The Prague Cemetery (2010)
Author: Umberto Eco · Il Cimitero di Praga · 2010
Plot
Paris, 1897. An elderly antiquarian named Simone Simonini wakes up in his cramped apartment above an antique shop in the impasse Maubert with a hole in his memory. On the desk is a diary he doesn’t remember starting. Stranger still: there are entries in the diary written by someone named Abbé Dalla Piccola, a priest who appears to live in the same apartment, using the same bed, signing off to “Captain Simonini.” The two of them are writing to each other through the diary. A young Viennese doctor named Froïde (Freud) has advised Simonini to write things down to recover his traumatic memory. The novel is that diary.
What emerges, in fragments and cross-entries, is the life of a professional forger and serial murderer who has quietly orchestrated the worst conspiracies of the nineteenth century. Simonini grew up in Turin under a fanatical Jesuit-hating, Jew-hating grandfather whose voice he never stops hearing. He learned forgery from a corrupt notary, Rebaudengo, who taught him that “What I produce are not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced.” He was hired by the Piedmontese secret service to infiltrate Garibaldi’s Thousand and write false reports betraying Italian patriots. He fled to Paris, set up a tavern and antique shop as fronts, and began selling forged documents to whoever was buying — the French, the Prussians, the Jesuits, eventually the Russian Okhrana.
His masterpiece is a fabrication built on plagiarism. Cobbling together fiction from Alexandre Dumas, Eugène Sue, and Maurice Joly’s political satire against Napoleon III, Simonini writes a fictional scene in which rabbis gather at midnight in the Prague cemetery to plot world domination. He sells it to one secret service after another, each time updating the anti-Semitic content to match the buyer’s prejudices. That document, after decades of rewriting and resale, will become The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — the forgery that will poison the twentieth century.
Running alongside the forgery career is the murder career. Simonini kills Maurice Joly (original author of the satire he’s been plagiarizing). He kills the real Abbé Dalla Piccola and dumps the body in the sewer beneath his shop — then adopts his identity as a disguise. He orchestrates, with the real-life charlatan Léo Taxil, a massive hoax against the Catholic Church involving a fictional Satanic cult called Palladism and a fictional convert named Diana Vaughan. He helps frame Alfred Dreyfus. He keeps eating enormous meals at fashionable Paris restaurants.
The traumatic memory he’s been trying to recover turns out to be this: during a black mass orchestrated by a defrocked priest named Abbé Boullan, Simonini (disguised as Dalla Piccola) had sex with Diana Vaughan. When he discovered she was Jewish, his bigotry and his pathological horror of women collided and he snapped — strangled her, killed Boullan, dropped both into the sewer. The memory breaks through the amnesia. Dalla Piccola, the guilt-persona, dissolves back into him. Simonini, fully integrated, fully unrepentant, finishes the diary. The book ends with him cheerfully preparing to plant a bomb in the Paris Metro excavations. One more shadow in the history of Europe.
What the Book Is About
This is a novel-length argument about how the big lies get made. Eco’s wager is simple and terrifying: behind every genocidal ideology there is usually not a mastermind but a small, bored, mediocre man — a forger paid by the word, plagiarizing fiction into “evidence,” selling it to secret services who buy it because it confirms what they already believe. The nineteenth century’s most lethal text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was not invented by a conspiracy. It was invented by one forger’s professional habits. Evil, in Eco’s telling, is artisanal.
The book’s thesis gets articulated by two characters. Simonini: “People believe only what they already know, and this is the beauty of the Universal Form of Conspiracy.” His paymaster Rachkovsky, the Russian intelligence officer: “The enemy is the friend of the people. You always want someone to hate in order to feel justified in your own misery. Hatred is the true primordial passion. It is love that’s abnormal.” Between those two lines is the whole psychology of modern propaganda. You don’t invent new hatreds; you find the ones people already have and give them a document to cite. The forger’s job is not to create — it’s to confirm.
Eco is also writing a thriller about identity. Simonini’s split personality — his diary-correspondence with Abbé Dalla Piccola, who turns out to be himself — is a virtuoso literary device, but it’s also the psychological diagnosis of the whole enterprise. A man who spends his life writing other people’s beliefs for them loses the ability to know which of those beliefs are his. The forger hollows out, becomes a conduit, splits in half. The fake priest he invents to infiltrate Catholic circles becomes the voice of his own buried guilt. “So who then is the abbé with my name whom you met? And at this point, who am I?” The answer, by the end, is: nobody in particular. Just the hand that writes.
What’s most chilling about the book is its refusal of redemption. Simonini is not punished. He doesn’t repent. He finishes his memoir and walks off to plant another bomb. Eco’s final word on the mechanics of hatred is that the architects of mass atrocity very often get away with it, die in their beds, and the hatred itself outlives them by generations. The Protocols are still in print. That’s the ending of the book.
The Cast
Simone Simonini. The narrator, the forger, the murderer, the only entirely fictional character in an otherwise historical novel. Eco’s bet is that every other figure in the book is real except the hand that ties them together — because the point is that no single hand was necessary. Simonini hates Jews, Jesuits, Freemasons, Germans, women, and priests in roughly equal measure. He loves food with a religious intensity: “I have always found more pleasure in food than in sex, perhaps a mark left upon me by priests.” His defining line is a Descartes inversion — “Odi ergo sum. I hate therefore I am” — which is also the novel’s diagnosis of the modern political subject. The self built on resentment.
Abbé Dalla Piccola. Simonini’s alternate persona, externalized as a separate diarist. Originally a real priest Simonini murdered and dumped in the sewer, reassembled inside Simonini’s head as a repressed-guilt double. He’s the conscience Simonini can’t quite extinguish — which makes him, in a novel about a man with no conscience, a deeply strange figure. When he stops writing back, the split is healed and the man is fully gone.
Pyotr Rachkovsky. A real historical figure — head of the Paris branch of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police. In the novel as in life, he is the patron who commissions the eventual Protocols. His philosophy is the novel’s philosophy: “We need an enemy to give people hope.” He’s the pragmatist to Simonini’s hack — the intelligence professional who understands exactly why the forgery will work.
Léo Taxil. Another real figure — a nineteenth-century anti-Masonic hoaxer who spent years fabricating a Satanic conspiracy inside the Freemasons before publicly confessing the whole thing was invented. In Eco’s novel he’s Simonini’s collaborator on the Palladism hoax. His public confession — “Gentlemen, when you understand you have been fooled, the best thing to do is to laugh with the audience” — is the novel’s sly aside: even when the fraud is exposed, the audience doesn’t unbelieve. The fake outlives the confession.
The grandfather (Giovanni Battista Simonini). Also real. The author of an 1806 letter to Abbé Barruel that helped seed modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. In the novel he’s the voice Simonini grows up inside — the original poisoner of the mind. “The Jews, therefore, with all the other sectaries, are but a single faction seeking to destroy the name of Christ wherever possible.” Simonini’s entire career is the monetization of this voice.
Symbols
| Symbol | What it signals | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| The sewer beneath the shop | The repository of buried crimes; the literal underground of the civilized city; the unconscious | The impasse Maubert, below Simonini’s apartment |
| The Prague cemetery itself | The blank canvas onto which paranoia projects; a fiction that becomes history through repetition | The forged rabbinical meeting Simonini invents from illustrations |
| Food and gourmet menus | The substitute for every human intimacy Simonini has destroyed; appetite as replacement soul | Chez Magny, Tour d’Argent, every scene of deliberate isolation |
| The diary itself | The novel’s meta-structure — forgery writing itself, the self split into two correspondents | The object in Simonini’s hands throughout the book |
| The Paris Metro bomb (final scene) | The banality of evil in its purest form: the architect of genocidal forgery moonlighting as a petty terrorist | The last paragraph |
Key Debate
How does a lie become true? The novel’s philosophical engine. The fanatic Osman Bey wants the literal “final solution — the extermination of all Jews.” The pragmatist Rachkovsky wants to keep the enemy alive so they can always be the enemy: “We need an enemy to give people hope.” Eco lets both positions speak and shows how they feed each other. The pragmatist writes the forgery; the fanatic reads it and sharpens his knife. The cynic doesn’t believe what he sells; the buyer does. Eco’s final point is the darkest one: the forgery succeeds because the belief was already there. “People believe only what they already know.” The lie isn’t new information; it’s old prejudice given a document.
Is there such a thing as innocent forgery? Eco is playing a long game here, because the book itself is a historical novel — a kind of authorized forgery, filling in the gaps of real events with invented material. Rebaudengo’s seductive maxim (“not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that… could and should have been produced”) is simultaneously a forger’s self-justification and a working definition of historical fiction. Eco puts the argument in his villain’s mouth to force the reader to feel the danger of the move. Narrative is always, in some sense, construction. The question isn’t whether to construct — it’s what gets built and what it does once it’s out.
How It’s Written
Eco structures the novel as a diary-within-a-diary. Simonini writes. Dalla Piccola writes back in the same journal. An omniscient “Narrator” occasionally breaks in to apologize for the confusing timeline and summarize events for the reader. The whole book is therefore a forgery about a forgery about forgeries — Eco’s literary joke on his own material.
The voice is cold, ironic, pitiless. Simonini’s diary is genuinely repulsive — anti-Semitic, misogynistic, xenophobic to the point of physical revulsion — and Eco lets it stay repulsive. There’s no narrative intervention softening the bigotry; the book trusts the reader to register the horror without being told to. Several critics (and the Vatican newspaper) complained about this on publication. Eco’s answer was that the voice had to be unrelenting to show how that voice actually works.
The novel is also studded with period detail in Eco’s signature style — restaurant menus, Parisian street plans, nineteenth-century illustrations, recipes. The serious joke is that the texture of the historical novel — all those authenticating details — is exactly the technique Simonini uses to make his forgeries convincing. The reader, taking pleasure in the historical furniture, is being quietly shown how the con works.
Connections
- The Name of the Rose — Eco’s earlier novel on the medieval politics of forbidden texts, false attributions, and the power of a book to reshape belief. Prague Cemetery is the nineteenth-century sequel: the book has left the monastery and is running the state.
- Nineteen Eighty-Four — Orwell on manufactured reality, the Ministry of Truth, the state’s power to rewrite the past. Simonini is the freelance private contractor running that same operation on behalf of whoever is paying. The Protocols are Ingsoc’s technology before Ingsoc.
- Mass Psychology and Other Writings — Freud’s analysis of how groups come to believe what leaders tell them, how the regression to the primal horde works in a modern crowd. Eco’s novel is the case study; Freud is the theoretical framework.
- On the Genealogy of Morals — Nietzsche on ressentiment as the engine of morality. Simonini’s “I hate therefore I am” is Nietzsche’s diagnosis made into a single character. The slave morality that Nietzsche anatomized becomes, a generation later, the saleable product Simonini forges.
- Civilization and Its Discontents — Freud on aggression displaced onto the scapegoat. The “narcissism of small differences,” the need for an out-group to bind the in-group — these are the mechanisms Rachkovsky puts into words and Simonini sells the documents for.
- The Trial — Kafka on the bureaucratic machinery of accusation. Dreyfus, who lurks at the edges of Prague Cemetery, is Joseph K. in real life. Eco is showing who forged the documents that Kafka’s bureaucracy would use.
- Animal Farm — Orwell on the pigs rewriting the commandments on the barn wall. Same operation as Simonini’s: the past made malleable, truth made a professional product.
Lineage
Predecessors
- the-name-of-the-rose (1980) — Eco’s own foundational investigation of forbidden texts and the dangers of a single book
- the-trial (1925) — Kafka on the apparatus of false accusation, which Eco traces to its sources
- nineteen-eighty-four (1949) — Orwell’s state-level forgery operation, which Eco shows was built from nineteenth-century freelance work
Successors
- ongoing — the nonfiction aftermath of this novel is still being written. The Protocols Simonini forges are still in print. Eco wrote the novel in 2010 and noted grimly that it was more topical than he’d hoped it would be