The most recent events of are described in the roundel at bottom left, while its counterpart on the right remains blank, ready for future reuse. British Museum, London. 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.
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. 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. Indeed, from the outset Noailles had framed the procession in terms of the Jansenist debate.
The official account presents a harmonious affair, but the simmering theological battle boiled over into public displays of discordance. Despite the disarray, the people came out in force for the great procession.
But the procession of 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 , this time nothing really happened. No one seemed sure whether there had been a miracle or not. 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.
Maybe just to err on the safe side, the Ville decided once again to commission an ex-voto Fig. Whatever the differences between and , both those invocations had been triggered by comparable natural disasters and had taken similar ritual forms. But twenty years later, on 17 August , events looked very different. 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 s, 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.
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.
Two tables relate a statistical breakdown of invocations recorded during the period to Table 1 , and between and Table 2. 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 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 as shown in Table 1 to the preponderance of exclusive descentes , which accounted for In fact, after , only three more processions were held. In it was certainly easier to proclaim a miracle than in as the king recovered completely from his smallpox a few days after the invocation. 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 , but as Daniel Rabreau notes, it was not until that funds were ordered and that the commission was awarded to Jacques-Germain Soufflot. Contemporary descriptions provide invaluable records of a design that has since undergone substantial alterations. Already by this was evident at the ceremony to lay the foundation stone. 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.
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. But this latest political appropriation was more invasive. Unlike those commemorative prints by Jollain and Radigues, here there is barely a cleric in sight.
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 s, few Parisians could still have remembered the last great procession of Many more, however, would recall the regal fanfare of the 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 , once each in and , twice in and so on. His real critique, however, was levelled at the civil and royal authorities and their manipulative investment in the cult.
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. 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. 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.
Getty Collection, Los Angeles. On 6 November 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 reliquary itself, however, was still a threat, continuing to preserve the relics in a sacred space. Next began its physical destruction. As for the relics themselves, the treatment was even more defiling. Instead of a pristine skeleton, the committee discovered a chaotic jumble of parcels, vessels, scraps and remains.
Desecrating and desacralizing the relics would not, however, put an end to her cult; only their destruction would do that. The location, like the punishment, was significant. 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.
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. In February , 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. As always, these appropriations were marked materially. For all the clear shifts in eighteenth-century French religious practices, there was no steady decline in the importance of religion. St Genevieve Medal — Sterling Silver with 18 in. Chain — Engravable.
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St Genevieve Rosary — Emerald Beads. St Genevieve Rosary — Brown Beads. Your email address will not be published. Paris experienced proof of Genevieve's intercession on many occasions. The most famous occurrence was the miracle of Des Ardens, or the burning fever. In , a violent fever swept through the city, and doctors couldn't stop the people from dying. The shrine of Genevieve was carried in a procession to the cathedral, and during the ceremony, those who touched her shrine were healed by the power of the Lord.
Throughout the whole town, no one else became sick, all the ill recovered and only three people died. Pope Innocent visited the city the following year and asked that an annual festival be held in commemoration of the miracle every year on November His goal, as is always the case with such practices, was to keep their faith alive by reminding the faithful that the Lord always works in the lives of those who pray and draw close to Him.
Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris. She is depicted dressed in a long flowing gown with a mantle covering her shoulders and is often shown with a loaf of bread, representing her generosity toward those in need. Her feast day is celebrated on January 3.
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