The Road Goes Ever On: The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois

Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois

While visiting the recently re-opened Samaritaine department store a few years back, we looked out some shoe department windows and saw, close-up, the gargoyles, flying buttresses, towers, and other marks of a Gothic church, and wondered which of the various churches we knew of it could be. Not nearby St. Eustache nor St. Merry, nor obviously any of those on the other side of the river. We made a note to locate and visit the mystery church some other day. The church turned out to be Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, tucked in between the Louvre and Samaritaine along with the town hall of the 1st arrondisement. It was the parish church of the Louvre, and thus the monarchs, but, as with the other parish churches in the inner city, just a second fiddle to the cathedral. Presently, the leadership of the cathedral is working out of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois while Notre-Dame is being repaired.

Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois was built in the 13th and 14th centuries, has undergone the usual centuries of use and abuse, and then major restoration in the 19th. Most notably, in 1572, its bells initiated the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, when some thousands of French protestants were killed, their leadership at the behest of Charles IX and his mom, Catherine de Medici, most of the rest by the overwhelmingly Catholic Paris mob. The massacre spread to twelve other cities, and as many as 30,000 Huguenots were murdered in all. It was the worst of the many savage events in the Wars of Religion. Marlowe's The Massacre at Paris was perhaps its first appearance in literature; Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots is a supreme example of French grand opera, three centuries later.