Description
Saint-Germain-des-Prés is a Romanesque and Gothic church on the Left Bank, considered the oldest church in Paris, and the heart of one of the city's best-known quarters. Its stout bell tower, begun around 990, stands among the cafés and bookshops of Boulevard Saint-Germain.
Inside, look up. The nave is covered with colorful murals under gold stars on a blue ceiling, painted in the 19th century by Hippolyte Flandrin and his team.
Flandrin's cycle of twenty murals in the choir and nave pairs scenes of the Old Testament with those they foretell in the New, and the capitals of the columns copy the surviving medieval ones.
In a side chapel lies the philosopher René Descartes. The oldest parts are the first four levels of the bell tower, the nave and the transept. The choir was consecrated by Pope Alexander III in 1163, and its flying buttresses were the first in the Île-de-France.
Outside, the quarter that took the abbey's name is the place where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, a couple of steps from the church.
When the first abbey rose here, in 558, it stood among the meadows outside Paris, "les Prés." King Childebert, son of Clovis, built it for two relics brought back from Spain, a piece of the True Cross and Saint Vincent's tunic, and chose it for his own tomb.
The Vikings destroyed it twice. For centuries it was one of the great centers of learning in Europe, with a workshop that copied manuscripts. Then came the Revolution.
In September 1792 a revolutionary crowd stormed the abbey prison and killed priests and Swiss Guards. The church became a gunpowder workshop, until an explosion wrecked it. In 1802 the authorities thought of demolishing it: its architecture offered "nothing particularly interesting." They kept it.
Inside, look up. The nave is covered with colorful murals under gold stars on a blue ceiling, painted in the 19th century by Hippolyte Flandrin and his team.
Flandrin's cycle of twenty murals in the choir and nave pairs scenes of the Old Testament with those they foretell in the New, and the capitals of the columns copy the surviving medieval ones.
In a side chapel lies the philosopher René Descartes. The oldest parts are the first four levels of the bell tower, the nave and the transept. The choir was consecrated by Pope Alexander III in 1163, and its flying buttresses were the first in the Île-de-France.
Outside, the quarter that took the abbey's name is the place where Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court at the Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, a couple of steps from the church.
When the first abbey rose here, in 558, it stood among the meadows outside Paris, "les Prés." King Childebert, son of Clovis, built it for two relics brought back from Spain, a piece of the True Cross and Saint Vincent's tunic, and chose it for his own tomb.
The Vikings destroyed it twice. For centuries it was one of the great centers of learning in Europe, with a workshop that copied manuscripts. Then came the Revolution.
In September 1792 a revolutionary crowd stormed the abbey prison and killed priests and Swiss Guards. The church became a gunpowder workshop, until an explosion wrecked it. In 1802 the authorities thought of demolishing it: its architecture offered "nothing particularly interesting." They kept it.