Paris and the Tour Saint-Jacques
Paris and the Tour Saint-Jacques
Environmental artist Christo worked wonders when he swaddled the Pont Neuf back in 1985, the year I moved to Paris. Nowadays I raise my eyes to the Tour Saint-Jacques on the Rue de Rivoli wondering if the master-wrapper has met his match.
Tour St-Jacques under wraps, copyright Alison HarrisSince 2001 scaffolding has shrouded the former churchtower of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie from its octagonal foot to its 54-meter-high head. The tower’s flamboyant Gothic silhouette, one of Paris’ tallest, is a Right Bank landmark between Châtelet and Hôtel de Ville. Somehow sinister, the shroud will hide the crumbling tower until at least November 2009 (click on the image to enlarge it).
For the last few years I’ve been reading everything I can get may hands on about the medieval pilgrimage the tower was associated with, part of the research I’m doing for A Skeptical Pilgrimage. The book traces the pilgrimage route from Paris south to the Pyrénées (and from there to Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle in Spain). In searching for traces of the alchemists, murderers and fanatics the tower’s site has known, my wanderings have led me many times into the square at its base.
In March 2006 city officials closed the Square Saint Jacques. Until at least 2009 it will be filled with limestone blocks and construction equipment. “Phase one is over,” a foreman told me over traffic noise, “five years of analyzing every centimeter.”
The square reopened in April. From a raised viewing platform you can watch artisans shaping gargoyles, statues and cornices. The scaffolding will come down in stages starting from the top, a novel way to turn a long, dusty job into edifying entertainment.
Talk about bad luck. Built from 1509-1523, the tower’s last 2 centuries are a chronicle of misfortunes that also remind us of the fragility of stone—limestone in this case. But to understand the monument’s origins you have to travel further back, to the Bronze Age.
That’s when Mediterranean and Atlantic trade routes first crossed the Seine at the Ile-de-la-Cité, a natural ford. The east-west Atlantic trail followed the river’s right bank. The north-south trail linked what’s now Senlis and Orléans (and in 1973 was cut off by the Boulevard Péripherique, Paris' beltway). The Bronze Age Mediterranean-Atlantic intersection became the Roman’s “cardo-decumanus” where raised, paved highways met (curiously, 3 Roman paving stones flank the Left Bank church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, about 100 meters off the Rue Saint-Jacques). These highways morphed into medieval Paris’ axis-thoroughfares. The church of St-Jacques-le-Majeur, recorded since at least 1060, sat at the crossroads, welcoming pilgrims to and from Saint-Jacques’ Spanish shrine. Today the crossroads is where the Rue Saint-Martin and Rue de Rivoli meet, on the 4th arrondissement’s western edge.
After Philippe Auguste’s city walls had completely girded Paris in 1220, the Right Bank boomed, filling with slaughterhouses, tanneries and butcher shops. By 1259 the pilgrimage church had grown, sprouted a tower and changed its name to Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie.
Mystery still wraps the figures of Nicolas Flamel and his wife Pernelle—wealthy, pious benefactors who in 1389 paid for the addition to the church of a northern portal. The pair are recalled by the names of nearby streets and by their townhouse, the oldest in Paris, from 1407, still standing in the Rue Montmorency (between the Centre Pompidou and church of Saint Martin). The Flamels theoretically made their fortune as booksellers, but many Parisians believed they were alchemists able to turn base metals into gold.
On the side tympanum of Saint-Jacques’ church the couple were shown kneeling at the Virgin Mary’s feet, flanking Saint-Jacques and Saint John the Baptist. In 1418 Nicolas was buried under the church in what’s now the Square Saint-Jacques. His ghost, chroniclers say, came back to haunt the tower, and almost caused its ruin. His cryptic stone epitaph—many times lost and recovered—is in the Musée de Cluny on the stairway to the “Lady with the Unicorn” room. (From the tower, walk south up the Rue Saint-Jacques, turn right on the Rue du Sommerard and you’ll see the museum on your right).
By the early 1500s the church’s medieval belltower seemed inadequate. Though the Renaissance had already peaked in Italy, Paris still preferred the flamboyant Gothic—witness the churches of Saint-Merri, near the Centre Pompidou, and Saint-Sévérin on the Left Bank. Architect Jean de Felin designed a massive belltower, joining it to the base of Saint-Jacques’ west side. On its crown soared a 3.5-meter-tall effigy of Saint-Jacques surrounded on each corner by 2.5-meter-tall phantasmagoric sculptures symbolizing the Evangelists, carved by Pierre Rault. Nearly 2 dozen statues of saints filled niches on each of the tower’s three levels. Stone tracery, gargoyle spouts and elaborate carvings decorated the façades top to bottom. The tower’s exceptional height made the carillon audible all over town.
So populous and prosperous was Saint-Jacques’ parish that soon the crypt, charnel house and graveyard overflowed with coffins, swamping caverns under what’s now the square and Rue de Rivoli (the stench, it’s said, lingers in the métro today).
Fast forward to 1793, when Revolutionary crowds ransacked Saint-Jacques, throwing the tower’s sculptures to the ground. Only the 4 rooftop animal statues symbolizing Mark, Luke, John and Matthew survived (3 are in the Musée de Cluny’s reserve, the fourth has disappeared). Four years later the church was auctioned and quarried for building stone, with the proviso that the tower be spared. A certain Monsieur Dubois bought the tower, sold the bells to a foundry, and set up a gun-shot factory.
Under the tower’s roof Dubois’ cauldrons melted lead. The molten metal, poured through a broad seive, formed pellets. By free-falling nearly 50 meters into tanks of cold water on the tower’s ground floor they formed perfect round shot. Dubois was the real alchemist—turning lead into hard cash. Flamel’s ghost returned with a vengeance, though, and the factory caught fire 3 times, destroying everything on the former church’s grounds, including a covered marketplace.
It was scientist François Arago who persuaded king Louis Philippe to buy back the gutted, damaged tower in the 1830s. In 1854, when the Rue de Rivoli and parallel Avenue Victoria were widened and straightened, the Saint-Jacques compound became a park, designed by Baron Haussmann’s favorite architect, Jean-Charles Adolphe Alphand. The ground level around the tower was lowered, an octagonal base with 14 steps built. And up went scaffolding.
Architect Théodore Ballu, in charge of the tower, hired Jean-Louis Chenillon to sculpt a new colossal Saint-Jacques. Nineteen different artists carved the 19 other statues of saints on the façades. Crumbling stonework was repaired. Since the bells were gone the belfry was sealed with stained glass windows by Stanislas Oudinot. Finally in 1862 the scaffolding came down. The tower won landmark status.
But bad luck continued. During the 1871 Commune, massacred “Fédérés” were buried in the park in a mass grave. When the métro was put through in 1900 their bones were reburied at the tower’s base, where they remain.
The 19th-century restorations didn’t last. Stones kept falling. By 1906 scaffolding was up again. In 1909, 1912, 1932, 1968 and 1978 scaffolding in whole or in part masked the tower, sometimes for up to 5 years. Copies of copies replaced cracked, eroded sculptures. Mismatched, inherently fragile limestone types, bad mortar, pollution and acid rain were what led to the current rebuilding campaign. This time 30 sculptors, stonemasons, stained-glass restorers, carpenters and coopers have 3 years and 8 months to get it right.
Will the remake last? Check back in a century or so.
Meanwhile, a secular skeptic, I’ve spent three months walking across Burgundy, then, on leg two, from Le Puy en Velay to Spain following the Chemin de Saint-Jacques – aka The Way of Saint James.
On October 18, 2006, buffeted by a spectacular wind storm, Alison and I made it through the frowning mountain pass used by neolithic tribesmen, Basques, Roman invaders, Charlemagne and Roland (of blow-your-horn fame) and of course Napoléon, reaching Roncevaux (or Roncesvalles, in Spanish), on the south side of the Pyrénées, more or less intact.
Click on Burgundy or Le Puy-to-the-Pyrenees To read about our journey, see photos and hear the sounds of the French countryside—brooks, streams and rivers, wind, TGV high-speed trains, church bells, restaurants and cafes, roosters, cows and donkeys, chefs, priests, museum directors...
In early 2007 the newsletter-website Paris Notes will be running a story tracing the Rue Saint-Jacques through Paris.
If you'd like to be in touch with us for more information about our trek, or would like to inquire about setting up an accompanied tour in Paris, Burgundy or the Midi, please email info@parisparisthebook.com and type TREK QUERY in the subject line.
[David Downie]
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