Thursday December 28. Paris.

After a quiet morning learning a little bit of Spanish, I headed out to walk towards what I think I’m looking at from my windows. I’m not sure if I did, but it was a nice walk!

Heading north. This building was completed in 1990.

I’m now in the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers. Nice colour contrasts!

A factory (1899, Babcock, manufactured large industrial heat vessels) being converted into an art venue - first just informally by artists setting up, but now a State project. Behind it you can see a blank wall that is part of an enormous windowless complex that you aren’t allowed to photograph.  I thought maybe a prison, but there are none listed for this area. Will try to find out!

And now I’m in the suburb of La Courneuve. From a distance I thought this must be a stadium, but it is a huge data centre, Digital Realty.

Here is a very large park, Parc Georges Valbon, in La Courneuve, which advertises itself as 415 hectares of nature and wetlands, but is actually pretty tame!

Walking out of the park towards the suburb of St. Denis.  All this area north of the city proper of Paris has long had a very bad reputation.  It used to be the site of many small to medium sized industries and was, and in fact still is, home to low income people and immigrants.  Horrible things have been said about the vices of the inhabitants, the high crime rate, etc.  The Communist party has traditionally done very well here (still does) which can alarm the well-to-do. This link goes to a good article enlarging on this.  https://mondediplo.com/2022/08/10stdenis

In the heart of a fully rebuilt modern downtown rises the Cathedral of Saint-Denis.  Lots to say about this church!  Saint Denis lived in the third century in Roman Lutèce (now Paris).  He was beheaded in either 250 or 270 for his faith. He then picked up his head and walked for a long distance, finishing his sermon as he walked.  A chapel was built not long after over the spot where he was buried. (There is even a word for this phenomenon : St. Denis is the most famous of the ´cephalophores’!)

By the twelfth century the little chapel had become this Gothic cathedral.  A Christmas market, complete with a small and very busy ice skating rink, is bustling.

Inside the cathedral, behind the main altar is this fourteenth century baldaquin holding the relics (bones) of Saint Denis.

Now for another story that I heard told in a musical performance inside the Cathedral.  All French schoolchildren probably know the song about le bon roi Dagobert who put on his trousers backwards and had lots of other mishaps.  Dagobert reigned from 629 to 639. When he was a boy of ten, he lived through three tragic events. First his tutor who had schooled him for several years and whom he loved dearly, died. Shortly after that his mother died, and then his father remarried only two weeks after the mother’s death.  When the new stepmother announced that her cousin, a stout man who had a tremendously long beard and who smelled very bad, was to be Dagobert’s new tutor, the boy was enraged.  Coming across this new tutor sound asleep in a semi-drunken stupor, the boy cut off his beard.  Well, it was soon known who the culprit was, and the King was prepared to give the boy a thorough beating. Dagobert fled on his horse deep into the dark forest that surrounded Paris at that time. As night fell, he saw the chapel to St Denis, took refuge inside and fell asleep. All night the King’s men looked for the boy, and when they found him the next day, the King was so relieved that he forgave his son.  

Despite the jolly song about Dagobert, he committed his fair share of atrocities during his ten year reign. On his deathbed, worried about his chances of being forgiven by God, he remembered the time he had taken shelter in the chapel and had been forgiven by his father. And thus it came about that Dagobert was the first of France’s Kings to be buried at St Denis.

This is the very large sculpted tomb built for Dagobert in the thirteenth century. It was originally brightly painted.

Since Dagobert, many many Kings and high nobility have been buried in St Denis.  This is the tomb of King Francois I (died 1547) and his wife Claude de France. There are still many such tombs in the Cathedral, and sometimes it is hard to see them properly. In this case, I had a splendid view of the feet, but the heads were quite hidden!

Then along came la Révolution française and the closing of monasteries and churches, dispossession and dispersion of priests, monks and nuns, beheading of le roi Louis XVI and la reine Marie Antoinette, and the emptying of the royal  tombs in St Denis, with the remains thrown into a common grave ditch.  Here is a low part of the crypt.

Humanity being humanity and inclined to pendular movement, after the interval of Napoleon’s Empire, the monarchy was restored in France.  The remains in the common ditch were dug up and placed in an ossuary in the Cathedral.  Relics that had been hidden were brought back, tombs were restored.  The church is now illumined with many nineteenth century stained glass windows. A very few panes of the original windows survived. Here is a twelfth century depiction of St. Paul.