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Tag Archive: france
The busy Posthumous life of Genevieve
By David Powell
In November 1793, the oldest victim of the Reign of Terror went quietly to her fate. She had already been dead for nearly thirteen centuries, but that did not mollify the revolutionaries who had exhumed Saint Genevieve of Nanterre from the crypt beneath the Parisian abbey that bore her name.
Her ornate, early medieval reliquary, gilded in gold and silver and encrusted with diamonds and other gems, was taken to the city mint over the protest of hundreds of the saint’s admirers. There, behind locked doors, assayers valued the ancient coffin at 23,800 livres. They then dismantled it.
Within, wrapped in white linen, they found “the bones of a cadaver and a head on which there were many deposits of gypsum or plaster.”
They also found a tiny piece of ancient parchment with an inscription: Hic jacet humatum corpus sanctae Genovefae. “Here lies buried the body of holy Genevieve.”
It was an undignified end for the patron saint of Paris. Genevieve was a shepherdess from nearby Nanterre who, as the governing apparatus of the Roman Empire receded from 5th century Gaul, gained widespread fame for her piety and charity. When Attila the Hun, the “Scourge of God,” threatened Paris in 451, a prayer vigil led by Genevieve was credited with saving the city from his wrath.
After her death, she was interred atop the hill that would later be home to the city’s Latin Quarter. Her shrine, just east of the town’s disused Roman forum, quickly became a pilgrimage site. Even in death, she remained active. In the centuries to come, as Paris bloomed around her, every grave threat to the city was met by a procession featuring her sarcophagus: war, plague, famine…even high water. The Marquise de Sevigny described a 1675 procession meant to end a series of flooding rainstorms:
“Monks of every order walk in it, and all the parish clergy and the canons of Notre-Dame, his Grace the Archbishop, in pontifical robes, on foot, and blessing the people right and left all the way to the cathedral. However he walks only on the left side. On the right walks the Abbot of Sainte-Genevieve, barefooted, preceded by 150 monks, also barefooted …The Parliament in red robes and all the higher guilds follow the shrine, which sparkles with precious stones, and is carried by twenty-two barefooted men clad in white. The head of the merchant guilds and five councillors are left as hostages at the Abbey of Sainte-Genevieve until the return of [the saint’s relics].”
By 1793, her fame had become a liability. Her bones were tried for treasonous collaboration with the Bourbon royal family, found guilty, and burned at the Place de Grève (now the Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville). The few remaining fragments of her body were later reburied at the Church of St. Stephen, where they remain today. Nearby, the city’s Pantheon stands on the former site of her shrine and is the final resting place of Voltaire and other secular titans of France. The building’s intended purpose remains visible, however, in the murals that decorate its vaulted interior, which depict the life of a shepherd girl from Nanterre.
Further reading:
Bitel, Lisa. Landscape with Two Saints: How Genovefa of Paris and Brigit of Kildare Built Christianity in Barbarian Europe. Oxford University Press, 2008.
Sluhovsky, Moshe. Patroness of Paris: Rituals of Devotion in Early Modern France. Brill, 1998.
David P. Powell studies ancient and medieval Europe in the graduate history program at Villanova University. When the urge seizes him, he writes about the topic at his blog, Studenda Mira.
IMAGE: Tomb of Saint Genevieve in Saint Etienne du Mont
Giveaway: Martyrs and Murderers, Oh My!
Martyrs and Murderers could be a title of an episode of dese guys you see in, you know, The Sopranos or something. But Stuart Carroll’s Martyrs and Murderers instead tells the story of the Guise: three generations of treacherous, bloodthirsty power-brokers.
One of the richest and most powerful families in sixteenth-century France, the House of Guise played a pivotal role in the history of Europe. Among the staunchest opponents of the Reformation, they whipped up religious bigotry throughout France. They overthrew the king, ruled Scotland for nearly 20 years through Mary Queen of Scots, plotted to invade England and overthrow Elizabeth I, and ended the century by unleashing the bloody Wars of Religion, before succumbing in a counter-revolution that made them martyrs for the Catholic cause. Never a dull moment with these characters! However, the story of the Guise family is sensational but true.
Stuart Carroll unravels the legends about this cultivated, charismatic, and violent dynasty, all the while challenging traditional assumptions about one of Europe’s most turbulent eras. And we at Wonders & Marvels are offering 1 copy of Martyrs and Murderers as our giveaway.
Enter by responding to this question by 11:59 p.m. January 19, 2010:
What dramatic-but-true tale remains indelibly on your mind? Could be a book you’ve read, or something in the National Enquirer – we want to know! Good luck!
(Sorry, at this time, books can only be shipped to winners with U.S. addresses.)
Lucky Gaspard de Coligny?
By Stuart Carroll
As he left the Louvre at 11 am on Friday 22 August 1572, Gaspard de Coligny, paid little attention to his surroundings. He had just attended a royal council meeting, and as he walked along was absorbed in reading an important piece of business. He did not return the hostile looks of the locals.
At 55 he was the kingdom’s most experienced politician and soldier and used to the gazes of Catholics. The curious were kept at a distance by a dozen bodyguards. Even his enemies respected his courage and piety. He was often compared to his contemporary, François duke of Guise—France’s ‘two shining diamonds’.
Like Guise, Coligny spread fear among his enemies. There was an uncompromising element in his character which suited him well to Protestant discipline. In war he knew the value of cruelty and terror as a weapon. To the Protestants this made him a hero, and the leadership was in awe of him.
That morning he was making the short walk to his lodgings in the rue de Béthisy. Soon after he turned into the rue des Poulies a single shot rang out from a hundred feet away. Protestants placed their trust in providence for good reason: at the very same moment the shot was fired Coligny stopped and turned suddenly, and the shot missed his vitals, fracturing his left forearm and taking off an index finger.
Coligny was not killed by the bullet; he would have lived. And yet within forty-eight hours he was murdered. Several days of anarchy followed in which between at least 2,000, and perhaps as many as 6,000, Protestants were butchered. Upwards of 600 houses were pillaged. The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is the greatest imponderable of sixteenth-century history. Martyrs and Murderers solves the mystery and lifts the lid of the role of the Guise family in it.
Stuart Carroll, author of Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe
, has taught at the Universities of London and York, where he is currently Professor of History. He is twice-winner of the Nancy Roelker prize for the best essay written on early modern French History.
IMAGE: Portrait of Gaspard de Coligny (1519 – 1572)
A Cruel Exception
By Dan Edelstein
The Capetian dynasty, which had ruled France since 987, was overthrown on the night of 9-10 August, 1792. The deposed king, Louis XVI, had escaped with his family to safety; with the monarchy gone, the French still had a monarch on their hands. There was little question that he should be tried for treason. The question was how. Under the 1791 Constitution, the king had been granted inviolability. How do you try a chief executive when that executive, by definition, cannot be tried?
The answer, it turned out, was straightforward. There was a higher law, respected by all peoples at all times, that allowed the Convention to prosecute the king: this was the law of nature. The “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” had served earlier revolutionaries well. But there was more to natural right (as this body of law was known) than political freedom. Indeed, it also provided the definition of an exceptional criminal—the enemy of the human race, or hostis humani generis—who, having violated the laws of nature, must be destroyed. The French deputies jumped through this loophole to try, and ultimately convict, the king.
At the time, the most radical deputies in the Convention (the “Montagnards”) were in favor of abolishing the death penalty. The execution of the king was a “cruel exception” to this rule, Robespierre opined. In a matter of months, however, these same deputies extended this exception to any counter-revolutionary, invoking the same arguments as they had against the king. This book shows how natural right provided the legal and moral authorization for the Terror, but also points to the strange republican ideal cherished by the Montagnard leaders: the dream of founding a state based entirely on nature.
Dan Edelstein, author of The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution
, is an assistant professor of French at Stanford University. He was raised in Geneva, Switzerland, where he attended university before returning to the United States for graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He works primarily on eighteenth-century French literature, politics, and philosophy, and more generally on questions of political mythology. His book on the genealogy of the Enlightenment will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2010.
IMAGE: Depiction of the storming of the Tuileries Palace on August, 10, 1792, Jean Duplessis-Bertaux, c 1793
The End of an Era
By Kate Cambor
News that Victor Hugo had taken ill was announced on May, 18 1885. He was a superstar before the age of superstars, a literary figure whose personal and political life had attained mythic proportions in his country and among his contemporaries.
For four days, the nation held its breath, waiting and praying that the poet would recover. When death finally claimed Victor Hugo at around 1:30 a.m. on May 22, men and women throughout the nation joined together in a shared display of grief and respectful devotion the likes of which none had seen. To contemporary observers, the event marked nothing less than the end of the nineteenth century.
Léon Daudet, son of the popular writer Alphonse Daudet, Jeanne Hugo, the beloved granddaughter of Victor Hugo, and Jean-Baptiste Charcot, son of the renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, were among the more than two million people who filled the city on June 1 to watch as Victor Hugo’s body, carried in a pauper’s coffin, wound its way through the city streets.
Victor Hugo and the values he incarnated had served as a powerful point of reference for generations of Frenchmen; his passing, when Léon, Jeanne, and Jean-Baptiste were all teenagers, marked an important turning point not only in their lives but in the history of the nation.
These three families—Hugo, Daudet, Charcot—represented the best of what France had to offer: integrity, success, Republican fortitude, and even genius. Now, with the death of Victor Hugo and the new century looming ahead, these three adolescents were faced with the daunting challenge of making names for themselves in a changing world, their very personal quests for self-discovery increasingly bound up in the great debates of the day. Their time together and the subsequent choices they made offer an illuminating glimpse into the possibilities and frustrations of growing up in the public eye in fin-de-siècle France.
Kate Cambor is the author of Gilded Youth: Three Lives in France’s Belle Epoque
. For more information about the book, please visit her website at http://www.katecambor.com
IMAGE: The Funeral of Victor Hugo (June 1, 1885)
Fifteen-year-old Françoise meets her first husband
By Veronica Buckley
From the humblest of births in a provincial prison cell, Françoise d’Aubigné made her perilous way out of desperate poverty to a brilliant salon life in Paris, and finally, as Madame de Maintenon, secret wife of the Sun King Louis XIV, to the centre of power at Versailles.
In the winter of 1651, wearing old-fashioned shoes and a dress much too short for her, the fifteen-year-old Françoise stepped into the salon of Paul Scarron, infamous poet of the burlesque. Though she had heard others talk of his dreadful disfigurement, the first sight of him in person proved too much for her.
Overcome by horror or pity, she broke down at once in tears. ‘My body, it’s true, is most irregular,’ Scarron himself admitted. The celebrated scandalmonger, toast of the Paris salons, was seated in the middle of the room, his twisted body propped up and strapped into a large wheelchair, with a wooden tablet affixed on which he rested one claw-like hand. ‘I used to be a well built man,’ he wrote, though it’s true I was never very tall. But now my legs are at an acute angle to my body, and my head is permanently bent down to my stomach – I’m a sort of human Z.
My legs and arms and fingers have all shrivelled up. In short, I’m a shrivility of human misery.’ Françoise, wiping the tears from her eyes, stepped forward to be introduced. ‘To look him in the face,’ recorded a witness of their meeting, ‘she had to lean over so far she was almost on her knees’.
Veronica Buckley, author of The Secret Wife of Louis XIV: FranCoise d’Aubigne, Madame de Maintenon
, was born and educated in New Zealand, and later studied at the Universities of London and Oxford. Christina, Queen of Sweden, was the subject of her much-praised first biography. She lived in Paris while researching The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, and now lives in Vienna.
IMAGE: Portrait dit autrefois de Paul Scarron (1610-60). French school, seventeenth century. Le Mans, Musee de Tesse.
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