Visit to Saint Etienne and the Jardin des Plantes

Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He has been spending the month of July and August in France. He grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip. Asher has a love of history so his dispatches are often full of historical details.

On August 6, the university where I am studying held a small excursion for those students who were interested to discover the city of Paris a bit more. Several of the students from all different levels of proficiency went along with a tour guide to explain some of what we were seeing. Some of the notable stops were the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, Saint Etienne Church, and the Jardin des Plantes.  

One of the very enjoyable parts of these tours is getting to talk to and make acquaintance with some of the other students whom one does not see on a daily basis because they are in a different class. There are students here from all over the world, including China, Korea, India, Nepal, Laos, Slovenia, Poland, Switzerland, Mexico, Italy, and more places. There are some Americans, but not many. 

The tour was the first of a series that the college offers to expose the language students to a bit of Parisian history and culture. 

The tour started with a stop at the Sorbonne. If you were like me before the tour, you probably have heard of the Sorbonne and know it is a renowned university, something like the French Oxford, it not much more. It is all of that, and it was founded in 1257, actually as part of the larger University of Paris. It came as part of a group of other European universities founded around the same time, around the twelfth century renaissance in Europe, such as the University of Bologna, Cambridge, Montpellier, Padua, and Coimbra. Before then, higher education in Europe was almost exclusively facilitated by monasteries, which had money and owned books, which were copied by hand. Famous monasteries that were great centers in the early Middle Ages were the Monastery of Sts. Cosmos and Damien in Spain or Saint Wandrille in France. Great advances were made at such places throughout the Medieval period in theology, philosophy, astronomy, and herbal medicine. 

At the beginning of the High Middle Ages, these institutions began to be replaced as centers of higher education by places we would more naturally associate with the modern university. Thus, the Sorbonne was founded in 1257 by Robert de Sorbon, a theologian, priest, and chaplain to King Louis IX. It remained a Catholic institution until 1905, when the official separation of Church and state was put into effect; since then, it has been a secular institution.

After visiting the Sorbonne, we walked down to the Pantheon. This building was originally begun by King Louis XV and was intended to be a Church to house the remains of St. Genevieve, the patron of Paris. 

St. Genevieve was born at the beginning of the fifth century in Gaul and lived during the reign of the medieval King Clovis. She was a consecrated virgin, likely as a result of being deeply influenced from when she was very young by St. Germain d'Auxerre. According to the tradition, so powerful was St. Genevieve that when the Huns were marching upon the city of Lutece (Paris) in 451, she convinced the populace to stay in the city and not flee; Paris was not captured. Ever since, Paris has had a special devotion to St. Genevieve.

It was for this reason that King Louis XV wished to dedicate the new building to her. However, during the French revolution, as you might expect, such an idea was not viewed with much enthusiasm by the revolutionary government. In 1791, the National Constituent Assembly voted to have it made into a resting place for prominent figures of French history. It contains the remains to this day of Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Jean Jaurès, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Pierre and Marie Curie, and Alexandre Dumas among many others.

But what of St. Genevieve? The building was originally supposed to be for her, after all. As it turns out, she was treated quite cruelly by the French revolutionaries with her relics being thrown into the sewer. After the revolution, some of her body was recovered and housed in an ornate tomb in the Church of St. Etienne du Mont, which is just behind the Pantheon. It is in this church that the remains of St. Genevieve lay. (Top photo)

In fact, after the death of Clovis, the body of the saint was housed in a church dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul, built by Clovis. It was in this church that many of the kings of the Merovingian dynasty of France were buried. The Merovingian dynasty was the royal family that ruled Ile de France from about 450 until 751. 

The modern church was built around the time of the Late Middle Ages, after when the Sorbonne was founded. It was built in flamboyant Gothic style, a later variant of Gothic architecture that was more ornate and lavish. As work continued, the style changed to be more of the Renaissance. Thus, the sculptures are in Renaissance style, as is the facade. One very notable feature of St. Etienne is the rood screen; it is an elevated platform that runs the full width of the nave from left to right. It was for the reading of the scriptures, and it is the only rood screen of its kind in Paris. The screen was built in the sixteenth century. 

St. Etienne was a very important church into the eighteenth century, and such figures as Blaise Pascal and Jean-Baptiste Racine were buried there (and they are still buried there to this day). However, it was the King Louis XV who, as mentioned before, wanted to build an even bigger church dedicated to St. Genevieve. That would have superseded St. Etienne in importance, but as we have seen, the Pantheon was never to become a church.

St. Etienne itself was extensively damaged during the revolution, and the abbey church next door that had stood there from the Middle Ages was demolished in 1804. 

I personally found St. Etienne to be one of the most beautiful Parisian churches I have visited, and I would certainly recommend visiting it when one is in Paris.

After that, we walked down towards the Jardin des Plantes. This is a botanical garden in Paris very well known for its large collection of different plant specimens and herbs. All the plants are carefully marked, and there is a stunning amount of them. 

The garden was founded in the seventeenth century as a result of an order from King Louis XIII. It was overseen by his physician, Guy de la Brosse, and it was the site of lectures on medicine and botany. This would certainly be characteristic of the already well underway Scientific Revolution. One of the people who worked at the garden as a researcher in the eighteenth century was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, known for proposing one of the earliest known theories of biological evolution to explain the complexity of organisms. 

It was at that garden that Henry Becquerel first discovered radioactivity for which he received the Nobel Prize. 

There is a particular area set aside for Alpine herbs, which was particularly interesting to me both because I was just at La Salette but also because I worked on creating a site that profiles and discusses medicinal plants and herbs and their uses. 

After the Jardin des Plants, the tour ended, and each went their separate way. I find the cultural excursions to be a very nice addition to the language learning I am engaged in at the university. I must say that the more time I spend in Paris the more I realize that the religious, cultural, and historical heritage of this city is amazingly formidable.

To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE