The Church of the Holy Apostles

On the hill above the left bank of the Seine, Clovis and Clotilde built a church of the Holy Apostles (SS. Peter and Paul) — begun, the tradition says, at Genevieve’s urging. There she was buried when she died, and there Clovis himself (d. 511) and later Clotilde were laid; the hill took her name, the church became the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, and her tomb was the anchor of her cult for more than a thousand years.

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

The Royal Foundation

The church that would become Genevieve’s shrine was a royal foundation of the first Catholic Frankish king. Clovis and his wife Clotilde built, on the summit of the hill on the left bank of the Seine (the Mons Lucotitius, later the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève), a great church dedicated to the Holy Apostles — that is, to SS. Peter and Paul; Gregory of Tours records that Clovis founded it, that he was buried in it when he died in 511, that Clotilde was buried there after him, and that Genevieve too lay there (Gregory of Tours, History of the Franks II.43 and IV.1, trans. Thorpe, Penguin, 1974, on the church of the Holy Apostles and the burials of Clovis, Clotilde, and Genevieve). The tradition, following the Vita, holds that the church was begun at Genevieve’s own instigation — that she had urged Clovis to build it — and that its completion came around or shortly after her death (Vita Genovefae 56, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3, 1896; trans. McNamara, Halborg, and Whatley, Sainted Women of the Dark Ages, 1992, “Genovefa,” §56; McNamara et al., introduction, on Genevieve’s association with the foundation).

The burial-together is the decisive fact. That the consecrated virgin of Gallo-Roman Paris and the pagan-born king turned Catholic lay in the same church, on the hill that would bear her name, made the church a monument to the fusion of the old Christian city with the new Catholic monarchy — and made Genevieve’s tomb a place of royal as well as popular devotion from the beginning (see Genevieve and the Rise of the Franks).

From the Church of the Apostles to the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève

Because Genevieve’s tomb rapidly became the church’s chief draw, the dedication shifted in popular usage from the Holy Apostles to the saint herself: the church came to be called Sainte-Geneviève, and the monastic community that grew around it became the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, one of the great religious houses of medieval Paris and, from the twelfth century, a house of Augustinian canons and an important centre of learning on the Left Bank — the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève being the heart of what became the university quarter (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France, Brill, 1998, on the abbey and the shrine; on the medieval abbey’s place in the intellectual life of Paris, R. W. Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe, Blackwell, 1995, on the Left-Bank schools). Her relics were enshrined above the high altar in a succession of ever more splendid reliquary-shrines (the châsse), and the abbey became the custodian of the cult (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; see The Processions of the Châsse).

The shrine’s importance is best measured by what was done at it in crisis: it was from this church that the châsse of Genevieve was carried down into the city in solemn procession whenever Paris was threatened, and to it that the relief was ascribed when the danger passed — most famously in the halting of the mal des ardents in 1129–1130 (see The Mal des Ardents). For more than a millennium the tomb on the hill was the fixed centre of Paris’ devotion to its patroness (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998).

The Later Fate of the Site

The medieval abbey-church fell into disrepair by the eighteenth century, and King Louis XV vowed a magnificent new church of Sainte-Geneviève in thanksgiving for recovery from illness; the vast neoclassical building designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot was raised on the hill in the second half of the century (begun 1758; structurally completed 1790). But it was finished on the eve of the Revolution, and in 1791 the Constituent Assembly secularized it into a mausoleum for the great men of the nation — the Panthéon — so that Genevieve’s intended church became, and remains, a monument of the secular Republic (on the building and its conversion, see the discussion of the Panthéon in Patroness of Paris; Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the eighteenth-century church and the cult’s setting). The old medieval abbey alongside was largely demolished after the Revolution; the surviving fragment, the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont beside it, became the home of the surviving cult and of a new reliquary after Genevieve’s medieval relics were destroyed in 1793 (see The Relics and the Revolution).

The trajectory of the site — from the royal church of the Holy Apostles, to the medieval Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève and its shrine, to Soufflot’s church seized as the Panthéon, to the modest survival at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont — is in itself a compressed history of Paris’ changing relation to its patroness, from the Merovingian foundation through the height of the medieval cult to the Revolutionary rupture and the reduced but continuing veneration. That the hill still bears her name is the durable trace of the church that began, by the tradition, at her word (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998).

See Also

References

  • Gregory of Tours. History of the Franks II.43 (Clovis’s foundation and burial) and IV.1 (Clotilde’s burial; Genevieve’s tomb). Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
  • Vita Genovefae, ed. Krusch, MGH SRM 3 (1896), §56 (Genevieve’s urging of the foundation; her death and burial).
  • 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,” §56 and introduction.
  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The abbey, the shrine, the eighteenth-century church, and the cult.)
  • Southern, R. W. Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Europe. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. (The medieval schools of the Left Bank.)