Saint Geneviève’s miracles: art and religion in eighteenth-century Paris

Abstract

This art-historical study of Saint Geneviève’s miracles explores an alternative path through France’s histories of religion and secularization. The article follows four objects—the saint’s relics, two paintings, and the building which became the Panthéon—across four moments in the city’s history, from the jubilant procession of her miraculous relics in 1694, to their public burning in 1793 during the Revolution. But far from articulating the familiar story from religious triumph to demise, this material investigation of rituals and ex-votos poses a challenge to grand narratives of progressive secularization and the mythical place of the Revolution in the birth of France’s secularist modernity. The vastly underexplored terrain of eighteenth-century religious art here tempers dominant narratives by tracing different experiences of religion through the lives of these often contested objects. Their use, reuse, transformations and appropriations reveal not religious decline, but shifting devotional practices and changing relationships with religious ideas and institutions.

I

In a side chapel in the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont reside the relics of Saint Geneviève, patron saint of Paris ( Fig. 1 ). For more than a millennium her relics were called upon by Parisians in times of crisis, their faith rewarded with Saint Geneviève’s long and impressive record of miracles. Whether saving the city from Attila the Hun in 451, ending a deadly epidemic of Ergotism in 1129, or delivering the people from threatening heresies throughout the sixteenth century, Saint Geneviève’s relics were intimately tied to the city’s history. ¹ But the chapel we see today does not contain those relics. The large casket under the canopy does not reveal her body but rather a portion of her stone tomb, while a smaller reliquary contains only the bones of a single finger. These traces are all that remain because the original relics of Saint Geneviève—those sacred objects cherished for over a thousand years—were destroyed in 1793, publicly burnt and cast into the Seine.

This article is about the hundred years before that moment. Following four objects—her relics and three ex-votos—across four moments in Paris’s history, this article looks to art and material culture to understand the story of the saint, and in turn finds an alternative path through historical narratives of religion and secularization. At first glance, given its ending, this account might appear to relate the familiar story of religion’s trajectory in France from triumph to demise: from 1694, when the whole city honoured Saint Geneviève’s relics in a great procession; to 1793, when those same relics were burnt in the midst of revolutionary Terror. But far from confirming grand narratives of secularization and the mythical place of the Revolution in those narratives, Saint Geneviève and her material objects pose a challenge.

Between 1500 and 1793, Saint Geneviève’s relics were involved in 120 public invocations of which, perhaps surprisingly, over a third occurred during the eighteenth century. ² I say ‘surprisingly’ because superstitious spirituality, with miracle-working objects and cults of saints, sits uneasily with our idea of the eighteenth century as the ‘age of reason’. Intellectual histories privileging Enlightenment writings have created a pervasive picture of this period as a prolonged ‘turning point’ of progressive secularization, separating an old religious world from our modern secular world. ³ Others have rightly questioned this convenient yet crude version of history, not least because of the implicit ideological loading making ‘secular’ modern and so ‘religion’ backwards. ⁴ For French history in particular, with its de-Christianizing Revolution tantalizingly ripe for teleological picking, this problematic narrative has resulted in a caricaturing of the eighteenth century as the moment of religious decline permitting the birth of the nation’s modernity.

Diminishing practices such as using religious language in wills, fasting during Lent or joining confraternities; the growing presence of lay authorities in Church affairs; and more vocal opposition to the Church have all been posited as evidence of progressive secularization. ⁵ Recently, however, there has been a compelling move to nuance this narrative and recontextualize such shifts. Nigel Aston and David Garrioch have warned against confusing decline and change, noting that devotional practices certainly evolved across the century, but that new modes of piety do not connote an abandonment of religion (indeed often entirely the opposite). ⁶ Aston also points out a distinction between anticlericalism and secularization, while Garrioch argues that secularization should not be envisaged in opposition to religion, nor as an inevitable or linear process. Likewise others have emphasized the key role played by religion (socially and politically) right up to, through and beyond the Revolution. ⁷ And historians of nineteenth-century France have started questioning the conventional shackling of religion to anti-modernist ideologies in the shifting politics of the next century. ⁸

Contributing to these valuable reinterpretations, this article proposes that art and material culture offer a distinctive way into France’s religious history in the eighteenth century. But it is a way in that has remained drastically under-explored. In History the subject may have been dominated by intellectual histories, but in Art History religion has been ignored almost entirely. ⁹ This article builds on important recent interventions in both disciplines, salvaging eighteenth-century religious material culture from its art-historical obscurity, and revealing the contribution it might make to revisionist historical narratives of secularization.

Along with the relics, the primary objects of this inquiry are three official ex-votos offered to Saint Geneviève following miracles. Two of these are paintings (one by Nicolas de Largillière from 1696, the other by Jean-François de Troy from 1726) and the third is the building which began as the new church of Sainte-Geneviève (conceived in the 1740s) and ended up as the Panthéon (transformed in the 1790s). As objects with long active lives, Saint Geneviève’s relics and ex-votos were agents that performed actions and formed relationships in the past, and remain now as witnesses to those events and experiences. Brought into being by artists and architects, they were received by their commissioners and the public, interacted with, accepted or rejected, imbued with power, moved or removed, they took on new meanings, were used and reused, altered and sometimes even destroyed. At each moment encountered in this article—1694, 1725, 1744 (and the decades up to the 1780s) and then the 1790s—the objects reveal changing relationships with Saint Geneviève, as they themselves became sites of tension and contestation, as devotional practices around them shifted and as different lay authorities claimed, appropriated and transformed the cult of Paris’s patron saint.

Most stories about the eighteenth century inevitably end up at the Revolution, but crucially this one does not expect to stop there. Encounters with objects that existed before and lived through the Revolution make it difficult to do otherwise, their very physical presence connecting at once to the moment of their creation and to all those moments since. While the Revolution certainly brings a climax, the final episode emphasizes that the eighteenth century is but a moment in a much longer and ongoing narrative. Rather than isolate Saint Geneviève’s fate and see it as the culmination of religious decline, my aim here is to tell a larger story and argue the opposite: that the tale of Paris’s patron saint reveals the inseparability of religion from the life of the eighteenth-century city. Undoing the grand narrative of secularization and destabilizing the mythical place of the Revolution therein is part of an effort to find a more nuanced picture of religion in France’s history, which may in turn contribute to a richer understanding of the role its religious past still plays in its secularist present.

II

In May 1694, the people of Paris were in dire straits. After one of the harshest winters in France’s history and several months without rain, the city was suffering an intense drought. Famine and disease had set in and there was no relief in sight with the summer harvest predicted to fail. ¹⁰ When the grain supply to Paris was threatened, the civil authorities could implement various practical measures: they could impose quotas, fix prices or take other measures to regulate the market. ¹¹ But when all worldly options had been exhausted, the government would turn to other-worldly alternatives. And in 1694, these proved much more successful.

On Thursday 27 May, the city’s patron saint was called upon to deliver the people from their dismal condition. For weeks already, the city had been preparing itself spiritually for this momentous invocation. Each day processions of clergy from Paris’s abbeys, monasteries, convents and parishes made their way to the cathedral of Notre-Dame and the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève. ¹² The poor were brought from hospitals to demonstrate the severity of resources, and the people fervently performed their own devotional acts, praying, weeping and showing the saint their meagre food supplies. ¹³ As both Steven Kaplan and Moshe Sluhovsky argue, these actions were orchestrated by the city’s authorities to deflect accountability for the crisis, passing the buck to the celestial powers, as it were, and making the people themselves at least partly responsible for both causing it (with their sins) and solving it (through repentance). ¹⁴ As a bonus, this community rite also calmed the panic and alleviated feelings of despair as the people channelled their efforts into practical devotional tasks and found solace in the prospect of the invocation. ¹⁵

Finally on 26 May, a city-wide fast was decreed by the archbishop in preparation for the main event, and late that night the reliquary of Saint Geneviève was lowered from the altar in her abbey. ¹⁶ Before dawn the next morning, crowds gathered along the route and bells tolled as the participants assembled, among them relics brought from churches across Paris. The relics of Saint Marcel, which resided in Notre-Dame, were crucial as medieval tradition dictated that Saint Geneviève not leave her abbey unless Saint Marcel came honorifically to fetch her. ¹⁷ Eventually, with everyone in their places, the enormous procession began making its way along the old medieval route (the black line in Fig. 2 ) heading down from the abbey, turning right into Rue Saint-Jacques, then along to the Seine and across the Petit Pont, where the bearers of Saint Geneviève’s and Saint Marcel’s reliquaries swapped their precious cargos in a demonstration of mutual trust, before continuing to Notre-Dame. ¹⁸ The relics were placed on the high altar, a mass was sung and afterwards the procession began its return journey (the white line in Fig. 2 ). Upon reaching the Petit Pont, Saint Marcel bid a symbolic farewell to Saint Geneviève, their bearers making the caskets bow to each other three times before Saint Geneviève made her way home via Place Maubert.

Saint Geneviève’s ‘miracle’ occurred just as the relics returned to the abbey, when suddenly the heavens opened and the longed-for rain fell upon the city, to be greeted by jubilant crowds and prayers of thanksgiving. ¹⁹ From start to finish, this rite reveals the inextricable relationship between Paris’s civil and ecclesiastical authorities, between politics and faith. For the invocation even to take place had required the cooperation of three different city authorities, given form in three documents. ²⁰ First, the Parlement de Paris acting on behalf of the crown issued the Arrêt de la Cour de Parlement pour la descente et procession de la Châsse de Sainte Geneviève (21 May 1694), officially ordering the ritual to take place. ²¹ Next, the archbishop, responsible for spiritual matters, issued the Mandement de Monseigneur l’Archeveque de Paris, portant injonction de faire des Prières & des Processions pour implorer le secours du Ciel sur les necessitez publiques & de faire la Procession générale où les Châsses de Saint Marcel et de Sainte Geneviève seront portées (21 May 1694), nominating the day of the procession, dictating liturgical obligations and granting all participants forty days of indulgences. Finally, the Paris Police, responsible for public order, issued the Ordonnance du Magistrat de Police pour la Procession générale de Sainte Geneviève (25 May 1694), dictating special measures and restrictions to ensure order in the streets and safety for the relics; for example, requiring all residents along the route to hang tapestries outside their homes, prohibiting shops from opening and vehicles from circulating, and banning all guns and explosives.

Collaboration between civil and ecclesiastical authorities was not only marked symbolically in official documents, but demonstrably in the procession itself. By the seventeenth century, as Sluhovsky has shown, processions to Saint Geneviève had evolved substantially from their medieval origins: from strictly clerical ceremonies to grand public spectacles of Church and State. ²² This coalescence was visualized in François Jollain’s commemorative print from the following year ( Fig. 3 ), where sartorial details and labels helpfully identify the procession’s participants. The majority were still Paris’s regular and secular clergy, distinguishable by ecclesiastical garments and objects, such as reliquaries, banners, crosses and incense. But amid the clergy we also find the police: the Lieutenant Civil , Lieutenant Criminel and huissiers of the Châtelet, positioned before and after Saint Geneviève’s reliquary, wearing wigs or carrying law-enforcing batons. As participants were customarily arranged in ascending order of status, Jollain’s schematic composition of a snaking line with figures decreasing in size places greatest emphasis on the end of the procession. Occupying prized position we find the archbishop (in his chair) and abbot of Sainte-Geneviève, but also alongside them, members of the Parlement in their ceremonial robes.

Trailing behind off-stage from Jollain’s print was another lay authority: Paris’s Corps de Ville or municipal governors. Though the Ville had no official role in organizing the procession, they turned themselves into the miracle’s representative recipients by offering the city’s collective thanks in a commissioned ex-voto ( Fig. 4 ). Largillière’s huge oil painting was a commemorative object of a different kind. Jollain’s print, designed as a calendar, was a quasi-ephemeral souvenir of the event; Largillière’s painting meanwhile had a specific religious function as a material votive offering. The people had already thanked Saint Geneviève in church services across the city, but the governors feared that such transient ‘actions de graces passagères’ were not sufficient for ‘un bienfait si extraordinaire’. ²³ According to their official Explication du tableau , Largillière’s painting was to be ‘une preuve permanente de leur reconnoissance’ to reside at her shrine in the abbey as ‘un monument éternel des graces qu’ils avoient receuës du Ciel’. ²⁴ In August 1696, the painting was installed with great ceremony by both its civic commissioners and its religious custodians. According to the Mercure Galant , the governors processed in full robes from the Hôtel de Ville to the abbey, where the canons met them with holy water. ²⁵ The Prévôt des Marchands gave a speech, the painting was unveiled, a mass was sung, the reliquary was displayed and lit by candles bearing the Ville ’s arms, and it ended with a benediction by the abbot.

From commissioning to unveiling, this work of art was a spiritual act, but also a political one. Largillière’s painting was a sacred object: an ex-voto presented to the saint and consecrated through rituals of installation. But the image depicted and the nature of the object’s ceremonial presentation were in every way political statements: a declaration of the Ville ’s power asserted through their special relationship with Paris’s patron. In Largillière’s painting the governors took centre stage. Largillière adhered in part to ex-voto traditions by depicting the saint with her thanksgivers, but less conventionally the miracle itself (usually the focus) has been upstaged by the painting’s commissioners who occupy the entire lower register in a group portrait. ²⁶ Kneeling on the cushion is the government’s head, the Prévôt des Marchands , Claude Bose; at the left gesturing to his chest is the Procureur du Roi de la Ville , Maximilien Titon; while on the right in the foreground are the four échevins , Toussaint Bazin and Charles Sainfray kneeling, and Claude Puylon and Louis Baudron standing, all recognizable in their distinctive robes. ²⁷ Their relationship with the Church is conveyed through the setting (probably Notre-Dame), while an almost indistinct crowd (including a self-portrait by Largillière) becomes a synecdoche for the city they represent. ²⁸ Their real power, however, comes in an intimate relationship with divine authority. The Prévôt des Marchands points directly to Saint Geneviève who floats above on dark heavy clouds, which delineate the celestial realm while alluding to the miraculous rain. Two heavenly rays of light break through the clouds, one to fall on Saint Geneviève, the other, slightly less bright, directed towards the Prévôt des Marchands . According to the governors’ Explication , this was a sign of God’s favourable regard and, they added hopefully, of their special relationship with Saint Geneviève: ‘une assurance que Dieu exaucera les vœux de la Ville, lorsque la Sainte les luy présentera’. ²⁹

Thus in the 1690s, the cult of Saint Geneviève was already being appropriated for political gain. During this dangerous natural disaster, religious and civic authorities had taken advantage of the people’s devotion to their saint to maintain public order and solve a crisis. The municipal government meanwhile made a bid for power. In this very public ex-voto, they not only claimed responsibility for the invocation, but bathed in the reflected glory of the saint. Parisians, however, were not blind to the inherent opportunism. Largillière’s painting gave rise to a popular chanson critique , which survived in a bundle of manuscripts found by Jules Cousin in the Arsenal in the 1860s. ³⁰

Ah! la rare nouvelle

Que l’on dit dans Paris

Qui n’eut point de pareille

Dedans le temps jadis;

Le prévost de la ville

Et les quatre échevins

Vont tous en souquenille

Au pays des Latins.

Chacun d’eux à la grève,

Chargé de son harnois,

À Sainte-Geneviève

Va montrer son minois

Pour offrir à la sainte

Un merveilleux tableau

Où leurs trognes sont peintes

En robe de bedeau. ³¹

In the first two verses of this satirical song, supposedly sung in the streets after the work was unveiled in the abbey, the lyrics poke fun at Largillière’s painting, not as an artwork (for it was ‘a marvellous painting’), but rather as a politicization of the miracle. Remarking on the unprecedented nature of such an offering, the song mocks the vanity of the governors for a gift that was essentially a self-promoting portrait. In the seven verses that follow, each politician is singled out for a dose of ridicule: Titon has ‘un regard méprisant’, Sainfray is ‘plus fier qu’un diable’, while Puylon ‘fait au passant la nique par un regard félon’. ³² Whether or not it was intentional on Largillière’s part (Abbé Du Bos certainly suggested the painter was complicit), his painting became a vehicle for critique. ³³ Deriding the governors’ posturing pomposity, the song expressed repugnance for this misappropriation of a spiritual moment for personal self-aggrandizing. The people of Paris were grateful for their saint’s miracle, but unimpressed with the Ville ’s usurpation of it for their own ends.

III

Thirty years later Saint Geneviève’s relics were called upon once more and at first glance events look remarkably similar. In June 1725, Paris was again suffering a climatic calamity—not drought this time, but interminable rain—and once again the summer harvest was under threat. ³⁴ In the face of crisis, the city’s authorities were galvanized to action in their familiar pattern of synergetic response: the Parlement issued an arrêt , the Archbishop issued his Mandement and the police took charge of public order. ³⁵ Then after a month of spiritual preparations with local processions, prayers, devotions, masses and fasting, on 5 July the great procession was held just as before, taking the same route to the cathedral ( Fig. 2 ), observing the same rituals and involving the same clerical and lay participants representing ecclesiastical and civil authorities. ³⁶

Commemorated in a print by Antoine Radigues ( Fig. 5 ), this procession’s similarity with earlier processions is clearly suggested visually. Each figure has been designed anew but the composition of the central image was appropriated from the same tradition as Jollain’s print ( Fig. 3 ), with labelled figures snaking their way across cobbles destined for the cathedral. For the printmaker’s purposes there was so little difference that the entire print is actually recycled. A hand-corrected mistake in the title of this British Museum proof shows that Radigues reused a plate made for another procession in 1709, forgetting to amend the date to 1725 (later impressions, such as the Bibliothèque nationale’s version, have been corrected). ³⁷ With roundels in the borders each describing an invocation, Radigues’ economical design was intended to be reused precisely in this way, updated whenever a new souvenir was required. The most recent events of 1725 are described in the roundel at bottom left, while its counterpart on the right remains blank, ready for future reuse.

Yet despite superficial similarities and the interchangeability of the print trade’s popular memorabilia, the procession of 1725 was a far more fraught affair. After all, this was the first procession of Saint Geneviève’s relics since the divisive drama of Unigenitus (1713), the inflammatory Papal bull signed at the request of Louis XIV condemning Jansenism as heresy. The Jansenist controversy had begun in the seventeenth century as a doctrinal debate over predestination and free will, but in the eighteenth century it exploded into a widespread moral and political issue dividing the city along ideological lines. ³⁸Unigenitus , as Brian Strayer argues, forced people to pick a side, openly declaring themselves supporters of Jansenism (notably the Parlement de Paris , the Sorbonne and much of Paris’s clergy) or opponents (the Crown and the rest of the clergy, especially Jesuits, Capuchins and Sulpicians). ³⁹ By the 1720s, Jansenism had also become a problem for the lay. ⁴⁰ Though always felt most deeply within the Church, the debate expanded after Unigenitus , becoming a conduit for other issues, from Gallicanism and parliamentary power to more local disagreements.

At the procession of 1725, with the city’s doctrinally divided clergy and lay authorities forced together in a communal activity, the conflict played out on the public stage. The very route of the procession traversed battle lines, moving from the Left Bank stronghold of Jansenist support around the university, towards the Right Bank where its detractors were more concentrated, but stopping on the Île de la Cité, location of both pro-Jansenist Parlement and anti-Jansenist cathedral. ⁴¹ Some participants, such as the clergy of Notre-Dame (wearing black birettas in the foreground of Radigues’ engraving), were staunch defenders of Unigenitus , while others, such as the canons of Sainte-Geneviève (walking tonsured and barefoot beside them), were sympathetic to the so-called heretical movement. Even more crucial to the cause was the Parlement (in wigs and robes at the end of the procession) who had refused to register the bull, not on theological grounds per se but because papal intervention posed a threat to Gallican liberties. ⁴² Meanwhile the archbishop, Louis-Antoine de Noailles (in his mitre walking next to the abbot), was also a key player. A renowned if somewhat closeted Jansenist, Noailles had a history of indecisively oscillating back and forth in his public actions, but had recently started coming out as a more visible sympathizer. ⁴³

Indeed, from the outset Noailles had framed the procession in terms of the Jansenist debate. In his mandement , describing the circumstances that had brought Paris to crisis point, Noailles claimed the interminable rains were a punishment from God, angered by the city’s religious disorder:

la Foi & la Religion s’affoiblissent & s’éteignent à un tel point, que l’on croit toucher au tems dont parle J[ésus] C[hrist] lorsqu’il déclare, que quand le Fils de l’homme viendra sur la terre, à peine y trouvera-t-il de la Foi. ⁴⁴

The archbishop’s meaning was not lost on Mathieu Marais, diarist and avocat in the Parlement , who claimed Noailles’ decision to invoke Saint Geneviève was motivated more by Jansenism than weather. ⁴⁵ Tensions had certainly been exacerbated recently by a local miracle in the Jansenist parish of Sainte-Marguerite. On Fête-Dieu (31 May), the wife of a cabinetmaker in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine had been healed of a debilitating twenty-year illness when she crawled towards the Host during the procession. Causing a city-wide sensation, the miracle became the talk of the town throughout June, with crowds eager to meet her (even Voltaire paid a visit) and with anti-Jansenists loudly deriding its veracity while Jansenists declared it proof of God’s favour for their cause. ⁴⁶ Noailles was called upon to ratify the miracle, and when he eventually did in August, the anti-Jansenists were incensed and professed it confirmation of his heretical sympathies. ⁴⁷

As Saint Geneviève’s procession on 5 July was the first city-wide event since this latest flare-up, it is not surprising that controversy then marred the invocation itself. The official account presents a harmonious affair, but the simmering theological battle boiled over into public displays of discordance. ⁴⁸ During the week of preparatory devotions, Sluhovsky describes how anti-Jansenist prelates, for example the Archbishop of Toulouse, prevented Sainte-Geneviève’s Jansenist canons from participating in ceremonies. ⁴⁹ Marais recounted similar antagonistic incidents, such as anti-Jansenist clergy refusing to process to Notre-Dame because it was the seat of Archbishop Noailles (that Jansenist heretic), while others refused to be blessed with holy water by the Jansenist-leaning abbot, and friction generally ignited petty disputes. ⁵⁰

Despite the disarray, the people came out in force for the great procession. ⁵¹ Edmond Barbier, another avocat and diarist, claimed never to have seen such crowds, attributing it dually to devotion to Saint Geneviève and desperation to ensure the harvest. ⁵² Given the build-up, they also likely came hoping for a scandalous spectacle as the raging doctrinal debate played out in the streets. But the procession of 1725 was largely a flop. The clergy had embarrassed themselves with their squabbling but there was no major drama on the day, and the invocation itself was something of a failure. Unlike the miraculous rain following the procession of 1694, this time nothing really happened. No one seemed sure whether there had been a miracle or not. Even the official Relation only tentatively declared a success: ‘le Bras du Tout-puissant paroît avoir suspendu les nuées’ and ‘il y a lieu de croire que l’abondance se fera sentir incessamment’. ⁵³ Barbier, however, recorded that ‘le froid et la pluie continuent toujours’. ⁵⁴ Both Barbier and Marais noted a briefly drier spell, but the monotonous rains resumed and came back with a vengeance in August. Meanwhile the harvest proved bountiful despite the rain, but the price of grain (the real issue at stake) remained so high and unstable that it led to bread riots in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine (perhaps not coincidentally the location of that controversial Jansenist miracle). ⁵⁵

Maybe just to err on the safe side, the Ville decided once again to commission an ex-voto ( Fig. 6 ), this time from Jean-François de Troy, whose father, François de Troy, had painted the ex-voto following the 1709 procession. Like Largillière, De Troy adopted a split composition with the saint above and a group portrait of the governors below. ⁵⁶ And once again, the painting was installed in the abbey in a ceremony combining religious and lay elements, with the Prévôt des Marchands and échevins processing from the Hôtel de Ville for a solemn mass. ⁵⁷ But despite formal similarities, as both a political act and a spiritual one, De Troy’s painting was more ambiguous and marked by telling differences. Unlike Largillière’s which was commissioned in thanks for Saint Geneviève’s miracle (‘des graces […] receuës du Ciel par son entremise’), De Troy’s commissioning contract calls for a painting to commemorate the procession: ‘en mémoire de ce que le cinq du present mois La Chasse de cette Sainte a été descendue et portée en Procession’. ⁵⁸ In the object itself, the miracle is then troublingly obscured by a disjunction between subject matter and frame. De Troy’s allegorical narrative shows Saint Geneviève imploring God to end the rains, her intercession answered as an angel swoops to stop the Water Carrier emptying her urn over the city, while a rainbow forms beneath parting clouds. ⁵⁹ The miracle thus claimed by the image was that the rain stopped. But the inscription on the frame composed by the governors gave a different spin, claiming the painting was an offering from the Ville thankful that God ‘a conservé les biens de la terre, malgré les pluies continuelles qui menaçoient le Rouyaume d’une Extrême disette’—the miracle being not an end to the rain, but an abundant harvest despite continuing rain. ⁶⁰ This semantic slippage is minor but indicative of the ambiguous outcome overall.

Subtle differences in De Troy’s painting also nod to the prevailing doctrinal unease. De Troy’s setting outdoors rather than inside a church intentionally reduces the ecclesiastical presence. Describing the scene, the Mercure observed ‘il faut supposer que le Corps de Ville sort de son Hôtel’, a choice that not only emphasized the governors’ agency, but also obviated any contentious choice between pro-Jansenist abbey or anti-Jansenist cathedral. ⁶¹ But perhaps even more revealingly a new authority has entered the picture. Paris’s municipal government is once again the focus, gathered in the foreground in bright robes in another series of portraits: Prévôt des Marchands , Pierre-Antoine de Castagnères, kneeling on his cushion; and around him the four échevins , Jean Hébert, Jean-François Bouquet, Mathieu Goudin, Étienne Laurent, and the Procureur de la Ville , Antoine Moriau. ⁶² But now their connection with Saint Geneviève is mediated by something else: ‘La France’, resting a knee on a globe bearing her name, and dressed in the fleur-de-lys ermine-lined robes of the House of Bourbon. This figure’s presence within the allegory indicates a new appropriation of the city’s patron saint for spiritual and political gain, this time by the royal family; an intervention that would transform the cult of Saint Geneviève over the coming decades.

IV

Whatever the differences between 1694 and 1725, both those invocations had been triggered by comparable natural disasters and had taken similar ritual forms. But twenty years later, on 17 August 1744, events looked very different. Rather than an extreme weather event devastating the whole city, this time Saint Geneviève was invoked to preserve a single person. Off in Metz for the War of Austrian Succession, Louis XV had contracted smallpox and fallen gravely ill. Obviously the king’s health was cause for national concern, but this was different in kind and proximity from the local problems with which Paris’s patron had helped before. Moreover, the ritual itself was different. Rather than a grand procession attended by the entire city and preceded by public devotional preparations, this time it involved a much more exclusive ritual known as a descente . First performed in the 1650s, a descente occurred within the confines of the abbey where the relics were kept suspended above the high altar. During a descente , as represented by Abraham Bosse ( Fig. 7 ), the reliquary was lowered and uncovered while a service of supplication was performed. While ostensibly public events, with the people alerted beforehand and bells tolling during the ceremony, actual attendance at a descente was strictly limited to members of the royal family, clergy of the abbey and cathedral, and select dignitaries. ⁶³

The invocation of 1744 is exemplary of an eighteenth-century change in the cult of Paris’s patron saint. When our three invocations (1694, 1725 and 1744) are contextualized within the 120 public invocations to Saint Geneviève recorded between 1500 and 1793, two discernible shifts emerge regarding reasons for invocations and their ritual form. Two tables relate a statistical breakdown of invocations recorded during the period 1500 to 1693 ( Table 1 ), and between 1694 and 1793 ( Table 2 ). ⁶⁴ Up until the eighteenth century, as indicated in Table 1 , the royal family prompted only 12.5 per cent of the seventy-three invocations, with punishing weather (49.5 per cent) and the threat of attack or war (19 per cent) accounting for the vast majority. But during the eighteenth century, as indicated in Table 2 , the royal family became the reason for 60 per cent of the forty-seven invocations, more than twice as many as those against the weather (28 per cent). Indeed, by the middle of the century, the House of Bourbon had become almost the only reason for the relics to be invoked (accounting for twenty-three of the twenty-eight invocations from 1744 onwards), completely supplanting the previous variety of more communal reasons (weather, war, disease and heresy). An even clearer shift occurred in the ritual form of invocations, from the great public processions that dominated 92 per cent of ceremonies before 1693 (as shown in Table 1 ) to the preponderance of exclusive descentes , which accounted for 91.5 per cent of invocations in the eighteenth century (as shown in Table 2 ). In fact, after 1694, only three more processions were held. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the royal family took over the cult of Saint Geneviève, appropriating Paris’s patron until she was transformed, as Sluhovsky puts it, from the people’s ‘humble neighbour’ into the king’s ‘royal courtier’. ⁶⁵

When it came to Saint Geneviève’s record of miracles, her royal appropriation did little harm; descentes were less elaborate but no less effective. In 1744 it was certainly easier to proclaim a miracle than in 1725 as the king recovered completely from his smallpox a few days after the invocation. Amid the people’s jubilation, fireworks, prayers and a Te Deum , once again ex-votos were planned in thanksgiving. ⁶⁶ But here we encounter the material impact of the shift. Yet again the Ville commissioned a painted ex-voto (now lost) by Robert le Vrac Tournières, but this time it was overshadowed by a much more ostentatious ex-voto from the cult’s most recent opportunistic appropriator. ⁶⁷ Instead of a mere painting, Louis XV offered thanks in the form of an entire building: a grand new abbey of Sainte-Geneviève.

As an ex-voto, the new abbey was much less immediate than the paintings, not appearing until decades after the miracle. Louis XV promised its construction at a service in the old abbey on 17 November 1744, but as Daniel Rabreau notes, it was not until 1754 that funds were ordered and 1755 that the commission was awarded to Jacques-Germain Soufflot. ⁶⁸ Soufflot’s church would be a masterpiece, arguably the most ambitious building project of Louis XV’s reign, and, in Barry Bergdoll’s words, an architectural ‘milestone in the return to antique purity’. ⁶⁹ But it was a long time coming, still unfinished when Soufflot died in 1780. Contemporary descriptions provide invaluable records of a design that has since undergone substantial alterations. ⁷⁰ ‘L’intention de l’architecte’, according to Quatremère de Quincy writing in 1791, ‘fut d’élever une espèce de monument à la perpétuité de la religion chrétienne.’ ⁷¹ Outside, the pediment thus proclaimed the glory of the Catholic faith in Guillaume II Coustou’s bas-relief of a Radiant Cross Adored by Angels , though an earlier design involved a celebration of the Eucharist, discernible in Antoine Demachy’s Ceremony to Pose the Foundation Stone ( Fig. 8 ). Inside, the abbey’s four vaults became an episodic Church history, beginning in the Judaic Church, then Greek and Latin, and culminating in the Gallican Church. ⁷² Saint Geneviève was central in this grand scheme: her relics to be housed under a baldacchino at the crossing of the transept, directly beneath the monumental dome, while outside in the portico scenes from her life adorned bas reliefs above the entrance. ⁷³

In practice, however, the new abbey would be more a celebration of Louis XV than Saint Geneviève. Already by 1764 this was evident at the ceremony to lay the foundation stone. A report in the Mercure and Demachy’s commemorative painting ( Fig. 8 ) both recall a public spectacle centred entirely on the king. Demachy’s painting was actually in part a record of his own handiwork, for the structure at its centre was not a building of stone and mortar, but a fictive edifice of board and canvas commissioned by Soufflot and painted by Demachy with trompe l’œil architecture. ⁷⁴ Like a life-size architectural model, these spectacular faux exteriors and interiors were designed to show the king how his church would eventually look, but also to provide a dramatic stage for the ceremony. Louis XV arrived in his carriage along streets lined by the Garde Française to the sound of cannon, fireworks, bells and the people’s voices. Making his way first to the old abbey, adorned inside with royal tapestries, he was met by the Prévôt des Marchands and the échevins (now playing merely a supporting role), and the Abbot of Sainte-Geneviève. Afterwards the canons led him to his new abbey to lay the foundation stone in a ceremony, where he remained in every way the focus. ⁷⁵ Even the bronze medal presented during the ceremony was less a glorification of Saint Geneviève than a moment of royal self-aggrandizing, celebrating Louis XV for building an even better church than Clovis. ⁷⁶

Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, the Crown gradually annexed Paris’s local saint. Popular devotion established through centuries of communal rituals was usurped as invocations moved from public processions for the well-being of the whole city to exclusive closed-door descentes enacted for the well-being of the royal family. The new abbey consolidated this usurpation in the very fabric of the city, with the translation of Saint Geneviève’s relics from the shrine Parisians had visited for centuries into a monumental masterpiece of contemporary architecture built to glorify Louis XV. Just as the Ville ’s painted ex-votos had claimed their special relationship with Saint Geneviève (which in turn materialized that relationship in people’s minds), so too did Louis XV’s abbey. Directly above the entrance it was spelled out in a declarative statement of association: IN HONOREM STÆ GENOVEFÆ D.O.M. A FUNDAMENTIS EXCITAVIT LUDOVICUS XV. ⁷⁷

Ostensibly gifts of thanksgiving, these ex-votos became agents of appropriation, turning government or king into the saint’s lay custodians. But this latest political appropriation was more invasive. The tenor of the takeover is felt in Demachy’s painting, where a religious ceremony has become a scene of royal pageantry. Unlike those commemorative prints by Jollain and Radigues, here there is barely a cleric in sight. Moreover its composition highlights the act of erasure entailed in the abbey’s very construction. The medieval abbey was still standing in the 1760s, but Demachy selected a vantage point from which the new church eclipsed the old, with only Saint-Étienne-du-Mont remaining visible on the horizon, while the old abbey immediately beside it is blocked from view.

As past practices and spaces evolved and dissolved, Paris’s former image of its great protectoress was fading from living memory under an accumulation of new associations. As descentes supplanted processions, those rare but significant collective spiritual events that had punctuated the lives of Parisians in times of crisis were now replaced with spectacles of royal pomp. By the time the new abbey was nearing completion in the 1780s, few Parisians could still have remembered the last great procession of 1725. Many more, however, would recall the regal fanfare of the 1764 ceremony to lay the foundation stone, and everyone had witnessed the pageantry each time the royal family came to the abbey for a descente (three times in 1775, once each in 1778 and 1779, twice in 1781 and so on).

Yet despite her appropriation, private devotions to Saint Geneviève flourished. In the 1780s, Louis-Sébastien Mercier described the continuing popular zeal for her cult. ‘Le petit peuple’, he noted, ‘vient faire frotter des draps & des chemises à la châsse de la sainte, lui demander la guérison de toutes les fievres’, while others left handwritten billets requesting interventions for their loved ones. ⁷⁸ Mercier admitted a hint of jealousy for this simple faith in the power of the relics, but scorned superstitious beliefs that turned people away from proper religious practices. His real critique, however, was levelled at the civil and royal authorities and their manipulative investment in the cult. Describing the ‘magnifique église’ being built to house the relics, he focused on its shocking cost: ‘bien douze à quinze millions’. For a saint whose cult evolved to save Paris in times of hunger and deprivation, the hypocrisy was striking: ‘[q]uelle énorme & inutile dépense, qu’on auroit pu appliquer au soulagement des misères publiques!’. ⁷⁹ Despite the people’s devotion to Saint Geneviève herself, her cult’s growing reputation as an instrument of the monarchy would have a dire effect during the turbulent years to come.

V

In the 1790s, amid the tumult of the French Revolution, the relics of Saint Geneviève would meet their ultimate destruction, and at least one of these ex-votos would be transformed forever. Revolutionary resistance to the Church intensified rapidly from November 1789 with the nationalization of Church property, to November 1790 with the Civil Constitution, requiring every member of France’s clergy to swear an oath of allegiance to the new government. ⁸⁰ The impact of the Civil Constitution was profound. It marked, in the words of John McManners, ‘the end of national unity, and the beginning of civil war’. ⁸¹ Violent confrontations ensued between those who swore and those who would not, intensifying until non-juring became politically treasonous, and clergy suffered public beatings, imprisonment and even death in the bloody massacres of September 1792. ⁸² Anticlericalism escalated in 1793 after the execution of Louis XVI, with heightened revolutionary radicalism and counter-revolutionary uprisings under the banner of religion. The oppressive response was ‘de-Christianization’, an intense campaign seeking the eradication of Christian practices and beliefs from French society.

This was the setting for Saint Geneviève’s (albeit temporary) demise. The new government closed Paris’s churches and orchestrated what Michel Vovelle has called ‘a clean sweep’. ⁸³ Eucharistic vessels, bells and crosses were removed and carried in irreverent anti-processions to be smelted down for the war effort. Religious art, relics and church furniture were defaced by iconoclastic blows, destroyed, burnt, sold at auction or locked away in storage, as church buildings were requisitioned as gunpowder stores (Saint-Séverin) or saltpetre refineries (Saint-Germain-des-Près). ⁸⁴ To fill the emotional and social void that de-Christianization left behind, new replacement systems of belief emerged: initially the staunchly atheist Cult of Reason in 1793; then Maximilien Robespierre’s deist Cult of the Supreme Being in 1794. ⁸⁵ These new ‘religions’ did not, however, find distinctly de-Christianized forms, never, as Mona Ozouf argues, entirely escaping religious parallels. ⁸⁶ In fact appropriating Catholic rituals and irreverently transforming them was often the intention.

For the Cult of Reason’s first ‘Fête de la Raison’ on 20 Brumaire Year II (10 November 1793), the ceremony resembled but pointedly parodied processions like that to Saint Geneviève. An actress playing Reason was carried through the streets in triumph to Notre-Dame, now transformed into the Temple to Reason, where she was placed on the high altar, now devoted to Liberty, using the tabernacle that once held the consecrated host as her foot-stool. ⁸⁷ New rituals clearly echoed the old: a procession of a sacred female through the streets, borne aloft by bearers, the cathedral as focal ceremonial site and her placement on the altar during the ritual. But for Reason, instead of a mass there followed an irreligious revel with beating drums, trumpets and ‘une populace effrénée’, as Mercier described them, dancing half-naked like ‘tourbillons’ through the nave. ⁸⁸

Crucial to the ‘Fête de la Raison’ was yet again an act of appropriation. Inventing original ritual forms might have effectively established the new system of belief, but eradicating the old Church was much more powerfully enacted by irreverently transforming familiar Catholic rites. The balance was finely tuned: similar enough to be recognizable, but radically altered to make a pointed attack. Hence, for example, the organizer Antoine-François Momoro’s insistence that the Fête focus on a living actress rather than inanimate objects such as the relics. ⁸⁹ Once again the people of Paris were given a patron to adore and a collective ritual in which to participate (in which participation moreover ensured complicity). But in this act of overwriting, the Cult of Reason’s new twist also explicitly critiqued the dangerous superstition inherent in the old, pointing out the material idolatry of relic worship.

Amid the turbulence of de-Christianization, the objects of Saint Geneviève’s cult became crucial sites for enacting the erasure and transformation of Parisian religiosity. ⁹⁰ Suffering the same fate as most of Paris’s religious art, her painted ex-votos were removed from the old abbey where they had resided, in Largillière’s case, for nearly a century. On 2 May 1793 a wagon arrived at the Dépôt des Petits-Augustins containing two of these large canvases; the next day the other two arrived. ⁹¹ Largillière’s and Jean-François de Troy’s paintings survived the iconoclastic cull (a reprieve usually granted on aesthetic grounds) and saw out the rest of the Revolution in storage. But this is the last recorded trace of François de Troy’s and Tournières’ paintings, which possibly ended up on the bonfires of ecclesiastical flammables lit in Parisian courtyards. ⁹²

Saint Geneviève’s architectural ex-voto experienced a different fate. In 1791, the building was barely finished when Mirabeau’s death prompted its appropriation for the Revolutionary cause. Transformed into the Panthéon, the new abbey would now serve as mausoleum for the nation’s ‘grands hommes’. ⁹³ Mirabeau was interred in April 1791, to be joined in July by the transposed remains of Voltaire and in October 1794 by Rousseau. ⁹⁴ The building’s functional and ideological transformation was marked in a major material transformation entrusted to Quatremère de Quincy. All traces of religious iconography were to be erased and replaced by a secular programme comprising symbols of French nationhood and a celebration of Revolutionary ideals. ⁹⁵ In the pediment, for instance, Coustou’s Radiant Cross was replaced with Jean-Guillaume Moitte’s La Patrie distribuant des couronnes à la Vertu et au Génie, la Liberté terrassant le Despotisme, la Philosophie combatant l’Erreur et le Préjugé (visible in Jean-Baptiste Chapuy’s print ( Fig. 9 ). Through the shifting regimes to come, the Panthéon remained a key site for rehearsing the ideologies of the French state. Moitte’s bellicose bas-relief thus no longer survives, replaced instead with David d’Angers’ La Patrie couronnant les hommes célèbres (1830–37). ⁹⁶ But the Revolutionary inscription replacing Louis XV’s Latin ex-voto still remains: AUX GRANDS HOMMES. LA PATRIE RECONNAISSANTE.

Erasing and transforming Saint Geneviève’s ex-votos was one thing; erasing and transforming her cult was another. As long as the relics existed so too did the potential for belief in their power, leading to perhaps the most violent and violating acts of all in Saint Geneviève’s story. At the beginning of the Revolution, as Richard Clay and Sluhovsky have shown, Saint Geneviève’s relics remained the focus of popular devotion. In 1789 after the fall of the Bastille, market women from Les Halles left tributes to Saint Geneviève for securing their liberty; in August 1792, the relics were reverentially translated from the old abbey into Saint-Etienne-du-Mont; and in November 1792, a midnight mass was sung in Saint Geneviève’s honour and a public descente performed, while the people queued to touch the reliquary and offer ex-votos. ⁹⁷ A year later, however, just a few days before the ‘Fête de la Raison’, the old cult had to make way for the new.

On 6 November 1793 a comprehensive process of desacralization and desecration began, each act part of a concerted effort to eradicate belief in the saint by destroying the material things that mediated that belief. First, access to the relics was denied. The Section du Panthéon (the local administrative district) transported them from Saint-Etienne-du-Mont to the Hôtel de la Monnaie, where they could no longer be a focus of veneration. The reliquary itself, however, was still a threat, continuing to preserve the relics in a sacred space. Next began its physical destruction. At the Monnaie, a committee was put in charge of its ‘dépouillement’: over several days they dismantled and catalogued every element of the châsse , each night sealing the door and stationing a guard outside to ward off thieves and relic hunters, and prevent potential rumours of rescue or survival. ⁹⁸ The reliquary was stripped for parts: each precious stone prised off and along with the gold and silver framework absorbed into national funds; meanwhile the wooden chest inside was broken up and burnt, its ashes washed away. These acts took place privately within the Monnaie, but were widely publicized in copies of the procès-verbal sent to every Section as well as to the Pope (a decision supposedly eliciting frenetic applause), and extracts were published in Le Moniteur Universel . ⁹⁹

Alongside the reliquary’s physical destruction, a slander campaign was waged. Scandalous ‘facts’ were circulated to extinguish the power of the sacred objects by tainting and devaluing them. One report in Le Moniteur noted mockingly, for instance, that the transportation of the reliquary to the Monnaie had occurred calmly and ‘ sans miracle ’ [their emphasis]. ¹⁰⁰Revolutions de Paris reported a quip from Gadeau, member of the Section du Panthéon, who noted they successfully managed the reliquary’s descente despite the absence of the Parlement de Paris (a jibe at former custodial customs). ¹⁰¹ In the procès-verbal reporting the dismantling of the châsse , an intentional under-valuing was conveyed in a litany of negative adjectives: ‘mauvaise qualité’, ‘médiocre’, ‘épaisse et faible’, ‘cassé’ or ‘mutilé’. ¹⁰² There were even accusations that a seventeenth-century goldsmith had replaced all the gemstones with fakes. ¹⁰³Le Moniteur reported that the reliquary was of no real value, public opinion having been ‘grandement trompée sur le prix exagéré auquel on a porté [sa] valeur’, and the final total of 23,830 livres was described as ‘bien médiocre’. ¹⁰⁴ Aside from monetary devaluing, there was also an effort to sully the object’s sacredness. One report noted, ‘[e]ntre autres choses fort ridicules et fort extraordinaires’, that several gems were engraved not with religious iconography but mythological scenes, including the sodomitic narrative of Jupiter abducting Ganymede ‘pour servir de giton au maître des dieux’. ¹⁰⁵

As for the relics themselves, the treatment was even more defiling. To demystify their ‘miraculous’ nature, Le Moniteur published a vivid report emphasizing the antithesis of an immaculate state. Instead of a pristine skeleton, the committee discovered a chaotic jumble of parcels, vessels, scraps and remains. Saint Geneviève’s bones were there—wrapped and tagged ‘ sanctæ corpus Genovesæ ’—but she was not alone, sharing the container with a portion of Saint Peter’s cloak; a lacrymatory phial with some indeterminate ‘liqueur brunâtre desséchée’; and scores of pouches and packets filled with anonymous bones and other things, some identifiable, others not. ¹⁰⁶ Despite the pretence at objectivity, the language of the report renders the contents unpleasant, incomplete and contaminated, degrading the sanctity of these objects and by extension the saint. Her body unwrapped, Saint Geneviève’s remains turned from holy relics to mere organic materials, polluted moreover by crystallized deposits that had formed on the skull. ¹⁰⁷ More irksome still was the implicit sexual undertone, for instance in the remark that Saint Geneviève’s pelvic bone was missing, pruriently tainting the chasteness of the virgin saint. ¹⁰⁸

Desecrating and desacralizing the relics would not, however, put an end to her cult; only their destruction would do that. Saint Geneviève’s relics thus endured a kind of posthumous trial, found guilty of ‘le crime d’avoir servi à propager l’erreur et à entretenir le luxe de tant de fainéants’, that is, for inculcating superstition and for abetting the corrupt regime that appropriated them. ¹⁰⁹ From the wording it is unclear whether the guilty party was the saint or the relics, the person or the objects (or if they were distinguished), but the result was the same: the body of Saint Geneviève was sentenced to burn on Place de Grève. The location, like the punishment, was significant. Instead of joining the executions of the Terror on Place de la Révolution (Place de la Concorde) where the guillotine stood, Saint Geneviève would burn on Paris’s traditional site for executing heretics. ¹¹⁰ In yet another parody of religious rituals, Saint Geneviève’s auto-da-fé would be a symbolic declaration of her heretical threat to the new religion of Reason. ¹¹¹ On 3 December 1793, Saint Geneviève’s relics processed one last time through the streets of Paris, to burn supposedly ‘sur un bûcher couvert de chappes, de chasubles et de divers ornements d’église’, while crowds danced around the pyre ‘ivre de sang’. ¹¹² When it was over, the ashes were thrown into the Seine to extinguish any final trace.

With this bizarre act of annihilation, the new authorities demonstrated not only their hatred of the Church and its oppressive rapport with the state, but also, perhaps unwittingly, the depth of popular belief. The trial and punishment of the relics simultaneously rejected belief in the miraculous agency of Saint Geneviève and confirmed it. She was not burnt because the people no longer believed, but precisely because they did. Destroying the relics was a recognition of their power: their power both in and of themselves (as material objects that could do things and had to be stopped from doing things); and their power over the people of Paris (as symbols of a religious cult from which the populace had to be dissuaded from believing). De-Christianization took aim at the Church through a series of iconoclastic acts destroying objects of faith. But faith itself proved much harder to erase. ¹¹³ And despite the vast destruction, only two years after it began de-Christianization was over.

VI

In February 1795, the post-Thermidorian Convention passed a law legalizing certain forms of Catholic worship. In September, Notre-Dame was formally reopened and the Church began to rebuild itself. ¹¹⁴ Only six years later, Napoléon signed the Concordat of 1801 with Pope Pius VII, officially establishing Roman Catholicism as the religion of France. ¹¹⁵ Church and State would then not be definitively separated again until the law of Separation, the statute defining French secularism, in 1905. ¹¹⁶Laïcité would be a long time coming.

Meanwhile from 1795, the exiled priests returned; surviving religious art, such as Largillière and De Troy’s ex-votos, emerged from storage; and the churches of Paris were reconsecrated and reinhabited; all that is except the Panthéon. Though Napoléon reclaimed it for the Church in 1806, and Louis XVIII reconsecrated it in 1822, the Panthéon would become an enduring trace of the Revolution’s religious intolerance and in time the great symbol of France’s secularist ideals. As political regimes shifted throughout the nineteenth century, the Panthéon’s affiliation switched back and forth: officially reclaimed for ‘grands hommes’ in 1830, returned to the Church in 1851, briefly occupied during the Commune in 1871, then back to the Church before being claimed definitively as a civic building in 1885 (for Victor Hugo’s funeral). ¹¹⁷

From 1790 until 1905, the Panthéon spent fifty-eight years as a church and fifty-seven years as a secular space. As always, these appropriations were marked materially. ¹¹⁸ Left behind in its decoration is an archaeology of the building’s contested past, revealed through juxtapositions of a triumphant Church (Jean-Antoine Gros’ Apotheosis of Saint Geneviève (1811) in the dome or Pierre Puvis de Chavanne’s massive murals of Saint Geneviève’s Childhood ( c .1874)) alongside grand statements against the Church (David D’Angers’ La Patrie (1830s) in the pediment or, where the high altar would be, François-Léon Sicard’s Altar to the National Convention (1913)). Today the Panthéon stands as France’s great secularist monument, not despite but because of its Christian iconography. Forming a palimpsest where the secular present is read through alternating layers of religious and secular pasts, overwriting proves yet again a powerful statement of triumph, this time for the new cult of laïcité .

Following Saint Geneviève’s relics and ex-votos across a hundred years of French history—through their origins, appropriations, movements, material transformations, and even destruction—has unearthed a story that challenges the grand narrative of secularization and the mythical origins of secularism in the French Revolution. For all the clear shifts in eighteenth-century French religious practices, there was no steady decline in the importance of religion. To explain Saint Geneviève’s demise in 1793 as an inevitable result of secularization would misrepresent the fundamental place of religion in Parisian lives, even in the later decades of the eighteenth and early decades of the nineteenth centuries. Indeed, the destruction of Saint Geneviève’s relics and the prurient violation that preceded it dramatically underscores the continuing strength of popular belief. After all, no one annihilates something that has no power. Far from an emergent secularism, this story instead highlights the inextricably entwined relations between Church and state throughout the eighteenth century, as the cult of Saint Geneviève and its symbols were consistently appropriated and manipulated for political purposes: by a municipal government seeking to deflect accountability for natural disasters; by factions playing out doctrinal issues on a public stage; by a king who turned a popular cult into an instrument for self-glorification; and finally in a different way by the Revolutionaries, who tried to raze the cult to forge new beliefs for the new regime. Far from a secularizing turning away from religion, lay engagements with ecclesiastical practices reveal the continuing relevance and integration of religion within social and political structures, even as these structures grew more autonomous across the century.

Secularization also makes it difficult to account for what happened afterwards. Certainly today in the chapel of Saint Geneviève ( Fig. 1 ), it is hard to envisage the eighteenth century as the turning point between a religious old world and a secular modern world. This reconstituted shrine is the product of fervent nineteenth-century religiosity, from as early as 1803 when the curé rescued the remains of Saint Geneviève’s stone tomb from the old abbey next door, and 1822 when, on the occasion of the reconsecration of the Panthéon, the archbishop recalled all Saint Geneviève’s relics that had been distributed before the burning of 1793. ¹¹⁹ New reliquaries were commissioned to house the tomb, a bit of forearm and some finger bones, and the chapel was built in 1853 to become her new shrine. ¹²⁰

Popular devotion to the city’s saint has a long steady history, one far from suppressed by the Revolution. Covering the walls inside and outside the chapel are hundreds of plaques dating from the 1820s up to the 1900s ( Fig. 10 ), each yet another ex-voto to Saint Geneviève from a grateful Parisian, for her intervention in family crises, healing loved ones or passing exams. In continuity with these past invocations, the chapel today is punctuated with signs of ongoing devotion, from prayer candles lit daily, to hundreds of billets pushed into the casket of her tomb, small handwritten slips calling for intervention. ¹²¹

Personal appeals to Saint Geneviève are not official civic invocations. A private religiosity detached from public practices does not run counter to secularist ideals. But other traces are more ambiguous. A large plaque from 6 September 1914 presents an ex-voto from a more recent collective invocation. During the First World War, with the German army ‘aux portes de la cité’, it recalls Paris’s desperate appeal to the relics. Crowds prayed for three days, and eventually their patron intervened as Paris escaped invasion. Just as she once thwarted Attila the Hun, so Saint Geneviève was credited with the Victory of the Marne. Whatever we make of it now, this plaque, resonating with those government descriptions of ex-votos from Paris’s ‘pre-modern’ past, was clearly envisaged in a continuum of civic religious practices with those eighteenth-century paintings by Largillière and De Troy hanging just outside the chapel.

But perhaps most curious of all is Saint Geneviève’s ongoing relationship with the French police. On 18 May 1962, Pope John XXIII declared Saint Geneviève the official patron saint of the Gendarmerie Nationale. ¹²² Each year on a feast day in November, uniformed officers of the Garde Republicaine gather to honour their saint. In 2014, the celebration was held (as it often is) in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, with a liturgy led by the Garde’s aumônier and Saint Geneviève’s relics borne aloft by members of the forces ( Fig. 11 ). Recalling those prints by Jollain and Radigues showing the coalescence of Church and State as clergy and lay authorities processed with the relics together, it is difficult to ignore the striking parallels with this contemporary Catholic rite. On the surface at least, the Gendarmerie’s annual fête looks more like 1694 than 1793.

Material objects and their ritual uses reveal a different picture of religious engagement in the eighteenth century, but they also offer an alternative set of sources through which to pose broader historical questions about religion and society in France. Tempering the narratives of intellectual history, art and material culture do not refute the history of ideas in Enlightenment writings, but rather draw attention to several other histories in play at once: from political and economic histories about changing institutional and constitutional relationships between Church and State; to popular histories about the experiences of religion in everyday life; and personal histories of fervent and enduring belief. Disrupting the grand narrative removes ‘religious’ and ‘secularist’ from a teleological timeline either side of the Revolution, unshackling them from those analytically unhelpful implicit pairings of ‘backwards’ and ‘modern’, and revealing a much longer and indeed ongoing history of interplay, interaction, resistance and confrontation. Here the eighteenth-century miracles of a fifth-century saint become merely a passage in that history, and those material objects, perhaps none more powerfully than the Panthéon, become traces of the tensions and contestations that continue to play out in the determinedly secularist France of today.