Viviers Cathedral: The Episcopal Church of the Diocese of Viviers
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- French, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Cathedral
On this page10 sections
History
Viviers Cathedral is the Roman Catholic cathedral of Viviers in France and has served as the episcopal church of the Diocese of Viviers since the fourth century. Dedicated to Saint Vincent, a fourth-century Christian martyr and deacon from Huesca in Spain, the present building incorporates an eleventh-century structure and combines a Romanesque nave with a Flamboyant Gothic choir.
From Alba to Viviers
The episcopal seat was transferred from Alba, the capital of the Helvii, a Celtic people whose territory lay in what is now southern France, to Viviers probably between 474 and 475 and 487. Bishop Promotus carried out the move, although its exact date and reason remain unknown. Changing political and economic conditions may have contributed. A nineteenth-century tale involving an assassinated bishop, a fleeing population, and an intermediate transfer to Mélas is not accepted as a reliable account.
Promotus was followed by Bishop Lucianus and then by Venance, who belonged to the family of the Burgundian kings. Venance attended the Councils of Épaone in 517 and Clermont in 535. He is associated with the restoration of the city walls, the embellishment of its churches, and the repair of the cathedral, and probably died in 544.
Medieval reconstruction
The cathedral may have been damaged or ruined during a Saracen incursion in 736 and was later rebuilt. Its position may also have shifted south after that event. When Bishop Léodegaire, also known as Léger, was elected in 1096, he found the cathedral in ruins and began a new reconstruction. Pope Callixtus II consecrated the building on 27 February 1119, although the work was still unfinished.
The nave belongs to the second quarter of the twelfth century, a period when three-aisled churches were spreading through the Rhône valley. The cathedral’s apse originally had square radiating chapels, an unusual arrangement in the region that may have been influenced by the abbey church of Tournus. These chapels were remodelled in the Gothic manner during the fifteenth century.
Bishop Claude de Tournon directed a major transformation of the eastern part of the church. Between 1516 and 1521, the cathedral acquired its Flamboyant Gothic choir, with an elaborate vault and an extensive sculptural programme continuing across the eastern end of the building. The choir was made wider and more richly decorated than the nave.
Wars, rebuilding, and later alterations
The French Wars of Religion, a series of civil and religious conflicts in sixteenth-century France, devastated the cathedral in 1562 and 1567. François Monnier, the chapter’s precentor, began the restoration. The nave walls were rebuilt and covered with a wooden roof. The cathedral chapter, the body of clergy responsible for assisting the bishop and administering cathedral affairs, returned to the choir in 1606. In 1627, the Poitiers family chapel was converted into a sacristy.
During the early seventeenth century, an ambulatory, a passage around the choir or apse, was built around the apse. The work altered the radiating chapels, which were shortened, removed, or lengthened. The chapter also commissioned a pulpit and an altarpiece for the high altar. Eighteenth-century additions included the marble high altar, while the stone vaulting was rebuilt between 1757 and 1759 by the Avignon architect Jean-Baptiste Franque.
Modern restoration and continuing use
The French Revolution appears to have caused less damage to the monument than the deterioration that followed the union of the Diocese of Viviers with the Diocese of Mende between 1801 and 1823. Restoration campaigns were undertaken during the 1820s and 1830s and again in the 1860s. The choir roof was renewed between 1864 and 1866, restoring the sculpture that crowned the eastern end. Fragile ornament was repaired again in the early twentieth century and in 1983.
Viviers Cathedral became a French historic monument on 9 August 1906. During the inventory required by the law separating church and state, parishioners occupied the building and prevented entry on 19 February. After troops were requisitioned and the doors forced open, the inventory took place on 23 February. The cathedral was consecrated again on 27 February 1946.
Archaeological excavations in 1978 and 1983 on the Plaine square north of the cathedral uncovered Early Christian structures and the remains of three buildings probably belonging to the early medieval cathedral group. The foundations of the thirteenth-century canons’ cloister were also found. In 2019, a diocesan Chrism Mass, a liturgy at which holy oils are blessed and clergy traditionally renew their commitments, commemorated the nine-hundredth anniversary of the cathedral’s consecration. An earthquake on 11 November that year weakened the building. After masonry repairs, it reopened for worship in 2020, with Christmas Midnight Mass celebrated there on 24 December.
The cathedral’s later ecclesiastical organization included an inter-parish grouping formed in 1994 by the parishes of Viviers, Saint-Thomé, and Valvignères. In 2003, these groupings became part of the Charles de Foucauld Viviers–Le Teil parish. From 2013, a rector, a cleric responsible for a church’s administration and pastoral organization, oversaw diocesan celebrations and gatherings.
Remains
Viviers Cathedral presents a compact plan without a transept. Its small, relatively plain Romanesque nave contrasts with the broader and more ornate Flamboyant Gothic choir. The building also incorporates the Saint Michael Tower, an eleventh-century defensive element, while the cathedral’s exterior has changed little since the end of the Middle Ages. Nineteenth-century work restored the chapel colonnettes and capitals.
Nave, apse, and choir
The nave has three bays and belongs to the second quarter of the twelfth century. At the eastern end, the original apse was accompanied by square radiating chapels, later altered in the fifteenth century. The ambulatory added around the apse in the early seventeenth century required changes to these chapels. The choir built under Claude de Tournon between 1516 and 1521 is wider than the nave and has a richly designed vault. Its sculptural decoration extends inside and outside the chevet, the eastern end of the church containing the choir and apse.
Saint Michael Tower
The Saint Michael Tower, also called the campanile, belongs to the eleventh-century phase of the cathedral. It is joined to the nave by a porch that formerly provided entry to the canonical quarter. Its square base has Lombard bands, vertical strips and blind-arcade ornament associated with Romanesque walls. The base once contained a baptistery, a place used for Christian baptism, which is now walled up. A chapel dedicated to the archangel Michael occupies the level above and contains finely worked sculpture. A higher level begun in the twelfth century was intended as the beginning of an unfinished belfry. An octagonal stage added in the fourteenth century brought the tower to a height of 40 metres.
Four swinging bells hang in the tower. All were cast in Lyon by Gédéon Morel in 1847. Marie-Jeannette weighs 2,439 kilograms and sounds B2; Théodorine-Joséphine weighs 860 kilograms and sounds E3; Arsène-Élisabeth weighs 446 kilograms and sounds G3; and Antoinette-Sophie weighs 238 kilograms and sounds C4.
Choir furnishings and artworks
The choir contains two rows of twenty-four seventeenth-century stalls, Gobelins tapestries, and an eighteenth-century Baroque high altar made from polychrome marble mosaic. The altar was produced in 1727 by Genoese marble workers apparently based in Marseille and consecrated in 1728. Its white marble is inlaid with coloured marble, including detailed representations of birds. The tabernacle of the former high altar holds the consecrated Eucharistic bread. The nineteenth-century Empire-style cathedra, the bishop’s official seat, remains in the choir.
A wooden Christ on the cross, made in 1599 or 1609 by Antoine Rousset of Romans-sur-Isère, dominates the assembly. Other works include a seventeenth-century Virgin and Child, an Ecce Homo, and gilded wooden statues of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Vincent from the cathedral’s Saint John chapel. The cathedral also contains Bishop Bonnet’s 1928 marble funerary monument by Jean Magrou, the tomb of the bishops of Viviers with a slab bearing their coats of arms, and portraits of saints and blessed people from Ardèche signed by Sister Françoise Ménétrier.
Other furnishings include a main-portal entrance vestibule from the first half of the nineteenth century and a white limestone pulpit installed in 1944. Paintings include Reynaud Levieux’s Return from Egypt, Nicolas Mignard’s Annunciation of 1642, Jean-Baptiste de Hault’s Rosary of 1627, and a seventeenth-century Saint Nicholas by an anonymous French painter. Six eighteenth-century scenes from the New Testament are associated with the cathedral, including the Miraculous Catch of Fish, the Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple, the Baptism of Christ, the Washing of the Feet, and the Last Supper. The Last Supper was stolen on 14 December 1974 and has not been located.
The choir windows bear the coats of arms of Viviers bishops and the cathedral chapter. A new ambo, the stand from which Scripture is proclaimed, and an altar were installed in 2005. Their worked copper supports were made by Jean Huard, while Jean-Marie Dumolard designed the ambo bookrest and the altar’s glass table. In 2017 and 2018, part of the former communion table and several supporting platforms were removed to simplify the choir and improve access.
Organs
Two organs serve the cathedral. The grand organ above the main portal was made by John Abbey in 1841. It has thirty-one stops, three manuals, a pedalboard, and electric action. The choir organ dates from 1869 and bears the name of the Merklin-Schutze firm.
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