Mother of the City

From the deliverance of 451 and from a lifetime of intercession, protection, and provision, Genevieve emerged in memory as the mother of Paris — the spiritual mother and protectress to whom the city belonged and to whom it turned in every danger. This standing, latent in the Vita, hardened over the centuries into her identity as the patrona of Paris, and it is the ground of her whole later cult.

Tradition: Western (pre-Schism, Gallo-Roman Gaul)

From Deed to Standing

The Attila episode (see Attila and the Deliverance of 451) is not an isolated wonder in the Vita Genovefae but the crowning instance of a role the whole text builds: Genevieve as the one who stands between the city and its perils. Across the Vita she is the woman who keeps Paris from fleeing before the Huns, who breaks the blockade-famine by bringing grain up the Seine, who intercedes with the Frankish kings for captives and the condemned, and whose prayer heals the city’s sick and calms its possessed (Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896, §§12, 26, 34–35 and passim; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §§12, 26, 34–35). The cumulative portrait is of a consecrated woman who has, in effect, taken the city into her keeping — a patrona in the old Roman sense of protector and patron, now transposed into the Christian idiom of the holy intercessor (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, University of California Press, 1985, on the holy person as the patron of a community; McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction, on Genevieve as patrona of Paris).

This is why she is remembered as mother of the city and not merely as a local ascetic. In a fifth-century Gaul where the imperial order was failing and the bishop was becoming the effective guardian of the civitas, Genevieve occupied — as a consecrated woman, without office — an analogous position of charismatic guardianship: the city’s protector by prayer rather than by administration, its mother by intercession rather than by rule (Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 2nd ed., Blackwell, 2003, on the holy person as guardian of the community in the post-imperial West). The role was unusual for a woman and is one of the things that makes her figure distinctive in the hagiography of the age (Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms, Harvard University Press, 1996, on Genevieve’s exceptional public role).

The Hardening of the Identity

What the Vita presents as a set of deeds, the subsequent history of Paris made into a permanent identity. Genevieve’s tomb in the church of the Holy Apostles on the hill above the left bank became a shrine; the hill took her name (the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève); the abbey that grew around her tomb became one of the great religious houses of Paris; and her relics became the palladium of the city, carried in procession whenever Paris was threatened by flood, plague, drought, siege, or war (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France, Brill, 1998, on the cult, the shrine, and the processions; see The Church of the Holy Apostles and The Processions of the Châsse). The great medieval and early-modern processions of her châsse were, in effect, the ritual enactment of her motherhood of the city: in crisis, Paris carried its mother through its streets and appealed to her (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998).

The pattern was fixed early and endured astonishingly long. The most famous single instance — the halting of the mal des ardents in 1129–1130 when her relics were carried to the cathedral (see The Mal des Ardents) — is only the best-documented of a series that ran from the early Middle Ages to the eve of the Revolution, and her patronage was invoked by kings and commoners alike. That she remained, for more than a thousand years, the saint to whom Paris turned in extremity is the strongest testimony to how deeply the identity of mother of the city had taken hold (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; on the modern survival of the cult, see Patroness of Paris).

What the Title Rests On

It is worth being precise about the standing of the claim. The historical residue — the datable, checkable core — is modest: a fifth-century consecrated woman of Paris whose tomb became a major shrine and whose cult made her the city’s patron saint for a millennium. That much is firmly attested by the archaeology and history of the cult, independently of the Vita‘s reliability on any given episode (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; Heinzelmann and Poulin, Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris, 1986). The specific deeds on which the title is founded — the deliverance from Attila, the grain-convoy, the intercessions with the kings — reach us through the Vita and are reported here as its testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5). But the existence and depth of the cult — Paris’ centuries-long conviction that this woman was its mother and guardian — is itself a massive and independently verifiable fact, and it is that conviction, ratified by the Church’s veneration, that the title finally rests on (cf. the treatment of cult-as-testimony in the repository’s methodology).

For the Orthodox veneration of Genevieve among the pre-Schism Western saints, this is the heart of the matter. What is honoured is not a certified biography but a holy woman received by the Church as the intercessor and mother of a great Christian city — a role that belongs to the same order as the protectress-saints of the Orthodox East, and that the Orthodox reception of the ancient Western saints gladly reclaims (see The Guardian of Paris; Holy Tradition).

See Also

References

  • Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (1896), §§12, 26, 34–35 and passim (the deeds on which the patronage rests).
  • McNamara, Jo Ann, John E. Halborg, and E. Gordon Whatley, trans. Sainted Women of the Dark Ages. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. “Genovefa, Virgin of Paris” (and introduction on Genevieve as patrona).
  • McNamara, Jo Ann. Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. (Her exceptional public role for a woman.)
  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The cult, the shrine, and the processions.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (The holy person as patron of a community.)
  • Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. (Guardianship of the civitas in the post-imperial West.)
  • Heinzelmann, Martin, and Joseph-Claude Poulin. Les vies anciennes de sainte Geneviève de Paris: études critiques. Paris: Champion, 1986.