3 Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris, France
Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
The oldest church in Paris, founded in the sixth century on the Left Bank, with Romanesque bones beneath nineteenth-century painted decoration and a long history as a center of Benedictine scholarship.
Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the oldest church standing in Paris. The abbey was founded around 558 by King Childebert I to house relics brought back from Spain, and the current bell tower dates to around 1000 — making it older than Notre-Dame by a century and a half. The Romanesque nave, with its thick columns and rounded arches, was built in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Flying buttresses were added in the Gothic period, among the earliest in Paris. The interior was heavily repainted in the nineteenth century by Hippolyte Flandrin, a student of Ingres, who covered the nave walls with murals of Old and New Testament scenes in a deliberately flat, almost Byzantine style. The colors are deep greens, golds, and blues. The effect is unusual — a Romanesque structure dressed in Romantic-era painting. The abbey once controlled a huge complex of buildings and gardens that gave the entire neighborhood its name. The Benedictine monks here produced some of the most important works of medieval scholarship, including the Maurist editions of the Church Fathers. The Revolution suppressed the abbey, and only the church survives. Sartre and de Beauvoir drank coffee across the street, but the church was here a thousand years before them.
Diocese: Archdiocese of Paris
Style: Romanesque with Gothic additions
What to See
The bell tower is best appreciated from the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where you can see the oldest standing structure in the city. Inside, the Romanesque columns and arches give the nave a heaviness that Notre-Dame does not have — this is an older, sturdier kind of building. Flandrin's murals are worth studying closely; their flat, icon-like style was controversial at the time but has aged well. The choir chapels contain fragments of medieval sculpture and funerary monuments. A small garden on the south side of the church has archaeological traces of the original abbey buildings.
Pilgrim Notes
The church is at the Saint-Germain-des-Prés metro station on Line 4, in the center of the Left Bank cafe district. It is open daily and free to enter. Mass is offered regularly. The neighborhood is one of the most pleasant in Paris for walking — bookshops, galleries, and restaurants line the surrounding streets. The Musée de Cluny, with its medieval art collection, is a short walk east. The Luxembourg Gardens are five minutes south on foot.