About a year after its purchase, the Crown of Thorns was welcomed into Paris in 1239 with a solemn procession led
by the king. One of his early biographers, Geoffrey of Beaulieu (as translated by Larry F Field), wrote of the event: “And with what joy did our devout king journey out to reverently take possession of these said relics! And again, with what solemn devotion did all the clergy and populace receive in procession at Paris these valuable relics, when the king himself, barefoot, bore on his own shoulders for some way this sacred treasure!” The procession stopped at Notre Dame, but only briefly. It had a different final destination: the king’s private chapel in his palace, at that time dedicated to St Nicholas.
The “holy chapel”, which is what Sainte-Chapelle means, was a special place in all ways. Legally, the pope had exempted it from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Paris. It was the private chapel in the palace, but the general public celebrated special feasts in the palace courtyard and inside. Within, on the upper floor, the medieval people of Paris and beyond would have seen walls almost entirely made of stained glass. Brilliant blues and reds made the gold of the reliquaries sparkle, illuminating on their own the vibrant paintings that adorned the walls.
And of course the paintings were not random or decorative; they told a story about God and kingship. They told the biblical story of Israel, beginning with Genesis and continuing through the Gospels. The story of the crucifixion appears directly above the altar where the relics were kept. But then the narrative continues on the south wall to tell a story of kings – those from ancient Israel, and then Louis IX himself and the story of the arrival of the relics to Paris. Every window is adorned with the fleur-de-lis of the kingdom of France. The message wasn’t subtle. Kings, not priests, are closest to God here.
In 1240, the sentence against the Talmud was pronounced. But the burning that would occur over a year later almost didn’t happen. All history is about contingency, about decisions that might not have been made, or how things could have gone differently. The archbishop of Sens, the most powerful among the judges at the “trial”, interceded. The papacy said that now the Talmud was to be censored of “offending” material, but not banned, nor burned.
But Louis was set on his course. Cartloads of the Talmud arrived at the Place de Grève in 1242. Louis IX seems to have believed that a “most Christian” king had a special responsibility to God to care for his people and that responsibility required zeal. The king was to be zealous in caring for the poor and ensuring that justice was done. For example, according to one of his hagiographers, “when a famine once befell parts of Normandy, he designated such a large supply of money for the poor of that area that, just as from there was usually brought to Paris a treasure of revenues in coffers and wagons, now by contrast just as much money was carried back from Paris in boxes and vehicles for distribution to the poor”. That hagiographer further explained that Louis himself washed “the feet of the… poorer and older men who could be found, which he did on bended knee, humbly, piously, and in a most secret place… In similar fashion he brought water to wash their hands, which he kissed in the same way. He then provided a certain sum of money to each, and he himself waited upon them as they ate.”
Being zealous meant not only helping his fellow Christians, but also struggling against those seen as God’s enemies. Louis would continue his persecution of the Jews, threatening to arrest all French Jews and confiscate their property in 1268. This didn’t happen but Jews were formally segregated from Christians in 1269, and forced to wear a yellow or red badge on their clothes.
The world had to be purified.
A crusader’s death
It’s also not a coincidence that, in the wake of the burning of the Talmud, even before Sainte-Chapelle was consecrated, Louis resolved to launch a military expedition to Egypt with the ultimate goal of taking Jerusalem. It was a disaster, even if it started auspiciously enough with the capture of the major port of Damietta in Egypt.
Egypt was hot, and the Christian army was prone to disease. Marching up the Nile towards Cairo, Louis’ army found its advance hindered by the annual flood of the great river. Louis was captured by the Mamluk general Baibars and had to pay a vast ransom, including the return of Damietta, for his release. However, the king would earn no such reprieve during his next crusade – launched in 1270 – dying from dysentery shortly after landing in Tunisia. The sheer force of Louis’ desire to rid the world of heretics had cost him his life.
The statue of St Louis sited in middle America – in the heart of the city that was named in his honour – remembers all parts of that medieval king. Erected in plaster for the 1904 World’s Fair, it was recreated in bronze in 1906 as a gift to the city, perhaps part of a larger trend of Civil War statuary being constructed at the same time. But it wasn’t formally designated a city monument until 1971, during the creation of a special cultural district encompassing the zoo and art museum.
The statue stood, and still stands, as a civic symbol, a point of pride for many – and, through the king’s formal canonisation, an important focal point for parts of the city’s Catholic community. But everything has a history. The event that created this particular statue, the 1904 World’s Fair, was notorious for its racism against black and Native Americans. As a monument to civic pride, an avatar in some ways of the city itself, the statue carries with it a long history of violence against black and Native Americans, most recently the police shootings of Michael Brown and Anthony Lamar Smith. Monuments, like people, are complicated; what some see as a point of pride, are to others sites of great shame.
The legacy of Louis IX helps us understand why that is. His legacy must hold all of that complexity, all of his humanity – as saint and monster. Does the fire in the Place de Grève change how we must see the beauty of Sante-Chapelle, how we imagine candlelight and sunlight mixing – as the latter passed through the glorious coloured glass, the pinnacle of gothic art? Does Louis’ violence against minority communities challenge his sanctity, even as that violence was explicitly celebrated by the papacy during his canonisation? It must, because the man and his actions were real.
As writers and historians – one Jewish, one Catholic – we both find ourselves able to remember the crackle of burning pages and wonder at the beauty in the chapel. It’s in this duality – the messiness of real people who lived in the past – that we found the bright ages, illuminating our own study of the past.
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