The Relics and the Revolution

During the French Revolution the medieval cult of Genevieve was destroyed at its heart: in 1793 her great reliquary châsse was seized and sent to the mint to be melted for its gold and silver, her relics were condemned by the Revolutionary authorities and publicly burned at the Place de Grève, and the ashes were cast into the Seine. This file gives the sober factual account of the destruction, the surviving fragments, and the continuing cult.

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

The Destruction of 1793

The Revolution fell heavily on the greatest of Paris’ saints. In 1793, at the height of the de-Christianization campaign and the Terror, the medieval reliquary shrine (châsse) of Genevieve — the gold and silver casket, enriched over centuries by kings and the faithful, that had held her relics above the high altar and been carried through Paris in every crisis — was seized by the Revolutionary authorities, taken to the Hôtel des Monnaies (the mint), and dismantled so that its precious metals could be melted down and its jewels taken for the national treasury; the materials were assessed and their value entered in the accounts (on the seizure and melting of the châsse at the mint in 1793, see the accounts of the Revolutionary confiscations of Parisian relics; Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, Brill, 1998, on the fate of the cult under the Revolution).

The relics themselves — the bones the châsse had held — were not merely discarded but subjected to a deliberate act of Revolutionary anti-cult. They were condemned by the authorities, and on 3 December 1793 (13 Frimaire, Year II) they were publicly burned in a bonfire at the Place de Grève, the traditional place of execution before the Hôtel de Ville, in a kind of revolutionary auto-da-fé; the ashes were then thrown into the Seine (on the burning of Genevieve’s relics at the Place de Grève on 3 December 1793 and the casting of the ashes into the river, see the standard accounts of the Revolutionary destruction of the Paris relics; Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve,” on the destruction of the relics during the Revolution). The symbolism was pointed: the palladium of Paris, the relics its people had carried against every disaster for a thousand years, were destroyed as objects of “superstition” and “error” by the Republic that had turned her church into the Panthéon (see Patroness of Paris). Per the repository methodology, this is reported soberly and factually, as the documented history it is (METHODOLOGY §3.5).

What Survived

The destruction was severe but not total. Fragments of Genevieve’s relics survived because portions had, over the centuries, been detached and given to other churches and communities, and so were not in the châsse in 1793. After the Revolution the cult was revived: under Napoleon and the Concordat, and through the nineteenth century, surviving fragments were gathered and enshrined, and the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, beside the site of the demolished medieval Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, became the principal home of the restored cult, where a modern reliquary containing relics of the saint is venerated and her feast observed to this day (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998, on the survival and revival of the cult at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont; on the nineteenth-century restoration of the cult). A fragment of her tomb — the ancient sarcophagus-stone — is also preserved at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, a relic of the burial that Gregory of Tours attests (see The Church of the Holy Apostles).

The revived cult never regained the scale of the medieval devotion — the great processions of the whole city’s palladium could not be restored once the palladium was ash — but it did not die. Genevieve remained the patroness of Paris in name and in the continuing devotion of the faithful; her feast is kept, her surviving relics are venerated, and the annual observances at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont carry the cult, in reduced but real form, into the present (Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998).

The Meaning of the Rupture

The events of 1791–1793 — the church become the Panthéon, the châsse melted, the relics burned and scattered — are the sharpest instance in French history of the Revolution’s assault on the cult of the saints, and they fell with peculiar force on Genevieve precisely because she was the greatest and most identified with the old order of the city (Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1988, on the de-Christianization and the reappropriation of sacred space; Sluhovsky, Patroness of Paris, 1998). That the relics were not simply lost but tried and burned shows that the Revolution recognized in Genevieve exactly what fifteen centuries of Parisians had recognized — the living heart of the city’s Christian identity — and moved to destroy it as such.

Yet the rupture is not the end of the story, and the sober historian notes both halves. The physical relics of the medieval cult were, for the most part, genuinely destroyed; the claim of continuity with the ancient bones is broken at 1793, and the fragments now venerated are those that had earlier been dispersed. But the cult itself — the veneration of Genevieve as patroness of Paris and saint of the undivided Church — survived the destruction of its objects, was revived, and continues; and it is that veneration, not the survival of any particular bone, that the Church honours (cf. the theology of ecclesial reception in St. Xenia of Petersburg: Methodology; METHODOLOGY §3.5). For the Orthodox veneration of Genevieve as a pre-Schism Western saint, the Revolution’s fire destroyed the relics but not the saint: she is venerated still, on 3 January, among the holy ones of the ancient Church (see Patroness of Paris; The Guardian of Paris).

See Also

References

  • Encyclopædia Britannica, “Saint Genevieve.” britannica.com/biography/Saint-Genevieve. (The destruction of the relics during the Revolution.)
  • Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Leiden: Brill, 1998. (The fate of the châsse and cult under the Revolution; the survival and revival at Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.)
  • Ozouf, Mona. Festivals and the French Revolution. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. (De-Christianization; the reappropriation of sacred space; the Panthéon.)
  • Gregory of Tours. History of the Franks IV.1. Trans. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. (The attested burial, source of the surviving tomb-relic.)