Parisian city fathers try to call time on a most grave problem

The saying "you are a long time in your grave" is to be re-written by the Paris town hall.

The saying "you are a long time in your grave" is to be re-written by the Paris town hall.

Parisians will be 15, 30 or 50 years in their grave, depending on how much they or their relatives pay for a plot in one of the city's celebrated but overcrowded cemeteries.

Yves Contassot, the assistant mayor of Paris for the environment, announced that the city was to put an end to its traditional policy of "permanent" leases in Père-Lachaise, Montparnasse and the city's other graveyards. Existing leases will be respected but in future entrants will have to be moved, or cremated, once their time is up.

Although the French are dying less rapidly than they used to, space available in urban cemeteries in Paris and other big cities is unable to cope with the demand.

The problem also exists in some villages. The mayor of Lavandou, a village on the south coast near St Tropez, issued an edict two years ago forbidding people to die in his commune unless they already had a family tomb or vault in the overflowing village cemetery. His edict was rescinded but he made his point.

Under French law, municipalities are duty-bound to find a burial place for anyone expiring in their commune within six days of the death.

Of the 16,000 deaths recorded in Paris last year, less than one third could be accommodated in the city's 14 cemeteries, mostly in six relatively new sites outside the city boundaries. The others were cremated or taken to graveyards elsewhere.

M. Contassot said there were more than 150,000 graves or vaults in Parisian cemeteries, but only a few hundred came free each year. Under existing rules, a permanent lease can only be cancelled and the remains removed if no one shows any sign of visiting the plot for 30 years.

"There is a three-year minimum waiting list here," an official at the Montparnasse cemetery told the newspaper Libération. "But I have nothing on sale at the moment."

The cemetery charges €10,132 (£6,454) for coveted "border" plots close to footpaths and €5,795 (£3,691) for "interior" sites.

There are suspicions that when President Jacques Chirac was Mayor of Paris, people with connections at the town hall were allowed to jump the queue. M. Contassot, part of the new socialist-green administration, said the way to make the system fairer, and cheaper, for everyone was to move to a policy of 15, 30 and 50- year leases. Even that would not start to solve the problem for many years ahead.