Ferdie Rous makes the journey to the spiritual home of France, and finds the tensions of the modern French state.
In June this year France was rocked by the death of Nahel Merzouk, a 17-year-old boy shot by police in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. For weeks, Paris and other urban centres witnessed the worst riots for nearly 20 years; 3,000 people were arrested and 2,500 buildings damaged.
Attempting to quell the violence, 40,000 police officers were met with hails of rocks and fireworks. Some weeks later, on Bastille Day, there was little physical evidence of the unrest, which had reportedly broken out of the banlieues and into central Paris for the first time. A spider web crack in the odd shop window was all that could be seen.
Juxtaposing this was a powerful reminder of state authority. The police and army blockades were almost as impressive a show of force as the buzz and crack of passing aircraft and the earth-rumbling rattle of tank tracks as they passed down the Rue de Rivoli.
However, only half an hour’s brisk walk from the centre, there was a clear demarcation of the line that separates the two cities that constitute Paris – the fractious suburbs and the picture-postcard centre.
Beneath the elevated Metro line supporting Stalingrad station, not far from my hostel in the dixième, there was a homeless colony of some 40 men, all lying on a hodge-podge of mattresses jammed between steel fencing.
Around a bend in the road, some 50 metres off, behind a mound of charred and twisted rubble and detritus, a wide black streak of soot ran up four floors of a block from a burnt-out Chinese supermarket.
There is perhaps no better place to illustrate these two cities than the neuf trois – the “nine-three” – the commune of Seine-Saint-Denis. One of Paris’s northern suburbs, and known widely by its administrative number, Saint Denis is home to one of the wonders of French Gothic architecture: the Basilique-Cathédrale Saint-Denis, where the kings of France were crowned and buried.
It is also France’s most notorious district. Averaging 150 criminal incidents per 1,000 inhabitants since 2005, it is known as one of the least safe places in the country. Indeed, when I told the receptionist at my hostel where I was going that morning, she raised a quizzical eyebrow and told me not to hang around too long and to wear my rucksack across my chest.
But look up Seine-Saint-Denis online and you’ll find the image of a quaint square with a coffee shop and the warm golden stone façade of the cathedral. Coming out of the metro, it’s a different story: a warren of narrow passageways overhung by the dark grey balconies of sinister geometric buildings.
The northern façade of the cathedral was a grim sight on that overcast morning. It reflects the greyness of the brutalist blocks that sit across a small garden opposite. The glass of the windows is cracked – the gaps stand out sharply despite the gloom. Just visible over a fence is the carved tympanum above the northern doorway.
The carving shows a man kneeling with his decapitated head raised up in his hands as an offering to a crouching Christ, who looks him in the eye with hands outstretched in benediction. The kneeling supplicant is the saint who gives the Basilica and the commune that surrounds it his name.
One of the 14 Holy Helpers, St Denis was Bishop of Paris in the 3rd century; he was martyred on its highest hill (now the site of Sacré-Cœur at Montmartre) in the persecutions of AD 250. According to legend, after his execution St Denis walked nearly five miles, holding his head, to the place which now bears his name.
The cathedral sits over his burial place. A shrine was built on the site in 313, with a cult swiftly building around it, and as the centuries passed St Denis came to be identified as the patron saint of France.
The Oriflamme, the battle standard of the French kings, was consecrated over his tomb.
Later, the Abbé Suger, who played a vital role in the centralisation of French royal authority in the 12th century, built upon the existing Carolingian structure to create what is widely considered the first work of Opus Francigenum – what we now know as Gothic.
The altar bearing the relics of St Denis in the elevated quire is immediately visible crowned in light from the tall windows supported by the double ambulatorium that passes around the altar.
As Suger intended, the view is unimpeded by the concealing walls of previous styles.
To reach the altar, pilgrims must pass beneath the high arches, with their then-revolutionary ogives, and the royal tombs. The dozen or so kings and queen are represented by gisants, idealised representations of their bodies laid as if in sleep bearing the paraphernalia of state, their feet resting on small animals: loyal dogs and brave lions.
Among these simpler, formerly painted, tombs is the towering, Renaissance mausoleum of François I. An architectural homage to the doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies, it displays François and his queen, Claude of Brittany, in both physical and spiritual form – the one perishable, the other imperishable.
Kneeling atop the tomb dressed in all their splendour, the royal couple look to the East in prayer; below they are sculpted without ceremony, naked in death.
On the other side of the quire, the tomb of Henri IV of Navarre is grislier still: the sculpture of Henri’s physical self bears the marks of the maggots and scars of the funerary process.
Back outside, I paused to take another look at the lopsided façade of the cathedral; an old boy in an uncharacteristically French combination of t-shirt and cargo shorts spotted a fellow enthusiast, and we fell into conversation.
After some basic pleasantries, he pointed up to the empty sky where the missing north-west tower should stand.
“Six years and they still haven’t done anything about it,” he said more to himself than to me, a wistful look on his face. “They allocated money, there was even a countrywide subscription – and nothing.”
He was referring to the promise made in 2017, a renewal of another pledge in 1987, that the unstable tower taken down in the 19th century would be restored. Some 28 million euros was found for it but over half a decade later, there seems to be no visible change.
Looking around the commune of St Denis, the apparently mandatory political graffiti that scars much of Paris is scrawled between and over the rundown shops and cafés – many of them dedicated to Islamic scholarship and dress.
It is far removed from the chocolate-box views of Sacré-Coeur and the Louvre. Seine-Saint-Denis was also promised much in 2017: President Macron came to power promising a significant urban renewal project for the banlieues. But the riots and the places themselves tell a different story.
It has long been said that France exists in an entrenched duality. At what is in some regards its spiritual birthplace, it could not be clearer. When read in the papers in the cafés of the fashionable arondissements, government promises might seem impressive; but in the reality of the banlieues themselves they mean very little. Meanwhile St Denis looks.
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.