There’s something unsettling about a statue with its head lobbed off. Sure, it’s just a piece of stone. But it represents something. There are headless statues in churches all over France, statues of bishops, martyrs, saints. It’s not surprising those statues came out of the French revolution badly; the church and its clerics weren’t popular.
But the revolution was nearly 250 years ago. How come the heads haven’t been put back on? It seems lax of the church authorities, to say the least. After all, the church in France is often referred to as fille aînée de l’Église, the ‘eldest daughter of the Church’. Its roots go back to the Apostolic Age when Jesus’s earliest disciples landed in Gaul. But, it turns out, the church actually has little power over the state of its decrepit buildings.
There are about 32,000 churches, 6,000 chapels and 87 cathedrals in France, according a Ministry of Culture survey from the 1980s. Church buildings built before 1905 are owned by the state, including almost all the country’s great cathedrals, such as Notre-Dame – hence the involvement of Emmanuel Macron in the rebuilding of the country’s most famous cathedral after the fire. Parish churches built before 1905 are typically owned by local communes.
The strange arrangement goes back to 1790, when the revolutionary government appropriated the church’s property. Subsequently, many of its churches and monasteries were destroyed, abandoned or turned into barns, armouries or military barracks.
But after Napoleon Bonaparte came to power in 1801, he signed an agreement between the Vatican and the French government that allowed the church to resume its normal functions in France, which included it reclaiming many of its properties. Religious life was, in effect, restored in the country.
However, the beginning of the 20th century ‘marked another swing toward aggressive secularisation and a government strongly hostile to church and faith’, states the Jesuit Review. The passage of a law in 1905 established laïcité, enshrining secularisation of the state. A bitter struggle followed between the church and the state, including the breakdown of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and France. Eventually a compromise was reached: the state would own churches built before 1905 but ‘had to provide financially for their upkeep and allow them to be used freely and without cost by the church’.
But based on what I saw, the state hasn’t kept up its side of the bargain. In addition to headless statues, moss and vegetation grow out of the walls of many churches. In one parish church, when I sat down on the pew at the start of Sunday Mass, I almost slid straight off. The pew was tilted at such an acute angle sloping forwards that I spent the Mass, when sitting down, with my legs braced to keep myself in place.
Fortunately, there is Vézelay to remind you what Catholic France is all about. The small town in Bourgogne is built around what is known as the Eternal Hill. Atop it sits the Basilica of Sainte-Marie-Madeleine. That in itself is noteworthy, being named after Mary Magdalene, the woman who is often portrayed as a woman of ill repute – she wasn’t, insisted our guide around the basilica.
Almost a thousand years old, the basilica is a masterpiece of medieval cathedral building, as evidenced by the interplay between solar light and architecture during the summer and winter solstices. The clever medieval designers built this 12th-century basilica so that during the summer solstice (21 June) the sunlight coming through the basilica windows creates pools of light on the stone floor proceeding in a straight line up the centre of the nave to the altar.
Those caught up in the supposed progress of reason during the revolution couldn’t do better than knocking off the heads of statues
On the winter solstice (21 December), the sun’s light comes in at an angle that illuminates decorative capitals atop the columns to the side of the nave. These are too high and dark to see at other times, but with the winter sun are revealed to be strange stone images carved out of the whacky, cosmic breadth of the medieval imagination.
The Middle Ages are often depicted by us moderns as bland and backward. But its inhabitants created some of the finest buildings ever to grace the earth as they sought to understand our role in the cosmic dance. In contrast, those caught up in the supposed progress of reason during the revolution couldn’t do better than knocking off the heads of statues built by their ancestors.
Such ‘progress’ continues, along with its subsequent fallout for the Catholic faith in France. Sometimes it’s as stark as when Fr Jacques Hamel was murdered in 2016 during Mass. He had his throat slit by Islamic terrorists. Or it’s more subtle, as during the Olympics opening ceremony with the was-it-wasn’t-it parody of the Last Supper, festooned with drag queens and LGBT cant.
At best, it is fair to say, while the excesses of the revolution are unlikely to be repeated, the French state remains far from a fan of the Catholic church. That the former has ownership of the latter’s crucial infrastructure is unsettling. Fortunately in the likes of Vézelay, one is able to escape this strange contradiction and acknowledge of forces beyond our realm.
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