[jmcomets]

Another fact not mentioned in this article is the WWII historical locations found in the unofficial Catacombs. Back when I lived in Paris, I was lucky enough to know someone who had access to one of the Cataphiles' maps (yearly-updated with notes on entrances and potential police patrols, with closest exits and dangerous passages).

We visited an old school basement, which was used as a bunker for members of the Resistance. The school itself was razed and rebuilt over at some point, but the Catacombs still hold traces of this period. Being there felt very...intimate. Nothing like you'd see in a museum or a documentary, we were in the same place as those back then.

[Aromasin]

I had a very similar experience. I used to do a lot of "urban exploring" in the UK, and as part of that, I visited Paris for it with some friends. We went with a guide I met on a forum to a secret resistance shelter recently uncovered at the time, and there was still litter from the 1940s. Old cigarette and match boxes, wine bottles, old posters and the like. It was exactly as you describe; intimate, in the way that visiting a mausoleum or cathedral is compared to a museum. I'm sure it's been picked clean now, but the memory will stick with me forever I suspect.