Grave outlook at celebrity cemetery

The former Doors singer, who died aged 27 in 1971, is the main draw at the Pre Lachaise in Paris, eclipsing other denizens such as the Irish writer Oscar Wilde, the Polish-born composer Frdric Chopin and the French singer Edith Piaf.

For Christian Charlet, the historian responsible for the upkeep of the graveyard’s 70,000 tombs, the crowds who come to commune with their deceased idol are nothing but an expensive headache.

"We would like to kick out Morrison because we don’t want him. He causes too many problems," said Mr Charlet. "If we could get rid of him we would do it straight away, but unfortunately the Americans don’t want him back."

On a sunny spring afternoon, visitors of all ages milled around Morrison’s simple marker, watched by a security guard.

It seems that even in death, the rocker has been a magnet for trouble.

Before the guard was appointed, fans would converge at the grave to drink beer and smoke joints or, even worse, have sex among the tombstones in a macabre communion.

"People come here not to worship the dead but think they can do what they want as if it was a rave party," said Mr Charlet. "Tourists have no respect for anything."

As it prepares to celebrate its 200th anniversary this month, the Pre Lachaise is more popular than ever. The necropolis draws two million visitors each year, a third of the number who throng to the city’s Eiffel Tower.

A vast park filled with spectacular sculptures, the cemetery is an oasis of tranquillity on the edge of town. It is also a fully functioning graveyard, with 100 staff in charge of burying the dead, restoring graves and pruning the 6,000 trees spread over a 110-acre hillside in north-east Paris.

That fact is sometimes lost on the crowds of tourists, who treat the place like an open-air shrine and litter tombstones with mementoes - when they are not trying to break off stone fingers and other "souvenirs" to take home.

"It’s a shame that all the old tombstones have names scratched into them," said Daniel Koestlin, 31, from Germany, as he walked down a quiet alley searching for the grave of Chopin.

"I can’t get close to these people when they’re alive," said Marie-Christine Nanniot, a day-tripper from Reims, explaining the lure of the famous.

Wilde’s towering memorial, featuring a winged male deity by the sculptor Jacob Epstein, is covered in purple lipstick marks. The statue’s penis has been snapped off, presumably by a collector.

Even non-celebrities can attain cult status. The statue of Victor Noir, a dashing young journalist killed in 1870, has become a fertility symbol, its crotch rubbed to a brassy shine by women seeking to increase their chances of conceiving.

When it opened in 1804, the cemetery was shunned by Parisians accustomed to being tossed into common graves.

The government of Louis XVIII tried to drum up interest by transferring the mortal remains of the doomed Medieval lovers Abelard and Heloise to the site in 1817, alongside those of Molire, the playwright, and Jean de La Fontaine, the poet. But it was only after Honor de Balzac featured the Pre Lachaise in a key scene of his 1835 novel Le Pre Goriot that it became fashionable to buy a plot.

Memorials of every shape and size bear witness to the cultural diversity of the cemetery, which took in Catholics, Protestants and Jews alike, breaking the Catholic church’s monopoly on mass burial sites.