Genevieve and the Rise of the Franks

Genevieve’s long life spanned the passage of northern Gaul from Roman to Frankish rule, and the Vita places her at its hinge: respected by the still-pagan Childeric, for whom she is said to have interceded on behalf of captives, and part of the world of Clovis and Clotilde whose baptism made Frankish Gaul Catholic. She was buried beside Clovis in the church he and Clotilde built. This file weighs her role in the Christian shaping of Merovingian Paris.

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

Genevieve and Childeric

The Vita Genovefae presents Genevieve in a remarkable relation to Childeric, the pagan Salian Frankish king (d. 481/482) whose people were reducing the sub-Roman enclaves of northern Gaul. Even as Childeric held Paris under blockade, the Vita says, he held Genevieve in reverence; and it recounts that she interceded with him for prisoners, obtaining the release of captives he had taken and the sparing of the condemned — a pagan king moved to clemency by the holy woman’s petition (Vita Genovefae 26, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §26). The motif belongs to a recognizable pattern in the hagiography of the barbarian conquests: the Roman holy person who stands between the conquered population and the conqueror, wringing mercy from raw power by the authority of sanctity alone (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, University of California Press, 1985, on holy intercession with barbarian rulers). Historically Childeric is a solid figure — his richly furnished grave was discovered at Tournai in 1653, one of the great finds of Merovingian archaeology (Guy Halsall, Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568, Cambridge University Press, 2007, on Childeric and the Tournai burial) — but the specific intercessions the Vita reports are attested by the Vita alone.

Genevieve, Clovis, and Clotilde

It is with Clovis (r. 481/482–511), Childeric’s son, that Genevieve’s memory is most closely bound, because the Frankish king who completed the conquest of northern Gaul and made himself a Catholic Christian chose Paris for his seat and was buried there beside her. Clovis defeated the last Roman ruler in Gaul, Syagrius, at Soissons in 486/487, extended Frankish power across the north, and — after his marriage to the Burgundian Catholic princess Clotilde — received baptism at the hands of Bishop Remigius of Reims, an event of vast consequence, for it made the dominant power in Gaul Catholic rather than Arian (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II.27–43, trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974, on Syagrius, the marriage to Clotilde, and the baptism; on the significance, Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, 2007). Clovis made Paris his principal residence, and it was in Paris, on the hill above the left bank, that he and Clotilde founded the church of the Holy Apostles in which Genevieve — and later Clovis himself (d. 511) and Clotilde — would be buried (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II.43 and IV.1; see The Church of the Holy Apostles).

The Vita and the tradition present Genevieve as a spiritual presence in this world — venerated by Clovis, associated with Clotilde in the Christian works of the new dynasty, and instrumental in the building of the churches that Christianized the Frankish capital (McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction and §§ on the churches; Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998, on her association with the Merovingian foundations).

[Disputed: the extent of Genevieve’s personal influence on Clovis and on his conversion. The Vita Genovefae and the later tradition associate her with the Christian shaping of Merovingian Paris and with the royal foundations. But the principal narrative of Clovis’s conversion — the vow at the battle of Tolbiac, the persuasion of Clotilde, the baptism by Remigius — is told by Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks II.29–31), who assigns the human role to Clotilde and Remigius and does not credit Genevieve with it. Her tomb’s presence in the royal church shows the closeness of her cult to the dynasty; a decisive personal role in the king’s conversion is tradition, not documented in the early sources (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II; McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction; METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

Her Place in the Christian Shaping of Merovingian Paris

The soundest way to state Genevieve’s significance for the Frankish transition is neither to inflate it into a decisive political role nor to dismiss it. What is firm is structural and profound: the holy woman of Gallo-Roman Paris became the saint of Frankish Paris. Her tomb, set in the royal church of Clovis and Clotilde on the hill that took her name, tied the sanctity of the old Roman-Christian population to the new Catholic monarchy; the Merovingian kings and the Gallo-Roman episcopate together fostered her cult; and Genevieve thus became one of the bonds by which the Frankish conquest was reconciled with, and sanctified by, the Christian civilization it had overrun (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the dynastic patronage of the cult; Halsall, Barbarian Migrations, 2007, on the fusion of Frankish power and Gallo-Roman Christianity). Her burial beside Clovis is the emblem of this fusion: the pagan-born king turned Catholic and the consecrated virgin of the conquered city lying in the same church, the two together standing at the origin of Christian France (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks IV.1, on the royal burials at the church).

This is the role that the later French tradition would enormously amplify — Genevieve as the patroness not only of Paris but, in a sense, of the Christian French nation at its Merovingian birth. Stripped of the amplification, the historical core remains significant enough: a fifth-century holy woman whose cult became a hinge between Roman and Frankish, pagan and Catholic, in the city that would become the capital of Catholic Gaul. For the Orthodox veneration of the pre-Schism West, she belongs to the founding generation of Latin Christendom, in the same age and the same Gallic Church as Martin’s heirs and Cassian’s monks (see St. Martin of Tours; St. John Cassian).

See Also

• The Relief of the Famished City — the Frankish blockade that framed the famine-relief
• The Church of the Holy Apostles — the royal church of Clovis and Clotilde where she was buried
• Mother of the City — her guardianship of Paris across the transition
• St. John Cassian — the founder of Gallic monasticism in the same generation
• St. Martin of Tours — the elder saint whose cult shaped the Gallic Church of her age

References

• Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (1896), §26 and passim (Childeric; the intercessions; the churches).
• 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,” §26 and introduction.
• Gregory of Tours. Decem Libri Historiarum (History of the Franks), Book II (Syagrius, Clotilde, the baptism) and Book IV.1 (the royal burials). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
• Halsall, Guy. Barbarian Migrations and the Roman West, 376–568. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. (Childeric, Clovis, and the fusion of Frankish power with Gallo-Roman Christianity.)
• Wolfram, Herwig. The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The dynastic patronage of the cult.)
• Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Holy intercession with barbarian rulers.)