Morgue

Morgue is a book about the history and afterlives of the most influential building you’ve never heard of.

Peer through the enormous window and you will see twelve marble slabs. On each slab lies a corpse.

For over one hundred years, from 1804, the unidentified dead of Paris, Europe’s hub of art, culture and innovation, were publicly displayed at the world’s first morgue. Wherever they were found, their bodies were brought to the morgue and laid out for exhibition in the hope that one of the many visitors – over one million a year – might identify them.

Structured around twelve overlapping stories, reflecting the twelve slabs in the display room, Morgue unspools a gripping and immersive narrative of a city in turmoil and a society in flux. Across five themed sections – crime, science, society, art and memory – Byers offers a panoramic exploration of topics as diverse as death tourism, the sex trade, queer life, surveillance policing, the birth of forensics, the invention of photography and the rise of gothic literature, told through the long-forgotten deaths – and lives – of ordinary people.

The Paris morgue was so successful that the model was replicated around the world, in cities including New York, Melbourne, Buenos Aires, Bucharest, Berlin, Rome and Lisbon. From true crime to modern medicine, Morgue is an extraordinary, illuminating and deeply human book about the most influential building you’ve never heard of.