The Processions of the Châsse

For more than a thousand years the reliquary shrine (châsse) of Genevieve was carried in solemn procession through the streets of Paris in times of crisis — flood, plague, drought, siege, and war — and the passing of the danger was ascribed to her intercession. These great processions, rare and solemn, were the ritual heart of Paris’ relation to its patroness, the recurring enactment of her role as mother and defender of the city.

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

The Shrine and the Rite

Genevieve’s relics were enshrined above the high altar of the abbey-church on the hill (see The Church of the Holy Apostles), in a succession of ever more precious reliquary-shrines: the medieval châsse was a great gold and silver casket, studded with gems and precious stones given over the centuries by kings and the faithful, one of the treasures of Paris (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France, Brill, 1998, on the châsse and its treasures). In ordinary times the shrine rested in the abbey; but in extraordinary danger, and only then, it was taken down and carried in a great procession (la descente et procession de la châsse de sainte Geneviève) through the city — most solemnly to the cathedral of Notre-Dame on the island — accompanied by the clergy of Paris, the religious houses, the university, the magistrates, and the people (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the ritual form and participants of the procession).

The gravity of the rite lay in its rarity. The great processions were not annual but occasional, decreed only in genuine public emergency, and hedged about with ceremony and precedent; the decision to bring down the shrine was itself a public act of the highest solemnity, and the procession involved the whole sacred and civic order of the city moving together in supplication (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the exceptional and regulated character of the processions). This is what distinguished Genevieve’s châsse from an ordinary relic carried in regular feasts: it was the city’s last resort, moved only when Paris was in extremity.

The Long Series

From the early Middle Ages to the eve of the Revolution the châsse was brought down again and again, and the occasions map the disasters of Parisian history. The archetype was the mal des ardents of 1129–1130, when the shrine was carried to the cathedral and the burning sickness ceased (see The Mal des Ardents); thereafter the relics were processed against recurring perils — the flooding of the Seine, which repeatedly threatened the low-lying city; outbreaks of plague and epidemic; prolonged drought and the excessive rains that ruined harvests; and the dangers of war and siege (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, cataloguing the occasions of the processions from the twelfth to the eighteenth century). In the early-modern period the processions became, if anything, more elaborate, bound up with the ceremonial life of the monarchy and the parlement, and were among the grandest religious spectacles of the capital; Sluhovsky’s study documents dozens of such descents across the medieval and early-modern centuries and analyses their political as well as devotional meaning (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the early-modern processions and their civic significance).

Each procession followed the same logic as the founding deliverances: the city in danger appealed to its mother, carried her through its streets, prayed, and ascribed the relief that followed to her. The châsse thus made Genevieve’s patronage a repeatable, visible, public reality across a thousand years — not a memory of ancient deeds but a living recourse, invoked by each generation against its own disasters (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998; see Mother of the City).

The Meaning and the End

The processions of the châsse are the clearest evidence of what Genevieve was to Paris: not a saint remembered in the abstract but the guardian to whom the city turned, corporately and ritually, in every extremity. The rite bound the whole social body — clergy, university, magistracy, and commons — into a single act of supplication to their patroness, and in doing so it repeatedly re-founded the identity of Paris as her city, under her protection (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the processions as acts of civic self-definition). The frequency and grandeur of the descents are, for the historian, among the strongest testimonies to the depth of the cult, quite apart from the reliability of any single miracle-report.

The tradition of the great processions ended abruptly with the Revolution. In 1793 the medieval châsse was seized, its precious metals sent to be melted at the mint, and the relics it held condemned and burned (see The Relics and the Revolution). The rite could not survive the destruction of its object; and though the cult was revived in the nineteenth century around the surviving fragments at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, and processions were held again, they never regained the character of the medieval descents of the whole city’s palladium (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the Revolutionary rupture; see Patroness of Paris). The processions of the châsse thus belong, in their full form, to the thousand years between Genevieve’s burial on the hill and the Revolution — the long age in which Paris carried its mother through its streets and believed itself delivered by her prayers.

See Also

References

  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The châsse; the ritual and participants of the processions; the catalogue of occasions from the twelfth to the eighteenth century; the political and devotional meaning; the Revolutionary rupture.)