Just in time for Easter, my nephew Louis from Auburn PA showed up at my front door. He was in Paris and stopped to visit before heading off to a conference in Vienna, Austria, where he hopes to interest other researchers in his work in the field of hydrology.
This is the best kind of Pottsville-Paris connection, and I am happy my nephew likes to spend time with me. He roamed Paris on his own, but together we visited the suburban city of Saint-Denis, where I taught for nearly 30 years. It is home to many people, many things, but best known for its basilica, where Abbé Suger, an extraordinary 12th century abbot, raised the nave of his church and inserted in its western façade the first rose window of Gothic architecture.
Behind the clock is the original rose window.
I’ve already written about the basilica and its necropolis, the official burial ground of French royalty since the time of Dagobert, a Frankish king of the 7th century. Long before his time, however, cemeteries existed on the basilica’s grounds, some going back to Gallo-Roman times, when France was a Roman colony called Gaul. In the 3rd century, Paris was known as Lutetia and its inhabitants worshipped Roman gods. The Gauls, warriors and farmers who inhabited the territory we today call France, had their own pantheon served by druid priests.
Not until the end of the 4th century did Christianity become the official religion of the Roman Empire. The hard work of conversion, an endeavor that required centuries, was carried out by humble men and women who roamed across Europe, preaching their faith. Saint Denis was one of them. In the 2nd century, he was sent from Rome north to Gaul. Such was his success that the Roman authorities of Lutetia considered him a menace to their power and put him to death.
The Romans carried out their executions on mons Martis, a prominent hill in the city dedicated to Mars, god of war. There Denis had his head chopped off. Later, when Christianity became the religion of the Frankish kings, mons Martis was renamed mons Martyrum, today’s Montmartre, where Christian martyrs met their death.
Saint Denis was one martyr among many, yet legend remembers him as the saint who, after decapitation, picked up his head and walked in a straight line north to the grounds where his basilica stands today. From the 4th century onwards, a church has existed on the site, and in the 21st century, archeologists are still making important discoveries about its past.
For example, the bones of a beheaded man were discovered there, but did they belong to Denis? Also, precious stones, gold and silk have been uncovered, proof that the wealthy chose to place their tombs near the martyr saints. Each time a sanctuary outgrew its worshippers, a new one rose above and around it. Today visitors can enter the original church, now the basilica’s crypt, and view Gallo-Roman sarcophagi.
Above it rises an 8th century church from the time of the Emperor Charlemagne. On the walls of its small windows are visible traces of the original paint imitating marble. Then came another church and another, each one built on the back of the one before. It took centuries for the Gothic basilica to be completed. In 1793, at the time of the French Revolution, it was almost destroyed. The tombs of the French kings and queens were opened and their bones scattered among the ruins. Children collected them and used them to play jacks, in French called “osselets,” “little bones.”
In 1806, Napoleon ordered the church rebuilt. With the return of the monarchy in 1815, it once again became the official burial place of French royalty. Work on the basilica continued throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and continues still today. Recently the façade was cleaned and refurbished, and a gilded clock was added, its design that of François Debret, one of the 19th century architects essential to the basilica’s renovation.
This year began the reconstruction of a steeple toppled during an 1845 tornado. The restoration of the basilica’s magnificent entrance doors is also underway. A few dozen feet from the church, a square previously used for an outdoor market has become an excavation site.
The basilica of Saint Denis is a more than millennial work in progress, as is the town of Saint-Denis that has grown up around it. Besides its importance to the French monarchy, the town was at the heart of France’s industrial revolution. Leather and textiles, then foundries, then automobiles and luxury goods provided jobs for qualified workers. And then came mid-20th century decline, a rustbelt on the outskirts of Paris. Today many old plants and factories have disappeared. A building boom has replaced them with offices and apartment buildings.
Saint-Denis has also been home to waves of immigrants. I took my nephew to the town’s big covered market, built in 1893, a site where markets and fairs have been taking place for hundreds of years. In the 12th century, a commercial fair, “la foire du Lendit,” attracted merchants and buyers from all over Europe. Gypsy kings from the east travelled to the fair and while in town, paid their respects to the French monarchy.
In 2023, at the market of Saint-Denis, you can still rub elbows with people from all over the world and hear many languages besides French. The town, like the basilica, is multilayered and multifaceted.
On another scale, Schuylkill County is also a multilayered and multifaceted place. Pottsville gave its name to a rock, “Pottsville conglomerate,” whose formation dates back to the Pennsylvania period in geology, over 300 million years ago! I think of this each time I hike on Sharp Mountain, whose north end has some beautiful outcrops of this stone.
View from Jackson Street Hill looking northwest
Closer to our own time is the region’s 19th century past when coal was king. “For anyone from Cape Cod to New Orleans, to say he had not heard of the renowned town of Pottsville, would sound as marvelous as if an Arabian were to declare he had never heard of Mahomet,” wrote 19th century historian I. Daniel Rupp. Today remnants and artefacts of those glorious times are present everywhere, as is the destruction mining wrought.
The Saint Nicholas Breaker of Mahanoy City, now gone
