Bourg-en-Bresse Cathedral: A Gothic and Renaissance Church in France
Site at a Glance
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- France
- Primary era
- Early Modern
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- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Duchy of Savoy, French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page19 sections
History
Bourg-en-Bresse Cathedral is a church in Bourg-en-Bresse, France, begun in 1505 in a period that combined a Gothic interior with Renaissance and Classical treatment on the exterior. It developed from a Marian sanctuary associated with the settlement around the castle of the lords of Bâgé and later became a collegiate church, a parish church, and a cocathedral shared with Saint John the Baptist at Belley.
The medieval Marian sanctuary
A sanctuary dedicated to the Virgin Mary stood at the site by the thirteenth century. A local tradition tells that a shepherd found an image of Mary in a willow near the Porte d’Espagne. After the image was taken to the parish church of Saint-Pierre at Brou, it was said to have returned to the place where it had been discovered. An oratory was then reportedly built, and a Black Madonna was carved from the felled willow.
A chapel served by priests is mentioned in 1258, when a bequest was made for its fabric. In 1343, Count Aymon of Savoy endowed the sanctuary after claiming that he had been cured through the Virgin’s intercession. The chapel’s reputation encouraged inhabitants to worship nearer to the settlement forming around the Bâgé castle rather than continue to travel to the more distant parish of Brou.
The foundation of Notre-Dame
The present church was begun on 15 March 1505. Jean de Loriol, a churchman from Bresse who had become bishop of Nice and held the commendatory abbacy of Ambronay, obtained a papal bull dated 10 March that year. It joined the vacant priory of Brou and the parish of Saint-Pierre to the ecclesiastical revenues of Notre-Dame, whose construction he had undertaken.
Marguerite of Austria secured the effective transfer of the parish from Saint-Pierre at Brou to Notre-Dame at Bourg. She was pursuing her mother-in-law Marguerite of Bourbon’s vow to establish the monastery at Brou, intended to receive the remains of Marguerite of Bourbon, Philibert of Savoy, and Marguerite of Austria. Pope Julius II confirmed the arrangement in a second bull dated 16 July 1506.
The choir was completed in 1507. In 1515, Louis de Gorrevod celebrated the first episcopal mass there in connection with the newly created Diocese of Bourg. Founded on 1 June 1515 at the initiative of the House of Savoy, the diocese was intended to remove Savoyard territories east of the Saône from the jurisdiction of Lyon, then a French city.
The short-lived diocese and collegiate church
The Diocese of Bourg was suppressed by Pope Leo X on 1 September 1516, restored on 13 November 1521, and finally suppressed by Pope Paul III on 4 January 1534. The death of Marguerite of Austria in 1530 removed an important source of support at the papal court. After the final suppression, Notre-Dame retained its chapter of canons and became Bourg’s collegiate church, meaning that its corporate religious life was directed by a chapter rather than by a resident bishop. It later served as the town’s parish church, particularly after the Saint-Pierre parish was suppressed.
Tower building and revolutionary damage
The construction of the present choir destabilized the earlier chapel, whose bells were in danger of collapsing. In 1534, a new bell tower was planned above the entrance portal to replace the chapel’s two earlier towers. Work stopped in 1550 at the bases of the massive pillars after the French invasion of 1536 and the threat that the church might be demolished to make way for a bastion.
Building resumed in 1660. Two stages were completed, and the contractor Bernard Lacroix later raised a third. The tower was finished in 1694. During the French Revolution, the canonical chapter was dispersed, and on the orders of Antoine-Louis Albitte, a representative of the revolutionary government in the Ain, the tower’s upper stage and dome were demolished. Its three bells were later sent to Pont-de-Vaux to be melted into cannon.
An order for the tower’s repair was issued on 31 October 1794, and a provisional dome was installed. Three bells recovered from the courtyard of the departmental administration were fitted in 1796, while the clock was restarted. The church remained a parish church after public worship was restored.
The twentieth-century tower and present status
Plans for reconstructing the tower drew on bequests made by Alfred Bon in 1846 and Amédée d’Escrivieux in 1868. The accumulated funds were judged sufficient in 1907, and the project was approved in 1908. Under the direction of Tony Ferret, the tower was restored and substantially rebuilt between 1911 and 1914 in a style noticeably different from its predecessor. The bells were removed during the work.
Notre-Dame was classified as a French historic monument on 21 December 1914. In 1992, it became the cocathedral of the Diocese of Belley-Ars, a status shared with Saint John the Baptist at Belley. The decree had been issued in Rome on 20 August 1990 and was implemented on 3 May 1992. The bishop and diocesan administration had been based at Bourg-en-Bresse since 1978. The church is owned by the city, and repairs and conservation affecting the roof, waterproofing, stained glass, clock, and gilded cross have been under way since 2024.
Remains
The cathedral combines a tall Gothic interior with an exterior articulated through Renaissance and Classical forms. Its eastern end is pentagonal, while the western front is dominated by a 70-metre bell tower. The building’s interior distinguishes the parish space of the nave from the area reserved for the clergy, with differences in window scale and the distribution of light reinforcing that division.
Exterior and bell tower
Eastern end and western facade
The pentagonal eastern termination has three bays filled with Flamboyant tracery, the elaborate flame-like patterning associated with late Gothic architecture. The windows lie between powerful angle buttresses, and the outer wall surfaces carry blind tracery. This concentrated vertical decoration contrasts with the plainer body of the church.
The western facade is vertically arranged but asymmetrical. Three round-arched portals open into the church and carry Renaissance ornament. The same decorative language continues in a shell-shaped niche on the first level of the tower, where a copy of a Virgin sculpted by Antoine Coysevox is placed.
Tower, clock, and bells
The two levels above the tower’s first stage date from the seventeenth century and follow the traditional sequence of Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian architectural orders. These are systems of classical column and entablature forms. The square fourth level, containing the clock, and the upper octagonal level belong to Tony Ferret’s reconstruction. The octagonal stage is capped by a lanterned cupola, a dome topped by a small open structure, and houses a carillon of 24 bells.
The tower’s belfry contains 23 bells. Six are electrified for swinging, while the other 17 are operated by mechanical hammers or sensors. The principal bourdon, Marie-Charlotte, weighs 3,953 kilograms of bronze. In 1910, the three largest bells were sent to the Paccard foundry at Annecy and returned on 2 December. Fourteen additional Paccard bells were installed during the reconstruction and linked to a carillon machine supplied through Paccard and subcontracted to the Dutch maker Eijbouts.
The machine has 60 rows of 243 positions, providing 14,580 potential strikes. It automatically plays melodies, including at the three Angelus times, and works with a manual keyboard spanning one and a half piano octaves. The complete bells-and-mechanism installation was formally received on 23 August 1913. Bells 7, 8, and 9 ceased swinging after the 1910 tower works but remain connected to the manual and mechanical carillons.
The clock faces were made by the Lyon firm Charvet. Beside the principal dial stand two figures, each nearly four metres high, sculpted by Alphonse Muscat. They have been interpreted as allegories of day and night or of the hour of birth and the hour of death. A moon and a radiant sun occupy the lower part of the clock, to the right and left of the dial respectively.
Interior and stained glass
Choir and nave
The choir is tall and airy, with large windows and closely spaced mullions occupying most of the wall surfaces. Its pentagonal apsidal bay has a very large pendant keystone, a keystone that hangs down from the vault. The nave has smaller high windows, creating more diffuse light and leaving a stronger sense of wall surface below the arcades.
The choir stalls have stood in the eastern part of the final nave bay and in the apse since 1768. They had previously occupied the penultimate bay, where they formed the canons’ choir with a rood screen, the screen that separated the clergy’s choir from the nave. Damaged during the Revolution, the stalls were restored in 1840.
Historic glazing
A 1526 window showing Saints Crispin and Crispinian survives from the cathedral’s early stained glass. The two saints were patrons of tanners and shoemakers, whose confraternity held an important place in Bourg at the time.
The three large apsidal windows originally held 17 compositions depicting episodes from the lives of the Virgin and Christ. Made after the choir was completed in 1507 and before the first episcopal mass in 1515, the glass was badly damaged when the bell tower was demolished in 1791. Around 1850, better-preserved pieces were set within arcades and decorative grisaille, monochrome painted glass used for shading and ornament, in the upper parts of the bays.
Nineteenth-century choir windows
In 1870, three replacement choir windows were commissioned from the Parisian glassmaker Eugène Oudinot, using figurative designs by Edmond Lechevallier-Chevignard. They were unveiled on 1 February 1874. Each bay is about 14 metres high and 2.5 metres wide, covering nearly 30 square metres. The windows combine glass coloured throughout its material with enamelled and painted glass, which receive coloured surface treatments.
Weathering and probably insufficient firing caused parts of the nineteenth-century decoration to disappear, especially the grisaille and the details that shaped the faces. Each window has an upper scene from the life of the Virgin and a lower zone of nine medallions containing sibyls, biblical figures such as Solomon, David, Isaiah, and Daniel, and further Marian scenes.
The left, central, and right windows are often associated with the Assumption, Coronation, and Dormition of the Virgin and with the Joyful, Glorious, and Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. That classification is disputed because the Assumption is not a Joyful Mystery and the Dormition is not a Sorrowful Mystery. Another interpretation connects the Assumption and Coronation with the Glorious Mysteries. A blue pane in the right-hand window bears the initials AEO, possibly referring to Achille Oudinot, Eugène’s brother. The pane’s date and insertion history remain uncertain.
Surviving fragments and later windows
Much of the early glass removed in 1870 was releaded and stored in the presbytery attics. Other elements passed to private collectors, the reserves of the Royal Monastery of Brou Museum, and the departmental archives of Bourg-en-Bresse. The archival material was reunited in 1994, and fragments were joined in December 2012 under the supervision of Jean-Jacques Fanjat.
The fragments preserve or identify scenes including the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, the Circumcision, the Betrayal of Judas, the Annunciation to the Shepherds, the Death of the Virgin, the departure of the Magi for Bethlehem, the Nativity, the Assumption, the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the Annunciation, the Wedding at Cana, Jesus among the Doctors of the Law, the Entry of Christ into Jerusalem, and the Visitation. Other pieces show unidentified women, a decorative panel top, faces, a castle tower, and a wall.
Several panels combine early pieces with nineteenth-century replacement glass. In the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple, the faces in the upper section are authentic, while blue and purple elements were replaced with brouillis glass. The panel of Jesus among the Doctors of the Law has a sketched figure of Jesus, repaired faces, three authentic heads, and replacement glass; Fanjat releaded and repaired it in 1987. Two further panels, also repaired and releaded that year, consist of later elements.
Three windows designed by Jacques Le Chevallier occupy the northern chapels of the baptismal font, Saint Vincent de Paul, and Notre-Dame of Lourdes. Three southern-chapel windows by André Auclair depict the life of Joan of Arc, the Lyon martyrs of 177, and the commemoration of the First World War. A Neo-Renaissance window by Eugène Stanislas, dated 1872, surmounts the Chapel of the Souls in Purgatory. Émile Hirsch restored some windows between about 1881 and 1884 at the request of the architect Charles Laisné.
Choir furniture and artworks
Stalls, pulpit, and altars
The oak choir stalls were carved around 1530 and are attributed to the Genevan sculptor Pierre Mochet. Each side has nine low stalls and 17 high stalls. Their decoration combines Flamboyant Gothic and Renaissance forms with religious scenes and episodes from daily life in Bresse.
The misericords, small projecting supports beneath folding choir seats, show fools and other figures of late medieval society. Side panels depict Old Testament figures, scenes from Bressan life, dogs, lions, fantastical animals, gnomes, and medieval monsters. Each high-stall back has a saint associated with the House of Savoy, the donors, or contemporary devotions.
Jean-Marie Fiot carved the pulpit in 1760. Its bowl depicts the four Evangelists, while Pentecost appears on the backboard. The work was classified in 1902. The collegiate church received a Louis XV high altar in 1768, and the later nineteenth-century high altar was made by the goldsmith Armand-Calliat after a design by Pierre-Marie Bossan. It includes Bressan enamels by Amédée Fornet, bas-reliefs, and gilded bronze angels by the Lyon sculptor Dufraine. Other altars are dedicated to the Holy Shroud, the Virgin, Saint Joan of Arc, and Saint Ignatius.
Triptych and paintings
The surviving outer shutters of a 1523 triptych show the Carrying of the Cross and the Entombment on one side and the Last Supper on the other. In the Last Supper, Christ is unusually placed at the end of the table.
The cathedral’s paintings include Anne Bricollet’s Lamentation of 1786, an unidentified seventeenth-century saint, The Calming of the Storm of 1859, The Sacred Heart Venerated by Angels from the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Raphael and Tobias from the nineteenth century, and The Apparition of the Christ Child to Saint Anthony of Padua from the nineteenth century.
In 1755, the confraternity of the Penitents of the Confalon of Notre-Dame commissioned five paintings from Jean-Antoine Sicard. The group comprises a 1756 Annunciation and eighteenth-century scenes of the Flight into Egypt, the Circumcision, the Visitation, and the Nativity. Sicard also painted a separate Last Supper in 1756.
Additional works include Bethlehem? by Glaisé, dated 1895; several paintings dated approximately 1734, including the Assumption of Our Lady, the Flight into Egypt, the Dormition of the Virgin, the Adoration of the Magi, the Adoration of the Shepherds, the Nativity, the Presentation in the Temple, the Annunciation, and the Marriage of the Virgin; a 1667 Assumption of the Virgin; a seventeenth-century Visitation; and a seventeenth-century Our Lady of the Angels, transferred from the former Notre-Dame cemetery chapel.
Organs and devotional sculpture
Claude-Ignace Callinet rebuilt the great organ in the nineteenth century. It then had 26 stops on two manuals and a pedalboard of 18 notes. The Lyon firm Beaucourt enlarged and restored it in 1861, placing the Romantic instrument in an expanded case with two lateral flat-fronted sections.
A violent storm on 11 July 1927 led to the organ’s reconstruction by Michel-Merklin and Kuhn of Lyon. That instrument remained until 1976, when Philippe Hartmann and Jean Deloye restored the case to Callinet’s configuration and added a dorsal positive. Delivered in 1981, the present organ has 42 stops on four manuals and a pedalboard with mechanical action. Jean Deloye’s firm overhauled it in 2006. A separate two-manual Merklin organ installed in the choir in the early twentieth century functioned until the 1980s and was dismantled by municipal services in the early 2000s.
An ensemble of statuettes representing Christ and the Twelve Apostles was made in 1826 by Jean-François Legendre-Héral. Anne Bricollet’s oil Pietà is signed and dated 1785, adding another work by the artist to the cathedral’s collection of religious images.
