Patroness of Paris

Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris, kept on her feast of 3 January. Her cult shaped the sacred and civic life of the city for more than a thousand years; her intended church on the hill became, by an irony of history, the secular Panthéon; and in the Orthodox Church she is venerated among the saints of the undivided Church — a pre-Schism Western saint whose holiness belongs to the common inheritance of East and West.

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

Patroness and Feast

Genevieve is, and has been since the early Middle Ages, the patron saint of Paris — the city’s patrona, its heavenly mother and defender (see Mother of the City). Her principal feast is kept on 3 January, the day of her repose, in both the Western and the Eastern calendars that honour her (Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve,” on the feast of 3 January; on the Roman calendar, the Martyrologium Romanum commemorates her on 3 January). To this the medieval Parisian church added the feast of 26 November, the Miracle des Ardents, so that she had two great days in the calendar of the capital (see The Mal des Ardents; Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998).

The depth of her patronage was expressed in every register of Parisian life: in the abbey and shrine on the hill that bore her name, in the great processions of her châsse against every civic disaster, in her invocation by kings and commons, and in an iconography known to every Parisian — the young woman or shepherdess with a candle (the cierge the devil could not extinguish) and a coin at her throat, sometimes with the keys of the city or with sheep (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the cult and iconography; see The Blessing of Saint Germanus on the coin). For more than a millennium she was, quite simply, the saint of Paris.

The Church of Sainte-Geneviève and the Panthéon

The most visible — and most paradoxical — monument of her patronage is the great domed building on the summit of the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève. King Louis XV, recovering from a grave illness at Metz in 1744, vowed to rebuild the ruined abbey-church of Sainte-Geneviève in thanksgiving; the vast neoclassical church designed by Jacques-Germain Soufflot was begun in 1758 and structurally completed by 1790 — a temple to the patroness of Paris raised at the very end of the ancien régime (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the eighteenth-century church; on Soufflot’s building, standard histories of French neoclassical architecture). But it was finished on the eve of the Revolution, and in 1791 the Constituent Assembly, on the occasion of the death of Mirabeau, decreed that the new church of Sainte-Geneviève should become instead a secular mausoleum for the great men of the nation — the Panthéon, inscribed Aux grands hommes la patrie reconnaissante (on the conversion of the church into the Panthéon in 1791, see the accounts of the Revolutionary secularization; Mona Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1988, on the Revolutionary reappropriation of sacred space). The church built to honour the patroness of Paris thus became, and remains, a monument of the secular Republic — the sharpest single emblem of the Revolution’s rupture with the cult of Genevieve, which the burning of her relics two years later would complete (see The Relics and the Revolution).

The surviving home of her cult became instead the neighbouring church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, beside the site of the demolished medieval abbey, where the fragments of her relics that escaped 1793 are kept in a modern reliquary and where her feast is still observed (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on Saint-Étienne-du-Mont as the surviving centre of the cult; see The Relics and the Revolution).

Her Reception as an Orthodox Pre-Schism Saint

Genevieve died about 502/512, more than five centuries before the schism that divided the Latin West from the Orthodox East (conventionally dated to 1054). She belongs, therefore, to the age of the undivided Church, and her holiness is part of the common inheritance of both East and West. On this ground the Orthodox Church venerates her — as it venerates the other saints of the pre-Schism West — as a genuine saint of the one Church, and keeps her memory on 3 January (on the Orthodox veneration of the ancient Western saints, see Holy Tradition; the Orthodox reception of pre-Schism Western saints is a settled principle, exemplified in the Orthodox calendars and in the Western-rite and diaspora communities that honour them). Her Orthodox reception places her in the company of the other fellow pre-Schism Western saints venerated in this repository — St. Martin of Tours, St. John Cassian, St. Columba of Iona, St. Patrick of Ireland — the founding generation of Latin Christendom whom the Orthodox Church reclaims as its own (see St. Martin of Tours; St. Columba of Iona; St. Patrick of Ireland).

For the Orthodox reader, what is venerated in Genevieve is exactly what the source-critical inquiry leaves untouched: a consecrated virgin of the undivided Church, ascetic and intercessor, the mother and defender of a great Christian city, received in the Church’s veneration for fifteen centuries (see The Guardian of Paris; What Can Be Known). The thinness of her documented biography is no obstacle to that veneration, because it is the holy life received by the Church, not the certified biography, that the Church honours (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5; and the theology of ecclesial reception in St. Xenia of Petersburg: Methodology).

See Also

References

  • Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve.” britannica.com/biography/Saint-Genevieve. (Patroness of Paris; feast 3 January.)
  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The cult, iconography, the eighteenth-century church, and Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.)
  • Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (The Revolutionary conversion of sacred space; the Panthéon.)
  • Martyrologium Romanum, 3 January (the Western commemoration).