Verdun Cathedral: A Romanesque-Rhenish Episcopal Church in France
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- French, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page23 sections
History
Verdun Cathedral is a Roman Catholic cathedral in Verdun, France, built by the Christian community of the city and developed chiefly as a Romanesque-Rhenish church between 990 and 1024. Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, it has been the episcopal seat of the Diocese of Verdun through successive medieval, early modern, and modern transformations.
Origins and the Romanesque cathedral
Verdun had been an episcopal seat since the fourth century. Around 330, Saint Saintin evangelized the city and founded a church dedicated to Saints Peter and Paul. In the fifth century, Saint Pulchrone established the cathedral within the Roman castrum, a fortified Roman settlement or military enclosure, on the site of an earlier Roman building. He dedicated the cathedral to the Virgin Mary.
In the tenth century, the earlier church of Saints Peter and Paul was replaced by the church of Saint-Vanne Abbey. Around 990, Bishop Haymon commissioned the present cathedral. Its original design was a large Romanesque-Rhenish church, a medieval form associated with the Rhineland and characterized here by opposing choirs, transepts, and several towers. Construction continued until 1024.
A fire in 1047 destroyed or damaged much of the building. Bishops Richard I and Thierry rebuilt the upper parts of the nave and transept and created the Officiality Portal. Further damage, attributed to Renaud I, Count of Bar, led Bishop Alberon of Chiny to order another rebuilding campaign. Between 1136 and 1160, the architect Garin reconstructed the eastern choir, the Lion and Saint John portals, the cloister, and the eastern crypt complex.
Pope Eugene III consecrated the cathedral on 11 November 1147 in the presence of 18 cardinals. A later stained-glass window preserves the memory of that ceremony. The rebuilding under Alberon and Garin gave the cathedral much of the medieval structure that later alterations would reshape rather than entirely replace.
Gothic transformation
From the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries, the cathedral was progressively altered in Gothic and Flamboyant Gothic styles. Pierre Perrat was associated with the fourteenth-century Gothic campaign, which included the raising of the eastern apse. The nave received stone vaults in place of its flat timber ceiling, the aisles were given new roofing, and the windows were enlarged. Side chapels were added, the towers received spires, and the interior was decorated with frescoes.
Further chapels were built during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Among them was the Chapel of the Assumption, constructed between 1522 and 1530. The cloister also took on its Flamboyant Gothic character, with most of its construction dating from 1509 to 1517 and its eastern gallery retaining fourteenth-century openwork.
The eighteenth-century fire and remodelling
On 2 April 1755, lightning ignited the roof and towers, causing a major fire. Under Bishop Aymar-Chrétien-François de Nicolaï and Canon Chaligny de Plaine, restoration and remodelling began in 1760. The work introduced Baroque, Rococo, and French classical features into the medieval church.
Only two of the four towers were rebuilt. The crypts, Lion Portal, and Venetian galleries were filled in, concealing parts of the earlier structure. The choir was reorganized around a Baroque visual focus, including a new canopy, balustrade, pulpit, and choir stalls. The gallery organ was also begun after the fire, in 1762.
War damage and twentieth-century restoration
During the First World War, especially during the Battle of Verdun in 1916, German artillery severely damaged the cathedral, its roof, towers, and cloister. The building served both as an observation post over the Meuse valley and as a garrison for French soldiers. Wartime bombardment also revealed the Lion Portal after it had been enclosed since the eighteenth-century fire.
Restoration directed by A. Ventre and M. Delangle took place from 1919 to 1935. Destroyed parts were rebuilt, features concealed during the eighteenth-century remodelling were recovered, and the crypt was rediscovered as wartime rubble was removed. Jean-Jacques Grüber produced replacement stained-glass windows. The restored master altar and crypt were consecrated on 10 November 1935.
On 2 July 1946, Angelo Roncalli, then an Italian cardinal and papal diplomat who became Pope John XXIII in 1958, crowned the statue of Notre-Dame de Verdun. Pope Pius XII elevated the cathedral to the rank of minor basilica by an apostolic brief dated 8 September 1947, on the eight-hundredth anniversary of its consecration. A minor basilica is a papal honorific granted to a church of particular religious or historical importance, and does not make it the seat of a bishop. The cathedral’s millennium was celebrated in 1990 with major religious and cultural events.
The cathedral has been protected as a French historic monument since 30 October 1906, and its cloister received protection on 13 July 1907. It remains the episcopal seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Verdun and is dedicated to the Virgin Mary. Its inventory includes 43 objects registered or classified as historic monuments, among them vestments, liturgical vessels, statues, reliquaries, and the organ.
Remains
Plan, structure, and medieval choirs
Verdun Cathedral stands on a rocky elevation and is attached to the former episcopal palace, now the World Peace Centre. The surviving building combines Romanesque-Rhenish, Gothic, Baroque, Rococo, and French classical traditions. It is built of stone and measures 94 metres in length. The nave is 12.4 metres wide, the transepts extend to 37 metres, and the vault rises 18.5 metres.
The original Romanesque-Rhenish plan comprised a nave, two transepts, two opposing choirs or apses, and four flanking bell towers. An apse is the curved or polygonal termination of a church. The nave has eight bays with aisles and nine Gothic side chapels. The cathedral now has two bell towers, while the bases of the lost eastern towers retain their Romanesque curved forms at transept level.
Western and eastern choirs
The western, or old, choir ends in a flat wall, reflecting the Rhenish tradition. The eastern, or new, choir has a seven-sided apse built in the twelfth century and raised in the fourteenth century by Pierre Perrat. The original flat-ended choirs had groups of three semicircular-headed windows beneath pointed gables pierced by small circular openings.
Gothic interior
The Gothic alterations replaced the nave’s flat timber ceiling with stone vaults and gave the aisles new roofs. Enlarged windows brought new openings into the medieval walls, while the side chapels and raised eastern apse altered the interior arrangement. Spires were added to the towers, and frescoes contributed to the decoration of the interior.
Portals and cloister
Lion Portal
At the foot of the former northeast tower, Garin built the twelfth-century Lion Portal. Its name came from a stone lion once placed in front of it and later transferred to the Princerie Museum. The portal was walled up after the 1755 fire and rediscovered in 1916 following the wartime bombardments.
Its tympanum shows Christ in Glory surrounded by the four Evangelists in a tetramorph, a symbolic group representing Mark as a lion, Luke as a bull, Matthew as an angel, and John as an eagle. Above the opening are a large flat-backed niche with a semicircular head, a small gallery, and vegetal ornament on the cornice, impost, and colonnettes.
Saint John Portal
Garin also built the twelfth-century Saint John Portal at the foot of the former southeast tower. It originally provided access to the Saint John baptistery and was enclosed in the thirteenth century when the Sacrary was built. Its tympanum once carried a fresco of the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple. The archivolts were decorated with heads, billets, and vegetal motifs, of which traces of the painted decoration survive.
Flamboyant Gothic cloister
The Flamboyant Gothic cloister has a total development of 87 metres and three galleries leading to the chapter’s dependencies. Most of the cloister was built between 1509 and 1517, while the openwork of the eastern gallery dates from the fourteenth century.
Four twelfth-century statues preserved in the cloister represent Adam and Eve, the Annunciation, Cain and Abel, and a bishop possibly identified as Saintin, traditionally regarded as the first bishop associated with Verdun’s Christian community. The statues originally decorated the buttresses of the eastern apse. They were moved indoors because of deterioration, then restored and installed in the cloister. Roman stone monuments are also preserved there.
Crypts and chapels
Eastern crypt
Built by Garin in the twelfth century, the eastern crypt consists of a central hall and two lateral annexes that served as access passages. A crypt is a chamber below or associated with the main church, often used for worship or burials. The southern wing has fifteenth-century frescoes on its vaults, walls, and transverse arches. Eight small painted scenes depict the Annunciation, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the Nativity, the Visitation, the Last Judgment, and the Resurrection.
The crypt contains 13 pillars whose capitals were made in 1935 by Gaston Le Bourgeois. Their sculptures represent episodes from Verdun’s religious life and the 1916 Battle of Verdun. A statue of the Virgin was carved by Bouchard in 1932, and the restored crypt includes modern sculptural elements referring to the First World War.
Chapel of the Rosary
Nicolas Masson built the Chapel of the Rosary between 1505 and 1515 in the Flamboyant Gothic style. It contains several sculptures and a Baroque altar surmounted by a Pietà made around 1774 by the Nancy sculptor Joseph Jonkher. A nineteenth-century wrought-iron screen, inspired by the choir screens of Notre-Dame de Paris, encloses the chapel. The screen was classified as a historic-monument object in 1989.
Baroque furnishings and sacred objects
Choir canopy, pulpit, and stalls
The choir canopy stands at the crossing of the transept and eastern choir. It is a reduced replica of the canopy in Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome and was sculpted by Chaligny de Plaine in 1760 from marble, stucco, gilded wood, and ironwork. The choir balustrade was inspired by the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris. Together, these elements directed attention toward a Baroque focal point while concealing much of the cathedral’s medieval appearance.
The oak pulpit also dates from 1760 and replaced one destroyed in the 1755 fire. Charpentier, a pupil of the Toul sculptor Lacour, made it. Its staircase rail depicts the Parable of the Sower, the Sermon on the Mount, and Isaiah’s prophecy of the ascent of peoples toward heaven.
Lacour made the eastern choir stalls in 1760. The bishop’s throne occupies the centre of the semicircle, with the canons’ seats on either side. Their decoration refers extensively to the Scriptures. The stalls were sheltered during the First World War and later restored.
Saint Saintin and the Holy Veil
The reliquary shrine of Saint Saintin preserves the relics of the bishop associated with Verdun’s evangelization. His body was brought from Meaux to Saint-Vanne Abbey in 1032. During the French Revolution, the relics were hidden in the tomb of Aymar-Chrétien-François de Nicolaï. In 1804, Bishop Antoine Eustache d’Osmond had them placed in a reliquary shrine.
The reliquary of the Holy Veil contains a relic taken from the Virgin’s Veil preserved at Chartres Cathedral. Bishop Raoul Harscouët of Chartres gave it to Verdun on 20 October 1933. Made in the same year by Henri Bouchard and the goldsmith Brunet, the bronze reliquary was gilded with mercury nitrate. It represents Notre-Dame de Verdun holding a glass tube containing the relic and enthroned above the cathedral as it appeared before the 1755 fire.
Manuscripts and stained glass
The tenth-century Fulda sacramentary remained in the cathedral treasury until the eighteenth century. It later passed to the Mannheim court library and then to Munich in 1803 or 1804. An eleventh-century sacramentary associated with the church of Verdun probably entered cathedral use during the twelfth century.
Jean-Jacques Grüber made the postwar stained-glass windows and panels to replace those destroyed by German bombardment. A western-transept window produced between 1927 and 1934 depicts the cathedral’s consecration by Pope Eugene III on 11 November 1147.
Organ and bells
Gallery organ
The gallery organ was begun in 1762 by Nicolas Dupont, an organ builder from Nancy, after the cathedral fire. Its Louis XV case has a main organ with six towers, 12 metres wide and 10 metres high, and a positive organ with four towers, 3.5 metres wide and 3 metres high. Installed in the south transept in 1766, the original instrument had 44 stops, four keyboards of 61 notes, and a pedalboard.
The organ survived the French Revolution through the intervention of the organist Spery. Jean-Baptiste Gavot slightly altered it in 1829, followed by Jean-Nicolas Jeanpierre in 1868. In 1898, Jacquot-Lavergne transformed it into a Romantic organ with three keyboards, 54 stops, electric wind supply, and a new swell division.
During the First World War, hurried dismantling damaged the mechanism and flattened the large pipes. After storage at the Carmelite convent of Domrémy-la-Pucelle, the organ returned to the cathedral in 1919, where exposure to the elements eventually made it unusable. In 1932, Jacquot and Sons received an order for a new instrument that retained the eighteenth-century case. Assembled and restored from 1934, it has 64 stops, four keyboards of 61 notes, a 32-note pedalboard, and 4,800 pipes. It was accepted on 1 February 1935 and inaugurated on 10 November 1935 by Marcel Dupré and the titular organist Pierre Camonin.
The organ was damaged again during the Second World War. Restoration approved in 1958 led to a new inauguration by Marcel Dupré on 11 November that year. Drought made it unusable in 1976, after which the Gonzalez firm installed a new console in 1986. Marie-Claire Alain inaugurated the restored organ on 19 March 1987, and an electronic combination system was added in 1999. The organ case was classified as a historic-monument object in 1980. The choir organ is a Jacquot-Lavergne Unit Major.
Bell peal
The two towers contain 19 bells cast between 1756 and 1955. Sixteen are swinging bells spanning exactly two octaves. The two largest, sounding G2 and A2, were cast in 1756 by the Lorraine founder Pierre Guillemin and were the only cathedral bells left in place during the French Revolution.
Fourteen further bells were cast between 1874 and 1899 by the Farnier-Bulteaux foundry at Mont-devant-Sassey. The D4 bell was damaged in 1945 and recast in 1955, while the C3 bell was repaired in 2010.
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