The Relief of the Famished City

When Paris was cut off and starving during a blockade — in the Vita, during the Frankish investment of the city under Childeric — Genevieve is said to have led a convoy of boats up the Seine to obtain grain, returned with it against natural obstacles, and distributed the food to the hungry with her own hands. It is her second great civic deed, the practical counterpart of the deliverance from Attila.

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

The Grain Convoy

The Vita Genovefae recounts that during a time when Paris was under blockade and suffering acute famine — the Frankish siege of the city in the years of Childeric’s ascendancy in the region — Genevieve took the relief of the starving upon herself. She organized and led an expedition of boats up the Seine and its tributaries to districts where grain could be had (the tradition points to the region toward Arcis-sur-Aube and Troyes on the Aube), obtained the grain, and brought the loaded vessels back down to Paris, overcoming obstacles on the river along the way; and on her return she saw to the distribution of the food, giving bread to the poorest with her own hands (Vita Genovefae 34–36, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §§34–36). The Vita surrounds the practical feat with the marks of the miraculous — obstacles in the river cleared by her prayer, the sufficiency of the grain for all in need — but the core of the episode is strikingly concrete: a consecrated woman commanding a river-borne supply operation to break a famine (McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction, on the realism of the grain episode).

The concreteness is part of what makes the episode notable. Where the Attila deliverance is an act of intercession, the grain-convoy is an act of administration — the holy woman as organizer, provisioner, and distributor, taking on a role that in a functioning Roman order would have fallen to the civic authorities or the annona. It shows the same guardianship of the city seen in the Attila episode, but in its material rather than its intercessory face: Genevieve as the practical mother who does not only pray for Paris but feeds it (Van Dam, Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul, University of California Press, 1985, on holy persons assuming civic provisioning functions as the imperial order failed; Jo Ann McNamara, Sisters in Arms, Harvard University Press, 1996, on Genevieve’s practical leadership).

The Historical Framing

The setting the Vita gives — a Frankish blockade of Paris — corresponds to a real and protracted episode of the later fifth century. The Salian Franks under Childeric, and then the campaign that culminated under his son Clovis, pressed against the Roman and sub-Roman enclaves of northern Gaul, and the reduction of Paris was part of that long pressure; Gregory of Tours, writing in the later sixth century, records that Paris held out against the Franks for years before submitting (Gregory of Tours, Decem Libri Historiarum [History of the Franks] II.27–38, ed. Krusch and Levison, MGH SRM 1.1; trans. Lewis Thorpe, Penguin, 1974, on the Frankish reduction of the region and the fall of the sub-Roman kingdom of Syagrius in 486/487). A city under such intermittent investment would indeed have known famine, and the notion that its holy woman organized relief by the one route a blockade might not fully close — the river — is entirely plausible in outline (Wolfram, The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples, University of California Press, 1997, on the Frankish conquest of northern Gaul).

[Disputed: the exact circumstances and dating of the famine-relief. The Vita Genovefae places it during a Frankish blockade of Paris associated with Childeric (§§34–36); the precise siege, its dates, and the destination of the grain-convoy are not independently documented, and the numbers and the miraculous details are the Vita’s (Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” §§34–36). The general historical situation — a protracted Frankish reduction of Paris in the later fifth century — is attested by Gregory of Tours (History of the Franks II), but Gregory does not narrate the grain-convoy. Reported here as the Vita’s testimony (METHODOLOGY §3.5).]

The Meaning of the Deed

The grain-convoy rounds out the portrait of Genevieve as mother of the city (see Mother of the City) by adding the dimension of bodily provision to that of spiritual protection. In the logic of the Vita the two are one: the same holy authority that steadied Paris against the Huns feeds it under the Franks, because both are the works of a woman wholly given to God on behalf of her people. The episode also has an evident scriptural resonance — the feeding of the hungry multitude, the sufficiency of bread multiplied — that the Vita means the reader to hear, casting Genevieve in the pattern of the biblical provider (cf. the feeding narratives, Matthew 14:13–21; the Vita’s theological shaping, McNamara et al., “Genovefa,” introduction).

For the later cult, the grain-relief mattered as proof that Genevieve’s care for Paris was total — that she was the guardian of its bread as well as of its walls — and it fed naturally into the centuries in which her relics were carried in procession against famine and dearth as well as flood and plague (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998, on the range of ills against which her intercession was invoked; see The Processions of the Châsse). Reported soberly, the episode is the tradition’s memory of a holy woman who broke a famine; whatever its unrecoverable historical detail, it is a memory the city held for a thousand years, and it belongs to the reasons Paris called her mother.

See Also

References

  • Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (1896), §§34–36 (the grain-convoy and distribution).
  • 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,” §§34–36 (and introduction).
  • Gregory of Tours. Decem Libri Historiarum (History of the Franks), Book II. Ed. Bruno Krusch and Wilhelm Levison, MGH SRM 1.1. Trans. Lewis Thorpe, History of the Franks. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (The Frankish reduction of Paris; the fall of Syagrius, 486/487.)
  • Wolfram, Herwig. The Roman Empire and Its Germanic Peoples. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. (The Frankish conquest of northern Gaul.)
  • Van Dam, Raymond. Leadership and Community in Late Antique Gaul. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. (Holy persons and civic provisioning.)
  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The cult and the range of ills against which she was invoked.)
  • Scripture: Matthew 14:13–21 (the feeding of the multitude, the biblical type of the provider).