Reims Cathedral

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Reims Cathedral — Notre-Dame de Reims, in the Champagne region of northeastern France — is one of the great achievements of High Gothic architecture and the church in which nearly every king of France was crowned. The present building was begun in 1211, after fire destroyed the cathedral that stood before it, and rose through the thirteenth century into the soaring, light-filled form that survives. Its west front, dense with sculpture, holds the figure known as the Smiling Angel — a serene, faintly grinning stone face that became, after the cathedral was shelled in the First World War, an emblem of the city itself.

The coronation role reaches back past the building to a founding story. By tradition Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptized at Reims around 496 by Bishop Remigius, and a dove was said to have brought down a vial of chrism — the Holy Ampulla — for the rite. Later French monarchy treated that oil as proof that its kings were anointed, like the kings of scripture, by heaven rather than by men. The anointing, not the placing of the crown, was held to be the act that made a king; and because the chrism rested at Reims, it was at Reims that the ceremony had to be performed. From the coronation of Louis VIII in 1223 to that of Charles X in 1825, the kings of France were made here. The most famous of these crownings is that of Charles VII in 1429, brought to the cathedral by Joan of Arc in the middle of a war the act was meant to settle.

What scholarship establishes is a building of unusual coherence, raised quickly by an identifiable succession of master masons, and a coronation liturgy elaborated over centuries into a long sacramental drama of oath, anointing, investiture, and Mass. What the monarchy maintained — and what gave the place its charge — was the further claim that the rite conferred something real: that the anointed king became a sacred person, set apart, in some readings able to heal by touch. Historians treat the sacred kingship of France as a political theology, a structure of belief built and tended for the throne’s purposes; and one that was widely professed and acted upon, by kings and subjects alike, for as long as the throne stood.

The cathedral was gravely damaged by German bombardment in 1914, its timbers burned and its sculpture scarred, and was rebuilt over the following decades. It stands today as a monument and a working church, and as the stone record of an idea France held for thirteen hundred years: that legitimate rule descended, through oil and ceremony, from above.

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