Paris is complicated, and I got myself in trouble by deciding to spend a little more (virtual) time there, this time on the Left Bank. I chose a topic that was a bit rich, like a serving of Saint-Honoré, and it took me a while to digest! Hence the delay, dear patient readers.
With Saint Germain (496-576) we have the opportunity to explore yet another sixth-century character and the influence of his name on later centuries. Our cast includes a bishop known for his modesty, kings and queens known for their cruelty, abbots known for their erudition, a drink for existentialists, and young people known for their lawlessness.
On our reductive map of sixth-century Paris we see the three poles of attraction: the church of the saints Peter and Paul (later called Sainte Geneviève) established by King Clovis at Geneviève’s request; the shrine to Saint Denis, also in place thanks to our heroine Geneviève; and the subject today, the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, founded by Clovis’ son Childebert as the abbey of Saint-Vincent-et-Sainte-Croix in 558. These sacred sites enclose Paris like a spiritual forcefield. Each of them was key to the development of Paris for different reasons, but they all shared the currency of religious and political authority, visible to the public in the relics they contained like storefront displays of exotic jewelry. The abbey of Saint-Vincent-et-Sainte-Croix, later Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was the first abbey established in Paris and the necropolis for some of the most lawless of the Frankish rulers.
The site, as many a Christian church site, seems to have had religious significance long before Christ put his stamp on the world. No doubt it served as a shrine for the Celts, and later it became the location for a temple to the Egyptian goddess Isis, adopted by the Romans. This goddess of immortality, love, and fertility, would be pleased to know that her influence extended right through to the mid-twentieth century, when the neighborhood of Saint-Germain-des-Prés became famous as a center of amours sans loi, as Druon puts it (or “love without law”), jazz and blues, and existential debate. Before all that, these fields (pré is the French word for “meadow,” derived from Latin pratum) enclosed by the north-swinging swerve of the Seine River, served as a battleground where the Gallic chieftain Camolugens was crushed by the Roman Labienus. A few centuries later, our man Germain was born in Autun (about 340 km or 3-1/2 hours by car SE of Paris) in 496. He grew up and began climbing the ladder of religious hierarchy in Autun. His life took a dramatic turn when he visited Paris in 555 and King Childebert asked him to become his bishop. Given the ways in which people often assumed important posts under Merovingian royalty, one can’t help but wonder what happened to Germain’s predecessor. We should assume our hero’s innocence, however, since by all counts, he did his best to reform his wild boss and lived his own life in exemplary fashion, eschewing pretention and display, even as the abbey he founded was gifted with enormous wealth in real estate holdings and powers of taxation.
King Childebert was one of the four sons of Clovis (whose name can also be translated as Clodowig, Ludwig, and Louis), the founder of the first line of “French” or “Frankish” kings, and, in his own lifetime, a man compared to the Emperor Constantine. Like Constantine, he converted to Christianity at his wife’s request, and like Constantine, he eliminated difficult family members with impunity. Once a Christian, however, he made good use of the tool of repentance, building a church after each murder. It was Clovis who established Paris as his capital, eliminating the Roman name Lutetia, and it was he who named his kingdom Francia. Clovis left his considerable territory to his four sons without another word, and you can guess what happened next. Druon describes the period following the death of Clovis as a “long boulevard of crime.” Infanticides were the rule rather than the exception, mistresses were many, and the pharmacists working on poisons and associated antidotes were making a fortune.
Paris fell to Childebert, who managed to hold onto it for some forty years, all the while campaigning to increase his territory in what is now western Europe. In the 530s and 540s he traveled south to Spain to confront the Visigoths (remember Leander?), and returned to Paris in 542 with a couple of significant relics: the tunic of Saint Vincent of Zaragoza (a third-century Spanish martyr and not to be confused with the seventeenth-century Saint Vincent-de-Paul of thrift store fame), and a portion of the True Cross (that which Christ was crucified on) encased in a gold cross-shaped reliquary. The True Cross was a veritable gold mine for relic collectors, as you can imagine how many splinters one could extract from such a large object. Vincent’s tunic was supposedly used as payment to prevent Childebert and his brother Clothar from sacking Zaragoza. Childebert returned to Paris and locked his prizes away in his safe deposit box. Thirteen years later he hired Germain as bishop, and one of the first requests that Germain made was to be given an abbey to safeguard the precious relics. Not only did he get his abbey, but he got a royal abbey, which meant it owed allegiance to no one below the pope in Rome. In addition, his abbey was given extensive property up and down the Seine River valley, the power to tax this property as well as mills, river traffic, and fishing activity.
The abbey church is described as a fitting testament to this status, with marble columns (perhaps spolia from Roman temples in Paris), glittering mosaics in the Byzantine style, and a gilded bronze roof, which earned the church its pseudonym of Saint-Germain-le-Doré. Almost immediately after the church was consecrated, King Childebert died and was buried there on December 23, 558. The site then became a royal necropolis as other family members joined him. There was Chilperic (d. 584), Childebert’s nephew who had two wives murdered in one week so he could take up with the famous Fredegund. Fredegund a “nocturnal scavenger” according to Druon, claims some of the following accomplishments in Gregory of Tours’ sixth-century chronicle: several attempts to murder and humiliate her stepson Clovis, torture and disfigurement of his girlfriend, an endless list of other tortures and murders, including that of the Bishop Praetextatus in his cathedral in Rouen, and solicitations for lovers from all walks of life not excluding bishops.
De mortuis nihil nisi bonum
When there’s a pause in the conversation, the French say, un ange passe, meaning “an angel is passing,” and that’s what we wish for here.
In 576 Germain himself passed, and his tomb was placed in the west entry porch, but his fan club became so great a problem that he was moved near the main altar. About 250 years later, Charlemagne did not neglect Paris in his Wealth Distribution Plan, and the real estate of the abbey was increased to include about 27,000 acres of forest and 16,000 acres of cultivated land throughout the north of France. Think 42 square miles of woods and 25 square miles of farmland. In Paris, the real estate holdings of the abbey effectively included all of the sixth and seventh arrondissements, and nowadays, the quarter of Saint-Germain is the second-most expensive area to live in Paris.
Naturally those greedy Normans sniffed these riches out, and swept through in 845 and 856. A resident monk described watching some Normans hacking down roof beams to repair their boats, and another, not the sharpest tool in the shed, trying to break up a marble column—in the end he only broke his hand.
Architecturally, the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés never quite made the grade. For those of us who like things clean and simple, it was probably at its best under the Merovingians; we can only imagine it, but it was most likely a straightforward basilica form with a flat wooden ceiling under a gable roof. The Normans having altered the appearance somewhat, the Abbot Monard used the existing foundations to erect an entirely new structure in 1014, the outline of which can be seen in the plan drawn above. The next big change came in1163, when the rounded chevet was added (a chevet is the assembly of the entire eastern end of the church, including the choir; which is the main central space with the altar, the ambulatory, and the radiating chapels). The reason for this remodel is worth a little side story. It was the result of a Major Event in 1144: the dedication party that Abbot Suger held for his newly remodeled basilica church at Saint-Denis. Suger was the Mies van der Rohe, the Frank Lloyd Wright of his age. Obsessed with light for both physical and spiritual reasons, he blew apart the sobriety and inefficiency of Romanesque design to create what is considered the first Gothic church at Saint-Denis. And, also being the Kim Kardashian of his time, he endowed his church with lots of bling, wrote endlessly about himself and his project, and threw a huge party at the dedication. Over 40 bishops attended, returned to their own churches and cathedrals, scratched their heads, and within twenty years you never saw such furious building activity in the north of France. Nor ever such interesting and beautiful experiments in structure and design. The work at Saint-Germain reflects this trend, but the church was never considered an architectural jewel, and is not often found in the index of books on Gothic architecture. One excellent historian, William Clark, argues bravely for the value of a second look at Saint-Germain through nuanced notation of construction sequence, use of details, and context. In the face of Clark’s experience, I am a novice, but as an architect I can appreciate the light he sheds on the dilemma of design integrity. I can also shamelessly say that in this case, the personalities and the urban history of this area are way more interesting to me than the architecture.
So, to continue in those veins, we begin with the shifts in terrain. Saint-Germain-des-Prés lived outside the walls built by Philip Augustus between 1190 and 1215, and it lived outside the walls built by Charles V in 1368. But by 1368 the abbey was a major stockholder in Parisian real estate, and Charles was not about to let it be attacked, so he forced the abbey to fortify herself. Moats were dug and filled with water from a canal connected to the Seine (once a stream called the Nove—that stream course is now rue Bonaparte), walls were built, and towers and gates. In the seventeenth century the Congregation of Saint Maur took over the abbey; these monks were the top intellectuals of their time, and they were fanatics for collecting and producing documents, including many beautiful maps and perspective views of monastic lands. Personally, I can attest to the richness, the remarkable organization and cross-referencing of the ten fat volumes of the Histoire Générale de Languedoc, written and assembled by two of these guys (Dom de Vic and Dom Vaissète), as I spent hours buried in these books during my work on my dissertation.
Between 1631 and the Revolution, as Paris grew, various officials filled in the moats and opened up streets around Saint-Germain where fields had been. With the Revolution, the sarcophagi of the Merovingian madcaps were either destroyed or moved to the basilica of Saint-Denis. Between 1794 and 1802 the church was a gunpowder factory; shortly afterwards the cloister was pierced by the rue de l’Abbaye, and the rue Bonaparte extended across the gardens to the west. Gradually through the nineteenth century, the church was restored and a new chapel added. The two Romanesque towers that had flanked the crossing were too unstable to keep and now we see only their bases. In 1852 Haussmann began his massive Pick Up Your Socks project for the streets of Paris and the grand Boulevard Saint-Germain was created, slicing through a warren of medieval buildings. And about the same time…coffee became big business.
And what better drink to nurture the existentialists who put Saint-Germain on the international map? Coffee, keeping you eternally present, conscious of yourself and of the moment. Death becomes irrelevant, as do other outside forces…
In 1855 Félix Mornand wrote, “Paris would not exist without its cafes or its journals.” He was writing the same year that The Grand Café opened on the Boulevard du Temple, not far from rue Saint-Honoré. At the Grand Café, the entry was marked with two giant caryatids (in Ancient Egypt and Greece, caryatids were stone female figures acting as columns), one representing Industry and the other Commerce. It was the apogee of a trend started by a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio, in 1686, back in our home territory, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then and there, Procopio’s coffee house established an atmosphere of casual elegance to frame the seventeenth-century actors and intellectuals who frequented the area, but as the years rolled on, the “cool” coffee houses migrated across town and back again. At the turn of the twentieth century, they were centered in Montmartre, associated with the cabaret life seen in the paintings of Edouard Manet and the prints of Toulouse-Lautrec.
About the same time, in 1885, the Café Flore was opened in Saint-Germain, when this neighborhood was a backwater, a haven of calm, a place where people played dominos. But the Left Bank had always been a center of the liberal arts, the home of the Comédie Française and of editors’ and publishers’ houses. It was inevitable that this atmosphere would be reflected in its cafes, first during the period between the wars when the Surrealists began to frequent them, and then during WWII when cabaret life lost its charm for the French who lived under German occupation in Paris, and many Resistance members lived in Saint-Germain. After the war, this area became an “intellectual laboratory” for people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, who could spend their days reading (journals then were expensive but the cafes subscribed to a wide collection), writing, and debating.
And then came the “young troglodytes,” exploding with pent-up energy after the war, causing a sensation with their adoption of American styles and music. They were troglodytes because they adopted Saint-Germain basements for their homes; places where they could play jazz or blues all night long—not without protest, as Boris Vian writes in his Manuel, as the “autochthones,” or local residents who had to work for a living, would dump their piss pots on those leaving the bars early in the morning. Vian, like many talented youths after the war, embraced multiple modes of expression, writing poetry and plays, and playing jazz with his two brothers—and sometimes American musicians like Miles Davis—in the caves of the Quartier Saint-Germain. He wrote his Manuel as a defense of the neighborhood, in response to the press of what he called the pisse-copie, or hack writer, and as a catalogue of the places and people that made up the identity of the neighborhood. Saint-Germain was the Haight Ashbury of its time, and attracted the same kind of sensational attention (Life magazine featured it in 1947, Parisian journalists were a constant presence, as were film-makers), although one could argue that its intellectual foundations were more substantial than those in the San Francisco of the 60s. Just as the pilgrims wanting to touch the sarcophagus of Saint Germain overwhelmed the porch of the abbey church in the seventh century, pilgrims coming to the neighborhood of Saint-Germain in the 1950s overwhelmed the neighborhood and changed its character.
Once again, we have the case of a saint whose name overwhelms his own life beyond measure. How would an existentialist have viewed this effect? Can a person’s name have an existence of its own that shifts at will? Or at the will of others? I refer you to the handy guide by Cathcart and Kline listed below and wish you luck!
Thank you for reading. If you haven’t yet subscribed, you can do so using the button below, and/or send this forward using the “share” button.
References for Weeks 20 & 21: Germain
Books and articles
Please note that sources listed here may be available in more recent editions.
Cathcart, Thomas, and Daniel Klein. Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes. New York: Abrams, 2007. (This is a fabulous introduction to philosophy!)
Clark, William. “Spatial Innovations in the Chevet of Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 38, No. 4 (December) 1979: 348-365.
Druon, Maurice. Paris de César à Saint Louis. Paris; Hachette, 1964.
Gregory of Tours. The History of the Franks, trans Lewis Thorpe. London: Penguin Classics, 1974.
Lecoq, Benoît. ‘Le café’ in Les Lieux de Mémoire, (volume 3). Paris: Gallimard, 1997, 3771-3799.
Pitt, Leonard. Walks Through Lost Paris. China: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006.
Shepard, Mary B. “The Relics Window of St. Vincent of Saragossa at Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Gesta, Vol. 37, No. 2, (1998): 258-265.
Vian, Boris. Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Paris : Pauvert, 1997 (originally published in the 1950s)