Poor Saint Genevieve

I live on the side of one of the few major hills in Paris, on a street called Rue la Montagne de Ste Genevieve [St. Genevieve's Mountain].  Here it is in 1913 - it looks just about the same, except that cafe in the foreground is a Vietnamese restaurant now.

 
The street where I used to live, now Rue Tournefort and about a 10 minute walk to the other side of the hill, was also called a variation of that, as old street signs on buildings can attest.  In fact this whole area was known as St. Genevieve's Mountain, and it's one of the oldest and most historically significant areas of Paris.  Today it is known as the Pantheon but that's a relatively recent development.

St. Genevieve is the patron saint of Paris, and for good reason: she "saved" the city from invaders twice during her life.  In the 5th century Attila the Hun's armies were set to invade Paris, and it was widely acknowledged that the city wouldn't be able to withstand such an attack.  The people were panicked, but after Genevieve organized a sort of prayer marathon the armies suddenly decided to go elsewhere.  Good for Paris, not so good for Orleans, where they went instead.  A few decades later a Germanic group attacked the city and it was under siege for a long time, and Genevieve was the only person allowed to cross the siege lines.  She brought food to the people of Paris by continually boating up and down the river, and managed to negotiate the freedom of many of prisoners of war.

Despite these incidents she mostly led a quiet life of ministering to the poor of Paris.  There was a small abbey at the top of the hill where she went to pray every day - the route she took up the hill is the current road I live on, St. Genevieve's Mountain.  She sort of became the unofficial spiritual leader of this abbey, although of course at the time a woman could not be acknowledged as such.  She was buried there after her death in 512 and apparently there were so many miracles that she was canonized quickly and they renamed the abbey as the Abbey of St. Genevieve.

A thousand years later and beyond, this abbey had a prestigious school, its library was the third largest collection of books in Europe, and many of the institutions of this general area were named for her.  Her bones were held as relics at the abbey as well.

Finally in the mid 1700s (keep in mind more than 1200 years after her death and many more since the abbey's founding) the king decided they needed a new building for the church, more reflective of a place that housed the bones of Paris' patroness and one of the most celebrated saints in Europe.  They tore down the church part of the abbey and began a huge, neo-classical construction project at the very top of the hill.  It was modeled after the Pantheon in Rome, an ancient structure and architectural marvel with statues to the most important Roman gods, and was the first major neo-classical structure in Europe.

It was finished in 1790 (regular readers probably see where this is headed) and dedicated to Genevieve, her bones placed in a massive reliquary.  Just months after its dedication the new leaders of France, the revolutionaries, ordered that it should instead be a mausoleum for illustrious Frenchmen.  Shortly after that, organized religions were outlawed altogether, the building was declared secular, and in their fervor a group of revolutionaries publicly burned Genevieve's bones and moved the huge library to a building nearby.  (And renamed my street simply Rue de la Montagne.)  During revolutionary times they started burying "great men" in the former church.

Sometime around Napoleon's empire, the building was converted back to a church for Genevieve.  And again in a few years it was secularized.  It was consecrated again in the 1870s to Genevieve and...again within a few years was converted back.

In the meantime, several important buildings had popped up around the old abbey: the church of St Etienne-du-Mont was started in the 1300s or so; the Sorbonne's law school stood in the opposite corner by the mid 1700s (its massive library next to it), and Lycee Henri IV, a prestigious high school, was built on the ruined abbey site in the mid 1790s.  The square with all these buildings was called Place Ste Genevieve, although the church was no longer named for her.  Soon after that the old abbey's library was moved to the Sorbonne's library in the square, now called St. Genevieve's library.  The area, however, became known as the Pantheon by the early 1800s.  Without her bones it was difficult to justify creating a new church for her, so her veneration kind of fell away during this time.

Here is the Place Ste Genevieve in 1870 (it's hard to tell, but between the buildings in the center of the picture is a tiny winding road - Rue la Montagne Ste Genevieve.  It's the other end of my street from the first photo.  The church is St Etienne-du-Mont.  Now there is an English-style pub on that corner.):

The Pantheon has come to dominate this area.  The vast majority of the things named for Genevieve have been renamed or destroyed: the abbey was suppressed and destroyed, the neighborhood, the hill, the church, and many roads and restaurants/cafes/taverns renamed.  The cafe next to where I used to live is cheekily named "La Montagne sans Genevieve" [The Mountain Without Genevieve], and her name was scratched from older buildings in the area.  There are no longer any relics of hers, although the reliquary where they were once kept is now displayed inside St Etienne-du-Mont. The Place Ste Genevieve is so often incorrectly referred to as the Place du Pantheon that no one would even know if you mentioned the Place Ste Genevieve.

I feel sort of bad for poor Genevieve.  She's one of the few early saints whose lives are fairly well documented, and disregarding her prayer marathon to turn away Attila the Hun, it seems unquestionable that she was a major force in keeping up Paris' strength and morale in the following siege.  Despite her position as a woman, and not even a nun or well-born or anything, she was a significant political force in her time, and became so simply by living her life the way she wanted.

She's not quite forgotten now in Paris, but I think she should be more remembered.  All this is to say: the Pantheon is a mausoleum for the great cultural figures of France, and I think Genevieve is more worthy of being housed there than many of the men who are currently.  I don't even know who half of them are, and I make it my business to know things like that.  Not to mention - Marie Curie is the only woman to get into that posthumous boys' club.  Although the secular nature of the building is much stressed, it will also host religious ceremonies.  Besides that though, her life and historical impact have enough significance apart from the religious stuff.  I think Genevieve (or at least a monument or her reliquary) well deserves to have a place in the building that was originally created in her honor.