Saint-Étienne-du-Mont

March 2016

I adore this church with a quirky history. It's right beside the Pantheon, atop a hill in the fifth arrondissement of Paris.

Erected in the sixth century and named after Sainte Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris, the original church housed both her remains and those of the first king of the Francs, Clovis. Ahead of her time, St. Geneviève advised the king on political matters — in the 400s. This, along with her Attila-the-Hun-diverting prayers that are said to have saved Paris from invasion, earned her a sterling reputation (and sainthood).

A millennium later, work began on a new, larger church — intended to stand alongside the old one — to accommodate the needs of a growing population. Built during a highly transitional phase for French art and architecture, Saint-Etienne-du-Mont is a mixture of both flamboyant gothic and Franco-Italian Renaissance style. The result is an eccentric hodgepodge of architectural elements. The church’s entrance resembles a neoclassical temple, its triangular pediment sitting atop Corinthian columns. Yet stacked clumsily above it is a tripartite gothic structure, replete with a rosace, and flanked by sculptures evoking the annunciation. A soaring gothic clock tower juts out awkwardly from the building’s left side.

In 1744, Louis XV commissioned the construction of a new edifice to replace the crumbling church of Sainte-Geneviève and house her shrine: the Pantheon. Yet this would-be homage to the patron saint was made into a mausoleum to honor men of the new republic almost immediately upon its completion, and the saint's chapel melted down and her bones burned and scattered in the Seine in revolutionary fervor. Only the original tower, now surrounded by buildings for the Lycée Henri IV, remains standing. To honor the patron saint, artisans designed a gilded, flamboyantly ornate, neogothic chapel in church Saint-Étienne, unveiled in 1850. Her sarcophagus and some of her relics, saved before the revolution and originally in the now-destroyed church of Sainte-Geneviève, were set there.

The "Jubé" section of the interior of the church, which separates clergy from laypeople, is the only remaining one of its kind in Paris today. Like so much of the church, it is a magnificent mixture of Gothic and Renaissance style. The arches and main architectural construction are gothic; the ornamentation Renaissance. Foliage chiseled into the stone and thin columns give it a feeling of sweeping movement, as do the elegantly curving stairs. The entire construction is topped by a figure of Jesus Christ, which, in following with the recurrent theme of mixing styles and time periods, is a sculptural work by Ulrich de Grienewald from the early 1800s.