Monastère Notre-Dame de la Daurade: A Benedictine Priory in Toulouse
Site at a Glance
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- 4.6
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- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Modern
- Civilizations
- County of Toulouse, French
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Monastery
On this page13 sections
History
Monastère Notre-Dame de la Daurade was a Benedictine priory in Toulouse, France, dedicated to Mary and belonging to the Diocese of Toulouse. A Christian place of worship already stood at the Daurade by the fifth century, and a monastic community was established there in the ninth century. The priory later became closely associated with the Basilica Notre-Dame de la Daurade, one of the city’s oldest Christian sites.
Foundation and Benedictine affiliation
In 1077, the house became the priory of Sainte-Marie-la-Daurade and was attached to the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Moissac, which belonged to the Cluniac network. The Cluniac order was a reforming network of Benedictine monasteries associated with the Abbey of Cluny. The Daurade already held considerable prestige: in 1071, monks from Sorèze Abbey gathered there to elect their abbot.
During the Middle Ages, the priory controlled the Daurade bridge and mills. These assets produced substantial revenue and helped make the house an important institution in central Toulouse. Before the priory gained specific privileges, its prior was appointed by the abbot of Moissac. The monks were forbidden to elect their own prior, with excommunication threatened if they did so.
Papal privileges and medieval influence
Papal protection gradually strengthened the priory’s position. In 1093, Pope Urban II granted William IV, Count of Toulouse, the right to establish a cemetery within the convent. The privilege included a plenary indulgence for the count and his descendants if they were buried there. In 1105, Pope Paschal II confirmed and extended the burial privilege to anyone who wished to use the cemetery, while placing the monastery’s possessions under protection.
Major building works began in the early twelfth century and continued through its end. They included a new church, cloister, and communal buildings. In 1230, Foulques, Bishop of Toulouse, laid the first stone of another new church. The priory’s property and internal government were further protected by papal intervention. On 29 May 1240, Pope Gregory IX granted the monks the right to elect their own prior and receive novices without outside interference, and placed the Daurade’s property under apostolic protection. On 5 April 1277, Pope John XXI prohibited lay and ecclesiastical authorities from taking the priory’s possessions because of an unresolved dispute.
The church also attracted privileges connected with worship. On 28 June 1254, Pope Innocent IV granted forty days of indulgence to visitors on Marian feast days and the anniversary of the church’s consecration. Pope Nicholas IV granted one hundred days for visiting the altar of Saint Michael, the archangel regarded in Christian belief as a protector and warrior against evil, on his feast day in 1289. In 1291, he granted a further indulgence of one year and forty days for visits to the sanctuary on several Marian feasts and Saint Michael’s day.
The cloister provided a setting for political and ecclesiastical affairs. In 1205, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, promised there not to alter the value of the local currency. In July 1237, the prior joined the ecclesiastical advisers who opposed excommunicating Toulouse’s viguier and consuls for allegedly failing to support the campaign against Cathar heresy. A viguier was a judicial or administrative official.
Later medieval and early modern changes
In April 1241, Sainte-Bibiane Abbey in Rome donated relics to the priory, reinforcing its devotional importance. The statutes of the University of Toulouse issued in 1314 allowed Benedictine monks of the Daurade who were university students to wear their monastic habits not only in their own house but also in thirty surrounding houses. Pierre VII de Rocosel, prior of the Daurade, took part in the Council of Constance, a major church council held from 1414 to 1418, and later became abbot of Aniane in 1423.
Fires in 1429 and 1464 weakened the establishment. In 1480, the appointment of its first commendatory abbot further harmed the community by diverting the priory’s revenues away from the monks. A commendatory abbot or prior held an institution’s revenues without necessarily living with or governing its religious community. A visitation by the Bishop of Montauban in 1506 recorded declining observance of Cluniac discipline.
Unrest continued during the sixteenth century, when several monks influenced by the Calvinist Reformation left the monastery. Around the middle of the century, a female statue in the church became confused with the supposed tomb of Clémence Isaure. Toulouse’s capitouls and inhabitants proposed a funerary monument to her as the legendary restorer of the Floral Games, a literary competition associated with Toulouse. Clémence Isaure’s historical existence remains disputed.
Maurist reform and destruction of the old church
In 1627, the Maurist Benedictines took possession of the priory. The Congregation of Saint-Maur was a seventeenth-century Benedictine reform movement known for strict observance and scholarly work. Dom Odon Lamothe was among the first Maurist monks installed, on 1 April 1627. He arranged for the church’s early Christian mosaics to be cleaned and described, leaving a Latin chronicle dated 1633 that provides an important record of the building and its decoration.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, the church was demolished to make way for Neoclassical buildings. The former early Christian church was destroyed in 1761. The demolition ended the physical survival of one of the Daurade’s oldest Christian structures, although columns, sculpture, and fragments of mosaic were later preserved in different collections.
Revolutionary transformation and later institutions
The French Revolution ended the monastic institution. In 1790, religious congregations were suppressed, the priory buildings became national property, and the church became a parish church. In 1791, the monastic buildings were sold to François-Bernard Boyer-Fonfrède, an industrialist from Bordeaux. He established a private residence and a major textile and printed-fabric manufactory in the former priory.
The cloister was demolished in 1811. In March 1812, Boyer-Fonfrède sold the estate to the state, which installed a tobacco manufactory there. After a fire in 1816, the manufactory moved in 1823 to a new site built in 1821 along the Allée de Brienne.
An ordinance of Louis XVIII dated 26 June 1823 proposed installing the School of Arts and Trades of Châlons-en-Champagne in the former priory. Logistical difficulties and protests, including those by François de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt and the mayor of Châlons-en-Champagne, led to the plan’s cancellation by an ordinance of Charles X on 6 July 1825. The buildings were refurbished in 1827 and continued to provide storage for the tobacco manufactory until the beginning of the 1890s.
On 23 May 1893, the state transferred the complex to the city for the School of Fine Arts of Toulouse. Its installation led to the construction of a new stone building on the Quai de la Daurade, which connected the wings of the former monastery. Pierre Esquié designed its eclectic stone façade in 1895. The surviving complex therefore incorporates traces of monastic, industrial, and educational use.
The basilica and associated historic elements received listed-monument protection in 1963. The protected group included the church, monumental colonnade, façade on Rue de la Daurade, and covered passage on Rue Peyrolières. The basilica’s presbytery façade and roof were listed in 1994, while the priory’s latrines, including the entire tower, drainage outlets, conduits, pit, and well, were listed in 1995.
Remains
Early Christian church
The early Christian church dated from the fourth or fifth century. Early Christian refers to late antique Christianity, especially the centuries before and around its formal establishment within the Roman Empire. The church’s surviving elements are dispersed. Three columns, representing each of the three identified types, are exhibited at the Musée Saint-Raymond in Toulouse. Two more stand in the courtyard at 4 Rue Joutx-Aigues, while another is in the Garonne near Muret. Other columns are held at the villa known as the Roseland Abbey in Nice, the Louvre-Lens, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
The three identified column types include a composite capital with deeply twisted fluting, an Ionic capital decorated with vine scrolls, and a Corinthian capital with shallow twisted fluting. A capital is the decorated upper part of a column. A fragment of the church’s gilded wall mosaic is held in the collections of the Musée Calvet in Avignon, and a model reconstructs the former building.
Medieval complex and later buildings
Monastic buildings
The medieval complex consisted of a church, cloister, and communal buildings. The cloister was demolished in 1811, but a wall of the former priory survives at 1 Rue du Tabac. The later complex also retains the physical remains of the priory latrines. These include the entire tower, drainage outlets, conduits, a pit, and a well.
Quai de la Daurade building
The former monastery was altered after the Revolution for industrial and institutional uses. A new ashlar-stone building on the Quai de la Daurade connected the old monastic wings. Its façade, designed by Pierre Esquié in 1895, is in an eclectic style and belongs to the phase when the complex was adapted for the School of Fine Arts of Toulouse.
Sculptural remains
A column statue and two capitals from the Daurade priory are visible at the Musée des Augustins. Sculptural works from the former monastery include biblical scenes such as the Story of Job, the toilette of the prince, King David tuning his harp, Jesus in the Garden of Olives, the Last Supper, the Descent from the Cross and Entombment, the Descent of Christ into Limbo, the Death of Saint John the Baptist, the Holy Women at the Tomb, and the Washing of the Feet.
Other sculptures depict mythological and secular subjects. Their themes include a bear hunt, men and animals fighting among foliage scrolls, musical animals, and a sculptor carving a capital. The group also includes Saint Anne playing the harp and King David with his musicians.
Basilica and protected elements
The surviving basilica complex includes the church, monumental colonnade, façade on Rue de la Daurade, and covered passage on Rue Peyrolières. The presbytery’s façade and roof also remain part of the protected historic fabric. Together with the dispersed columns, mosaic fragment, sculpture, surviving priory wall, and latrine tower, these elements preserve evidence of the Daurade’s early Christian, medieval, and post-monastic history.
