Le cimetière du Père-Lachaise n'est pas seulement un magnifique cimetière monumental qui a plus que deux siècles d'histoire. Situé au cœur de Paris, avec deux millions de visiteurs par année il est considéré comme un musée en plein air et pour les centaines de parisiens qui s'y rendent au quotidien est aussi un lieu de promenade, de rencontrer et un endroit où pratiquer des activités à l'ai libre. En autre, pour les habitants du 20ème arrondissement il constitue une inestimable source de gains.Cette étude cherche à établir et à analyser les différentes manières d'utilisation et d'appropriation du cimetière, qui font souvent abstraction de la fonction principale de cette nécropole, mais qui contribue à faire de ce lieu un endroit unique par sa complexité. La mémoire collective se combine couramment aux idéologies de résistance et de rupture de ce cimetière, où se manifestent des comportements inconcevables ailleurs, comme par exemple ceux qui font du Père-Lachaise un des endroit privilégié où l'on pratique l'érotisme à Paris.Ainsi la transgression observée dans ses diverses formes au sein des 44 hectares du Père-Lachaise contribue à bâtir l'atmosphère de ce cimetière et caractérise la perception que les gens ont de cet endroit. / Situated in the heart of Paris, Père-Lachaise is a magnificent monumental cimetery with more than two centuries of history. Every year two millions people visit Père-Lachaise as if it were a big open air museum; every day for hundreds of Parisians it represents a privileged place to walk, meet people and do open air activities. For many peolpe who live in the same neighbourhood as the cemetery it is a precious source of income.Besides its principal function as a necropolis, the cemetery has become a unique and extremely complex place: a space where the collective memory is connected often to particular ideologies of resistance and change, a space where the overlap of different natures allows bahviours which are unthinkable eslewhere.For example the cemetery is one of the favourite places if eroticism in Paris. Transgression marks, in a deep way, the life and the perception of the cemetery, in différent forms in the 44 hectares of the Père-Lachaise.

This thesis consists of a creatively constructed nonfiction memoir told in eight chapters. It begins with an introductory chapter written in the present tense, in which the narrator struggles with the notions of life and death while wandering the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, France. She reflects on being among hundreds of thousands who have died knowing that, very recently, she almost died herself. The chapters that follow take the reader on a journey through the narrator's life and what led up to her near death experience. The story culminates with a return to the present, back in the cemetery, where the narrator comes to terms with the notion that her life is a gift. This piece is an examination of the human experience through one young woman's eyes, a look at life and death and the events that give us the will to live. The narrator explores her own diseases and observations about her own body in the context of the human experience--how we cope with disease and attempt to move past artificial ideals set for the human body, coming to a better understanding of ourselves