closely related to the morgue.

A visitor to the morgue in the sixties of the nineteenth century saw a great scene of daily drama, and the displayed body was a cause for celebration so that visitors had to wait several hours to be able to enter, and in one day tens of thousands of men, women and children would come to see the bodies, especially those that It was linked to crimes and public events.

For example, a man tore his sweetheart with a knife and cut her body and transported it to the Seine in two packages, and the other case of an 18-month-old girl who was found dead under the stairs of a house, both cases were widely covered by the media, which brought thousands of visitors to the morgue to view the bodies and speculate about the circumstances of their death, and from The funny thing is that despite the thousands of visitors flocking to see the body of the victim who was cut off by her lover. Those who attended the murderer's public execution were fewer than 600.

Despite the ugliness of the idea of ​​the Paris morgue, it was more than just a place to display bodies for visitors, but it also contributed to the introduction of photographic technology into forensic medicine, the introduction of refrigeration, a greater focus on autopsies, and the development of police methods in forensic investigation.

In 1907 AD, the Paris morgue was finally closed due to concerns about hygiene, as well as concern for ethical issues, the introduction of more scientific techniques in forensic medicine, and the granting of the morgue a professional character more than just a place for entertainment, and also because of the radical changes that occurred in society after the Industrial Revolution, and it was replaced At the Forensic Institute, however, the horrific history of the Paris morgue cannot be forgotten.