Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis
Understanding the Drama of the Church, Royalty, and Power in France
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Like its design, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis history is also somewhat sensational and bold. The present church building was consecrated in 1641, and at that time was known only as “Église Saint Louis”. The structure was one of the first churches in Paris built in the Baroque style, signaling, in its construction, a dramatic and rather sharp break from the Gothic aesthetic approach which previously dominated French ecclesiastical architecture. Its founding was supported and monitored closely by the kings of the early Bourbon monarchy. In a dramatic show of piety, both Louis XIII and Louis XIV would even choose to have their hearts removed and interred there following their respective deaths. Thus, from its beginning, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis represented the emergence of a new and closer alignment of the French monarchy and the Catholic Church.
This new dynamic can be seen in the church’s first inhabitants and its primary pastors, the Jesuits, who were one of the period’s most influential religious actors and who came to have close ties with the Bourbon kings. A Catholic mendicant religious society, the Jesuit Order was a critical part of the Counter-Reformation, a major cultural movement initiated by the Catholic Church aimed, principally, at reasserting Catholic doctrinal orthodoxy and enacting strident evangelical action within Europe after the fallout of the Protestant Reformation. For the Jesuits during the Counter-Reformation, the Baroque’s highly ornate nature and its allusions to Roman classicism made it useful as a simple, powerful aesthetic tool for communicating the truth and luminosity of the Catholic faith and the primacy of the See of Rome. Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis’ highly decorative Baroque plan - designed by two of the Order’s architects, Étienne Martellange and François Derand - exemplified precisely this novel, more evangelically-oriented approach to building, one in which the Jesuits frequently engaged.
The construction of such a church as Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis would have been impossible without the backing of the French monarchs. Partially expelled from France in 1594 during the French Wars of Religion, it was King Henry IV who worked to actively restore the Jesuit Order to full legal status and facilitate its expansion across France. Although this decision was likely motivated, more than anything, by political pragmatism on Henry’s part, it resulted, ultimately, in the cementing of a continued, persistent relationship between the Jesuit Order and the French kings that would last throughout the course of the Bourbon monarchy. Hence, for much of the period of the Ancien Regime, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis was a lively hub of Jesuit activity in Paris, with some of the Order’s priests serving at the parish as direct confessors to the French kings.
By the end of the French Revolution, however, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis’ fortunes drastically changed. The church’s monarchical associations - so crucial to its original inception - had made it a target for revolutionaries fueled by anti-clerical and anti-royalist vigor, who seized control of its operations and turned the building into a storehouse for items looted from other nearby religious and civic sites. This marked the end of the parish’s founding Baroque period: following the events of the Revolution, nearly all of the church’s original patrons and pastors had been either executed, scattered, or exiled, and the parish, with Paris and with France, was entering a new age. After Napoleon’s accession to the French imperial throne, the church would be rehabilitated, returned to the Diocese of Paris, and renamed as Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, in recognition of another nearby church, Église Saint Paul, which was destroyed entirely during the Revolution.
In many respects, then, Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis testifies clearly to the profound story of the Baroque period in France, and the new relationships between temporal and spiritual powers that emerged from the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Consequently, not only is the convergence of the supernatural and the natural realms present symbolically in the church’s architecture, but so, too, can it be seen in its very history. This interplay of the natural and supernatural, indeed, has been critical in shaping also the broader history of France and its people. Église Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, located in Paris’ central Marais district, stands, in many ways, at the heart of this drama as it has unfolded.
