Cathedral Cities of France

by R. W. S. Herbert Marshall; Hester Marshall

The most ancient emblem of Lutetia which has been preserved from antiquity is that of the prow of a boat which one sees sculptured on the springing of the vault of the Roman palace of the Thermes, built on the left bank of the Seine; the powerful association of the Nautæ Parisiaci, which is found at the head of the Parisian Navigation represented by the prow of a boat, has therefore a direct Celtic or Gallic origin. Living only in rude cabins the early inhabitants naturally possessed no public building. Cæsar therefore conceived the idea of convoking the Gaulish chiefs into one central place or forum, and ordered to be built a “Suggestum,” a tribune from which he could harangue the assembled headmen. This is considered by some French architects as the earliest indication of their édilité naissánte. As further evidence of their building and engineering capability, the inhabitants of Lutetia threw out bridges to join their island to the main banks of the river. Cæsar frequently refers to the bridges built by the Gauls, such as the one at Melun, on the Seine, another across the Allier, near Vichy, of which ancient foundations and piers have been found, another at Orléans, and of such slender construction as to have especially attracted his attention, and, finally, the bridge of Lutetia across the main arm of the Seine, the predecessor of the present Pont Notre Dame, which has also left traces of its ancient piers.

In Rome the Nautæ Tiberis were a corporation who enjoyed the privilege of carrying corn and other produce from Ostia to the capital; similar associations existed in Gaul in addition to the Nautæ Parisiaci, and on a wall of the amphitheatre of Nîmes is an inscription in which as many as forty places are mentioned where corporations enjoying the same privileges and immunities existed. No wonder the territory of the Parisii increased in commercial activity. Watered by the Seine, the Marne and the Oise, its trade routes by land and by water were fully organised and guarded by powerful associations which existed almost before the Roman Conquest, and attracted the attention of the writer Strabo. It soon developed under such advantages into a prosperous and enlightened city. Roman buildings took the place of the Gallic huts, Roman laws governed the city, Roman customs and manners prevailed amongst the inhabitants, and by the time the first messengers of Christianity had penetrated into Gaul Lutetia had become a city not of the Gauls, but of the Romans. Curiously enough it was from Rome also that these early messengers came, to preach their doctrine to a Roman city. The pioneers were Saint Denis, generally confounded, for the sake of the antiquity of the Gallican Church, with the convert of Saint Paul, Dionysius the Areopagite, and two companions, Eleutherius and Rusticus; and their work was carried on by Martin of Tours, one of the bravest soldiers of the Emperor Julian, who left the army to preach the faith in Gaul, and to stamp out the cult of the old pagan gods. Speaking of Julian, moreover, may serve to remind us that it was at Paris that he was first proclaimed emperor; here was his palace before his imperial honours came upon him, and here, he declares in his own writings, were spent the three happiest winters of his life, showing that even in these early times Lutetia was a fair and pleasant city, as it is to-day.

In the following centuries Gaul was overrun with tribes from the east, Goths and Visigoths, Alemnanni and Huns, Burgundians and Franks. The last-named broke down the Roman defences all over the land and seized upon Paris. A new era now began for the city. Under Clovis, the first Frank king, it became the official capital of the State in 508, and from this time forward takes its place as one of the great cities of France. After the conversion of Clovis, abbeys and churches were built, great bishops and great saints preached and wrote their message, and indeed the ecclesiastical fabric of the city seems to have grown up more quickly than the civil fabric, until the time of Charlemagne, when craftsmen’s guilds were established, Jewish capitalists admitted within the walls, and a mercantile reputation founded. Then a second time the work of the conquerors seemed to be undone. The Northmen, more terrible invaders than Goths or Franks, plundered the coast-lands and presently swept up the Seine past Rouen to Paris, where they worked such havoc as the town had never before known. The streets were set in flames, the monasteries were sacked and burnt, the priests and monks were massacred without mercy; yet all this evil was to end in better things. The very persistency of the Normans in besieging and pillaging a town four and five times, argued that the town itself must be worth the trouble, and the “lords” of Paris speedily began to look to its safety. Weak, foolish Charles the Fat could devise no better plan than the cowardly one of bribing the invaders to retreat; but Eudes, Count of Paris, knew that this would only be an inducement to them to come again, and determined once and for all to rid his city, at least, of this scourge. This he did with such effect that the crown of France was given to him and the inefficient Charles deposed. It was his nephew, Hugh the Great, who ruled at Paris in Rolf’s day, and waged constant war with Neustria and Charles the Simple, the last of the Carlovingian kings, on the hill-crest at Lâon. Then, at the end of the tenth century, began the feudal monarchy under the Capetian dynasty. The first of the line was the eldest son of Hugh the Great, and the connections which he brought with him promised well for the prestige of his new kingdom. On the one side, he was brother-in-law to the Norman Duke, Richard the Fearless; on the other, his own brother Odo was Duke of Burgundy; in his own right he was lord of Picardy, of Maine, of Chartres, of Tours, of Blois, and of Orléans; and his bond with the Church was further strengthened by the fact that he held the lay abbacies of Saint Martin, near Tours, and Saint Denis, near Paris. Thus the kingdom with which Hugh Capet began his reign was a fairly compact strip of land, having as boundaries Flanders to the north, Aquitaine to the south, Champagne to the east, and Normandy to the west. Of this kingdom Paris was nearly the actual geographical centre, and soon became the political centre also.

The early importance of Paris in the tenth century is very different to that of London. Paris at this time was a military position of growing importance, both from its central situation and its place on the island in the Seine. London on her Thames had an almost similar position, but she derived her power not merely from her Teutonic conquerors, but also from her early connection with Roman and Celtic Britain; while as a military stronghold she was no less to be desired.

The eastern point of the city, where the only bridge then existed, traversing the Seine in the exact place where now stands the Pont Notre Dame, a point where the roads through the province converged, was already a place sacred to the Gauls. Here were performed rites and sacrifices to their mysterious divinities in an underground church which existed in the third century. Probably the tradition of dark deeds of persecution of the early Christians, human sacrifices, and missionaries suffering death in the cages of lions which were kept for the purpose of exhibitions, prevented the Parisian boatmen, when they heard of the wonderful tidings of Galilee, from using this Gaulish building, so full of terrible reminiscences, as their first church. The site of the Temple of Jupiter was chosen for the establishment of a church which should stamp out the heathen religion, crush with its heel the serpent’s head and build upon its ruins a temple of the Holy Cross. About 375, on the site of the Temple of Jupiter, was built a church dedicated to Saint Etienne, which may be considered as the first Cathedral of Paris.

To the splendour of this early basilica, built by Childebert in the early Latin style, with its marble columns, some of which are now in the Musée de Cluny, the monk Fortunatus bears witness, and his description of the edifice is thus given in M. Hoffbauer’s book on Paris: “Le vaisseau de cette église repose sur des colonnes de marbre, et le soin avec lequel on l’entretient en augment la beauté. Le premier il fut éclairé de fenêtres ornées de verres transparents par lesquels on reçoit la lumière. On dirait que la main d’un ouvrier habile a emprisonné le jour dans le sanctuaire. Les feux tremblants de l’aurore naissante semblant se jouer jusque dans les lambris, et le temple est éclairé par la charté du jour même, quand le soliel ne se montre pas. Le roi Childebert, animé d’un zèle particulier pour cette église destinèe à son peuple, l’a dotée de richesses qui ne doivent jaimais s’épuiser; toujours passioné pour les intèrêts de la religion, il s’est empressé d’augmenter ses ressources. Nouveau Melchisédech, notre roi est en même temps un pontife qui remplit exactement ses devoirs de fidèle comme ses devoirs de pasteur. Bien qu’occupé dans le palais qu’il habite du soin de rendre la justice, son plus grand désir est d’imiter l’example des saints évêques. Il quitte la première charge pour en remplir une autre avec plus d’honneur, et le souvenir de ses grandes actions lui assure l’immortalité.”

By the twelfth century the basilica has disappeared, and its place has been taken, not by a single church, but by two churches side by side—Sainte Marie on the north, Saint Etienne on the south. At the beginning of the century Saint Etienne was the more important of the two, having escaped plunder at the hands of the Normans, who wrought considerable destruction in the sister church; but a twelfth-century archdeacon, Etienne de Garlande, took upon himself the task of restoring Sainte Marie, which became known as the nova ecclesia, and formed the foundation of the great basilica planned by Maurice de Sully. This church, begun in 1163, was to unite Saint Etienne and Sainte Marie; the foundation stone was laid by Pope Alexander III., and in 1218 the remains of the old church of Saint Etienne were destroyed to make way for the south aisle of Notre Dame. The work went on into the thirteenth century; the great west portal was probably finished about 1223, and those of the transepts some forty years later.

“There are absolutely only these two churches (Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle) left standing in the island of the city, and there is nothing in the history of Paris which more clearly exhibits the modern disposition to make a tabula rasa of the past.” In the Middle Ages the great Cathedral of Paris—“cathedral” since the twelfth century—stood in its island of La Cité amidst a perfect cluster of lesser churches, of which only the chapel of Saint Louis remains. Mr. Hamerton, whose words are quoted above, gives quite a considerable list of them in his “Paris in Old and Present Times,” Sainte Genèviève, Saint Jean le Rond, Saint Denis du Pas, and its brother church of La Chartre—these are but a few of their names, and yet these names are all that now remain of churches where mediæval knights and burghers and artificers worshipped, and into whose building mediæval architects, unknown and forgotten, put their best work and their highest service; even their sites are, in most cases, undiscoverable amongst the great mass of buildings, and bright wide streets, and green gardens of Paris as we know it. Some of these churches, like Saint Aignan and Saint Germain-le-Vieux, have left a few isolated columns and stones, but to find these, as one writer observes, “il faudrait pénétrer dans les maisons et se livrer à des recherches.” Another, the old Madeleine, has suffered an even worse fate, its last remaining chapel being now transformed into a wine-shop at the corner of the Rue des Marmousets; a private house now stands upon the site of Saint-Pierre aux Bœufs, built, says an inscription on the façade, in the middle of the twelfth century, and demolished as late as 1837; and as for Saint Michel du Palais, within whose walls Archibishop Maurice de Sully baptised Philip Augustus in 1165, nothing remains to the memory of the Archangel but the bridge over the Seine. “‘There is my bridge still,’ Saint Michael may think, ‘but as for my church I seek for it in vain.’” These vanished churches are too many all to be numbered here, since in La Cité alone there were, up to the eighteenth century, no less than seventeen of them, and outside the walls of the city there were many more.

Happily Notre Dame has better withstood the attacks of time and all the accidents of fire, plunder, and desecration. Five years or so after the completion of the western façade a fire broke out, and in the restoration the double-arched buttresses of the former apse disappeared, and the windows were enlarged in accordance with the growing love of light which was being manifested in other cathedrals all through France. In more modern times—towards the middle of the eighteenth century—the extraordinary taste of the late Renaissance period ordered the removal of all the stained glass both of nave and choir—leaving, however, the western rose window and the two in the transepts—and this is, of course, a loss that can never be repaired, although the restorations of Viollet-le-Duc have probably, as Mr. Hamerton says, gone some way towards bringing back the original effect of light in the interior of the church. The exterior of the nave likewise suffered not a little from the doubtless well-meaning zeal of an unarchitectural age, which had literally stripped it bare of all ornament: “One after another the architects had suppressed the advancing parts of the buttresses between the chapels, the gables, the friezes, the balustrades—in one word, the entire ornamentation of these same chapels, the pinnacles which decorated the tops of the buttresses, with the statues which accompanied them and their flowering spires, the picturesque gargoyles which rendered the services of throwing the rain-water to a distance from the walls.”