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The first underground exploitation of stone in Paris dates from the late 12th and early 13th Centuries, and the mining took place in the capital itself and surrounding areas. Prior to that, starting at the Roman occupation, extraction was open-cast. For centuries the city’s monuments, palaces, mansions as well as its bridges and quays were built from this subterranean resource. In 1777 a body was set up to administer stone extraction that still exists today, namely, the General Inspection of Quarries (IDC for “Inspection de Carrieres”.)Several years later, Louis XVI’s ministry decided, for reasons of health and safety, to move the entire contents of the cemetery of “Les Innocents” into a section of the mines in the suburbs called “La Tombe Issoire.” The removal of bodies from practically every cemetery in the city soon followed. Charles Axel Guillaumont (first head of the IDC) oversaw the transfer of bones of hundreds of thousands of individuals into the underground galleries, however it was his successor, Héricart de Thury, who decided to arrange the Catacombs with a view to opening them up to the public. This mining engineer from the old nobility combined deeply religious and royalist sentiments with an immense scientific knowledge and curiosity.The combination of these qualities as well as the fads of the period – Egyptomania (after the Napoleonic Campaign there) and the beginning of Romanticism – determined how Héricart de Thury was to lay out the bones, set the extent of, and the decoration for, the Catacombs as we see them today. He also embellished the network of ancient mines beneath the city with several monuments. The Catacombs make up only 1/700th of the total surface area of underground Paris – the mere tip of the iceberg.