1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/St Denis

ST DENIS, an industrial town of northern France, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Seine, 5 m. N. of Paris. Pop. (1906) 62,323. St Denis, an important junction on the northern railway, stands in a plain on the right bank of the Seine, which is here joined by the canal of St Denis. It has numerous metallurgical works, where railway material, naval engines and the like are constructed, distilleries of spirits, glass works, potteries and manufactories of drugs, chemical products, oils, nickel plate and pianos. The name and fame of the town are derived from the abbey founded by Dagobert I. on the spot where St Denis, the apostle of Paris, was interred. The abbey buildings, occupied by a school for daughters of members of the Legion of Honour, founded by Napoleon I., date from the 18th century.

The church exhibits the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic style. The west front was built between 1137 and 1140. The right-hand tower is almost pure Romanesque; that on the left was Gothic, and its spire was carried to a height of 280 ft., but it was struck by lightning in 1837 and reconstructed in so clumsy a manner that it had to be reduced to the level of the roof of the nave. The rose window, now occupied by a clock face, dates from the 13th century. Under one of the three rows of arches above the main entrance runs an inscription recording the erection of the church by Abbot Suger (q.v.), minister of Louis VI., with abbatial funds and its consecration in 1140. The porch formed by the first three bays of the church contains some remains of the hasilica of Pippin the Short and Charlemagne, by whom the church was rebuilt. The nave proper (235 ft. long and 57 wide) hasp seven bays, and dates, as well as most of the choir and transepts, from the reign of St Louis. The secondary apse (rondpoint) and its semicircular chapels (consecrated in 1144) are considered as the first perfected attempt at Gothic. The transepts have fine façades, the north of the 12th, the south of the 13th century, each with two unfinished towers; if the plan had been fully carried out there would have been six towers besides a central spire in lead. The church contains a series of tombs of the kings and princes of the royal houses of France. The most remarkable are those of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, executed from 1516 to 1532; of Henry II. and Catherine de' Medici, a masterpiece by Germain Pilon (1564–1583); of Louis of Orleans and Valentine of Milan, from the old church of the Celestines at Paris (1502–1515); of Francis I. and Claude of France, one of the most splendid tombs of the Renaissance, executed under the direction of Philibert Delorme (1550–1560); and that of Dagobert, which, though considerably dilapidated, ranks as one of the most curious of medieval (13th-century) works of art. In the apse some stained glass of the time of Suger remains. The crypt dates partly from the 10th or 11th century. In the centre is the vault where the coffin of the king used to lie until, to make room for that of his successor, it was removed to its final resting-place. It is at present occupied by the coffin of Louis XVIII., the last sovereign whose body was borne to St Denis. Besides fine statues, the crypt contains the Bourbon vault, in which among other coffins are deposited the remains of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.

St Denis, the ancient Catulliacum, was a town of no pretensions till the foundation of its abbey, which became one of the most powerful in France. The rebuilding of the church, begun in the 12th century by Suger, was completed in the 13th century. Among the many domains of the abbey was the French Vexin. It was held during the later middle ages by the French kings and vassals of the abbey, and to this fact is due their adoption of the oriflamme or red banner of St Denis as the royal standard. St Louis caused mausoleums to be erected with figures of the princes already buried in the abbey; and from his time to that of Henry II. every monarch in succession, had his monument. Louis XIV. reduced the abbey to the rank of a priory; and at the Revolution it was suppressed, the tombs being violated and the church sacked (1793). Two years later all the remains that could be recovered were placed in the museum of the Petits Augustins at Paris; but the bronze tombs had been melted down, the stained-glass windows shattered, and large numbers of interesting objects stolen or lost. Louis XVIII. caused all the articles belonging to St Denis to be brought back to their original site, and added numerous other monuments from the suppressed abbeys. But it was not till after 1848 that, under the direction of Viollet le Duc, the basilica recovered its original appearance. St Denis, which was the key of Paris on the north, was more than once pillaged in the Hundred Years' War, suffering especially in 1358 and 1406. A sanguinary battle, in which the Catholic leader Constable Anne de Montmorency found victory and death, was fought between Huguenots and Catholics in the neighbourhood on the 10th of November 1567.

See F. de Guilhermy, Monographie de l'église royale de St Denis (Paris, 1848).