Saint-Étienne-du-Mont

Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève

You want the full story? Oh, well ...

In the Parish of Nanterre in the year 422 was born a girl called GENEVIÈVE. While very young she met a Saint – St. Germain of Auxerre, whose church is next to the Louvre – and decided that this was the life for her. Her mother, who thought being a Saint was no ambition for a girl, and that she ought to get married and have children like any sensible person, slapped her one day and was immediately struck blind. Luckily her daughter, being a Saint, was able to cure her. After her mother’s death Geneviève moved to Paris. When the population was in a panic over the imminent arrival of Attila the Hun, Geneviève got them

all together for prayers and lo! the Huns turned aside. The next invader was Childéric, the leader of the Franks, who besieged Paris until the people (nobody having yet founded a zoo) were starving. Geneviève then set off up the river on a raft, begged help from the people of Arcis-sur-Aube, loaded up three boats with food, and returned to Paris under the very noses of the besiegers. The Franks, however, won in the end – why do you think it’s called France? – so Geneviève talked to Childéric’s successor Clovis, and converted him and his wife Clotilde to Christianity. Actually, she converted Clotilde first, after which poor old Clovis didn’t stand a chance. It was Clovis who founded the Abbey, the Abbaye Sainte-Geneviève; the streets called Rue Clovis and Rue Clotilde still run either side of its site.

Geneviève lived to a ripe old age, though when she was fifty the local Bishops persuaded her to change her diet; she’d been living on bread and beans which she ate on Sundays and Thursdays only. For the next thirty years she added milk and fish. She never stopped knocking out the miracles, being very good at curing the sick, raising the dead, calming storms and so on. Her speciality was lighting candles at a distance, and when the work on the church of St.-Denis stopped because the builders were thirsty, she made a jug fill up with water. After she died the miracles went on. People prayed over her bones to be cured of plague and fever, and to put an end to droughts and floods. If you rubbed your bedclothes on her coffin, that immunised you from the Ague. In times of plague the remains, by now in a gilded shrine, were carried in procession to Notre-Dame.

Plainly, so effective and important a local Saint needs a Church of her own. She died in 511, and her remains were kept in St. Peter’s church on the top of the hill you’ve just climbed; but when the Normans came a-pillaging they were removed and, even though returned later, spent the next 500 years in a portable shrine. Even in the absence of the actual bones the tomb itself continued to work miracles. Bones and tomb didn’t come together again until the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth the Abbey across the road, the only place of worship dedicated to the lady who was now the Patron Saint of Paris, began to fall down. King Louis XV, when ill in 1744, vowed to rebuild it if he were cured. Luckily, he was and he did. Alas, the new Church of Sainte-Geneviève was only finished in 1789, which was when the Revolution started, and the Revolutionaries were against all that kind of thing. The bones of poor old Geneviève were taken to the Place de Grève, the proper place for public executions, and burned. The shrine was melted down. All that remained was a tiny fragment of wood from the coffin, salvaged from the ashes by some of the faithful. Then in 1791 one of the Revolutionaries, Mirabeau, died, and the church was turn into a Temple of Fame so that   remains could be buried there. Apparently that sort of thing was all right as long as it had nothing to do with religion. The bones of Voltaire and Rousseau were brought in to keep Mirabeau company, the windows were blocked up, and the place renamed the PANTHÉON. Then in a year or two it turned out that Mirabeau had been in cahoots with the King all along and he was depantheonised – which means chucked out – in favour of Marat, the chap whom Charlotte Corday stabbed in the bath and the heart. Marat lasted three months before he, too, was removed to the graveyard next door. Then in 1806 Napoleon came to an agreement with the Pope, Christianity was back in, and the Panthéon became the Church of Sainte- Geneviève once more. By pure coincidence that was the same year that the old Abbey finally fell down, except for the tower – La Tour de Clovis – which still stands inside the Lycée Henri IV. Revolutions came and went. After 1879 the Third Republic put religion out of fashion again, but the place remained a church and the artist Puvis de Chavannes decorated it with a series of stodgy frescoes on the life of the saint.

The final blow fell in 1885. Victor Hugo died, France’s greatest poet, and simply had  to have a State funeral. The State, however, like Totor himself, had no religion, so where could it take place?  You guessed. Poor Sainte-Geneviève finally lost her church for good. It was redeconsecrated and became the Panthéon again, and still is. A last resting-place for great Frenchmen who have no religious allegiance. Unfortunately, most great Frenchmen are devout Catholics, so the place is a bit empty. Over the door is inscribed AUX GRANDS HOMMES LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE –  the Fatherland is grateful to its great men. The inside is enormous, empty and boring, and withal expensive to enter, so why bother?

Meanwhile, what about that fragment of Geneviève’s coffin? It was taken, secretly at first, to the next-door church of SAINT-ÉTIENNE-DU-MONT, my favourite church in Paris and, I think, anywhere. When the old Abbey fell down, the base of the Saint’s tomb was found, and that now forms the foundation of a new and magnificent shrine for Sainte-Geneviève. Let’s go and have a look. It’s just across the road.

First, though, stand back and have a good look at the front of this amazing building, I defy you to think of any architectural style not represented here. If you find one I bet it’s used on the  inside. The basic structure is Gothic, dating from 1220, but it was ‘done up’ very thoroughly in the 16th and 17th centuries, in whatever style – Romanesque, Baroque, neo-classical – took the architect’s fancy at the time.

Go inside. Look around. Marvel. Look at the vaulted ceiling! Look at the pillars, attached to nothing else because the aisles are the same height as the rest of the building! Look at the carving  of Samson holding up the pulpit! And look especially at three things; first, the shrine of Sainte- Geneviève, never with less than fifty candles burning; then, the rood-screen, dividing Nave from Choir, incredibly carved from marble and the only screen in Paris not destroyed in the Revolution – the people of the area defended their church from that, with the help of their Saint’s one little fragment. Last, go down into the cloisters behind the Choir and look at the stained-glass windows, full of Bible stories in medieval dress. You should be able at the very least to spot Noah’s ark, Elijah with the prophets of Baal, and the feeding of the five thousand.

On your way back, see how the Choir is out of line with the Nave, so that you turn a corner as you walk up. A lot of Paris churches are like that. Perfection is for God alone.

I love Saint-Étienne-du-Mont; not only because it’s old and architecturally significant, but because it’s fun. The men who designed and built here over so many centuries obviously enjoyed every minute of it. Which, for a Christian church, is how it should be.