The Grévin Museum (now known as the Paris Wax Museum) opened in 1882 on the model of the London Wax Museum. Its first artistic director was the caricaturist Alfred Grévin. The museum aim was to show to the general public a visual reconstruction of the most important moments of French and European history.  

In 1904 the museum was expanded and a series of underground rooms reproducing the Christian catacombs were opened. These rooms were set up with special wax sculptures by Léopold Bernhard Bernstamm. Bernstamm created mannequins of Christians performing their rites and funeral ceremonies in hypogeal settings generally inspired by Roman catacombs. There were different scenes related to early-Christianity, some of which clearly set up in a catacomb during the persecutions. For example, scenes of the Baptism, the Preaching of St Peter, the deposition of a martyr, the Mass, a Christian marriage or the visit at the catacombs, see the mannequins inserted in a room that reproduces original galleries, loculi with inscriptions, or arcosolii with paintings.

The main source for the history of this section of the museum is the evocative set of photographs disseminated as postcards for museum publicity purposes This reproduction of catacombs inside a museum is a kind of evocative reconstructions of the setting with no clear educational intention in a religious sense.