Preparation work began shortly after a 1774 series of basement wall collapses around the Holy Innocents' Cemetery added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1788, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris's cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire  [fr].

[3] The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of accesses around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was opened to public visitation from 1874.

Although the ossuary comprises only a small section of the underground mines of Paris, Parisians often refer to the entire tunnel network as the catacombs.

In ruins after the Western Roman Empire's 5th-century end and the ensuing Frankish invasions, Parisians eventually abandoned this settlement for the marshy Right Bank: from the 4th century, the first known settlement there was on higher ground around a Saint-Etienne church and burial ground (behind the present Hôtel de Ville), and urban expansion on the Right Bank began in earnest after other ecclesiastical landowners filled in the marshlands from the late 10th century.

By the end of the same century, Saints Innocents was neighbour to the principal Parisian marketplace Les Halles, and already filled to overflowing.

[7] The undermined state of the Left Bank was known to architects as early 17th-century construction of the Val-de-Grâce hospital (most of its building expenses were due to its foundations), but a series of mine cave-ins beginning 1774 with the collapse of a house along the "rue d'Enfer" (near today's crossing of the Avenue Denfert-Rochereau and the boulevard Saint-Michel) caused King Louis XVI to name a commission to investigate the state of the Parisian underground.

[citation needed] Mine consolidations were still occurring and the underground around the site of the 1777 collapse[9] that had initiated the project had already become a series of stone and masonry inspection passageways that reinforced the streets above.

[citation needed] After deciding to further renovate the "Tombe-Issoire" passageways for their future role as an underground sepulchre, the idea became law in late 1785.

Beginning from an opening ceremony on 7 April the same year, the route between Les Innocents and the "clos de la Tombe-Issoire" became a nightly procession of black cloth-covered wagons carrying the millions of Parisian dead.

[12] By this way the skeletal remains of several notable victims of the French Revolution were transferred to the Catacombs, including (the date is the date of death):[13] Catacombs in their first years were a disorganized bone repository, but Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, director of the Paris Mine Inspection Service from 1810, had renovations done that would transform the caverns into a visitable mausoleum.

In addition to directing the stacking of skulls, femurs and tibias into the patterns seen in the catacombs today he used the cemetery decorations he could find (formerly stored on the Tombe-Issoire property; many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones.

[14] During World War II, Parisian members of the French Resistance used the tunnel system and established the headquarters from where Colonel Rol-Tanguy led the insurrection for the liberation of Paris in June 1944.

[22] The Catacombs of Paris became a curiosity for more privileged Parisians from their creation, an early visitor being the Count of Artois (later Charles X of France) in 1787.