The following is based on info in the 2004 Stephen Davis biography Jim Morrison: Life, Death, Legend; Davis seems to have gotten interviews with people in France who knew Jim Morrison, and he seems to have had access to notebooks and paraphernalia from Morrison's time in France (though his writing style is quite sensationalised and some things should be taken with a grain of salt).

In February 1971, a few days after an earthquake in California that killed 65 people, Jim Morrison's on-again-off-again girlfriend Pamela Courson moved to France. Morrison was meant to join her after a couple of weeks; he was feeling very apathetic about the Doors (who were in the final stages of mixing and preparing the LA Woman album, and wanted a new start. There was also some talk that if Morrison was sentenced to prison (as was possible at the time) that he was in for beatings or possible murder attempts. Additionally, by this point the Rolling Stones had moved to France for tax reasons, and Morrison was aware of this and it could have influenced his decision.

Morrison eventually moved to Paris in March. The rest of the band seem to have told Davis that they were surprised he actually left, and the implication is that everyone else in the band was pretty sick of him and his behaviour by this point anyway. Morrison being in France was not well publicised; one of the attractions of France for Morrison was that he was a relative unknown and wouldn't be bothered. While Morrison was still in the USA, Pamela Courson had become friends with some people in the Parisian modelling/socialite scene, and arranged to live at the apartment of a model called Zozo while Zozo was away on an assignment. Pamela's crowd in Paris were fond of heroin, and she and then Jim Morrison lapsed into old habits.

Jim Morrison had previously known the Belgian-born France-based film director Agnes Varda before moving to France; he appeared as an extra in her 1969 film Lions Love, and had previously been to France to see how the French directors like Varda's partner Jacques Demy went about filming. When he moved to France in March 1971, he rekindled his friendship with Varda, and apparently told Pamela that she was the only person in Paris he could trust.

Concerned about Jim and Pamela's heroin habits, Varda - a woman in her forties with children - arranged for a sort of Parisian intervention, getting a yogic healer to visit their apartment; the healer found Morrison receptive but fled the apartment after picking up Pamela's negative heroin vibes.

On Saturday July 3rd, Jim Morrison passed away of a heroin overdose; it's unclear how and why this occurred because Pamela Courson told several different stories about it to several different people. The other witness to events of that night, Jean de Breteuil, was a French Marquis, junkie, and drug dealer who took heroin with Courson, and who would die the next year (Courson would die in 1974). Courson called Varda, who went to the scene of the death with an associate, Alain Ronay to try to help.

Ronay believed that in the current French political situation, the police did not need to know whose corpse that was, and so they claimed that he was 'Douglas Morrison', an alcoholic poet. That night, Jean de Breteuil and his partner Marianne Faithful fled to Casablanca in Morocco, so as to avoid any fallout.

Ronay also decided that he wanted to get Morrison buried as soon as possible to avoid controversy. He and Courson tried to convince the police and doctors that Morrison was an alcoholic who had effectively died of natural causes - this ended up working, with the doctor saying that he was inclined to believe Morrison had died from a heart attack caused by blood clots in the cardiac artery. Pamela burned everything she could find that had the name 'Jim' on it, to perpetuate the 'Douglas Morrison' ruse.

Rumours started to fly about the death of Jim Morrison in the couple of days after his death, because a DJ in a nightclub had apparently announced it after being told by de Breteuil, but there was no official word, and the French authorities had not yet made the connection that Douglas Morrison was Jim Morrison. Varda apparently had connections in the French press and may also have convinced them to keep it out of the papers, despite the rumours, until Morrison was in a coffin.

On Monday, Ronay convinced a mortician at the quite crowded Père Lachaise that Douglas Morrison was a famous American writer, and a small plot was found. Morrison was put into a coffin that day. Having heard the rumours and talked to Pamela Courson on the phone, Doors manager Bill Siddons was convinced that something was very wrong, and immediately got on a plane to Paris, arriving on Tuesday morning. Siddons told Doors keyboardist Manzarek about the rumours, and Manzarek said he'd heard them before, and wanted proof. Upon arriving at Pamela Courson's residence, Siddons found a distraught Courson, and Morrison in a coffin. The funeral was later that day.

On Tuesday, at the funeral, according to the Davis book, there were five people in attendance who weren't undertakers or employees of Père Lachaise: Agnes Varda, Alain Ronay, Pamela Courson, Bill Siddons and Morrison's Parisian secretary Robin Wertle. According to Davis, some elderly Parisian women present in the cemetery at the time were shocked at the speed of the funeral - it lasted about eight minutes - and the lack of a priest to administer last rites; they claim to have put a flower on the grave.

Siddons was concerned to make sure that Courson was out of France before there was an official announcement of Morrison's death; at best, the Parisian police would investigate her and discover her very illegal junkie lifestyle, and at worst they might think that she murdered him. Ronay, who is very clearly Davis's main source on these events - said that he wondered at the time whether he was assisting in the cover-up of a murder as he tried to perpetuate the 'Douglas Morrison' myth. Bill Siddons and Pamela Courson flew back to L.A. on Thursday, and arrived at the Doors' workshop to tell the others that he buried Jim on Tuesday. A press release was released on Friday, and Jim Morrison's parents found out that he had died when Morrison's father received a phone call from a reporter from the Washington Post on Friday.