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.

A building raised in stone and light

The fire came in 1210. What it destroyed was already an old church on an old site, a place of bishops since late antiquity; what replaced it was begun the following year, in 1211, under Archbishop Aubri de Humbert, and the first stone is recorded as laid on the sixth of May. The man who set the plan was Jean d’Orbais, the first of four master masons whose names the building has kept — after him Jean le Loup, then Gaucher de Reims, then Bernard de Soissons — working in succession across roughly eighty years, the structural campaign running to about 1275 and the west front carried on into the next century. The design looked to Chartres, begun some fifteen years earlier, and pushed its logic further: the wall thinned almost to absence, the load carried down through piers and flying buttresses, the remaining surface given over to glass.

Reims is where one of the defining devices of the Gothic took mature form — bar tracery, in which thin stone mullions are cut and joined to frame the window rather than a solid wall pierced through. The technique let the windows grow, divide, and carry the great rose at the west, and it spread from here across the cathedrals of the age — to Amiens, raised from 1220 and taller still, and to Bourges, with its own answer to the problem of carrying a wall of light. Reims belongs to that generation of great French churches of the Middle Ages, each working out a variant of the same system, and stands apart from the older royal abbey of Saint-Denis north of Paris — where the kings were buried, as at Reims they were made — and from the imperial octagon of Aachen, the coronation seat of the German kings, a different kind of building for a parallel kind of rite. The nave rises to roughly thirty-eight meters at the crown of the vault, a height held steady and unbroken down the long interior so that the eye is drawn forward to the apse and upward at once. The exterior, when finished, carried on the order of two thousand three hundred carved stone figures — kings, prophets, angels, the dead rising, a whole population of stone arranged across portals and towers and the upper galleries. The west front in particular is among the most sculpturally crowded surfaces in medieval Europe, its three deep portals framing tier upon tier of figures beneath the rose, and it is there, on the north portal, that the Smiling Angel stands.

On the floor of the nave there was once a labyrinth, an inlaid maze laid out in dark and light stone, with images of the four master masons set in its corners and inscriptions naming each man, the years he served, and the parts of the building he raised — the medieval mason’s signature, claiming the work as his own before God. The labyrinth was opened in 1286, and was destroyed in 1779 by the cathedral’s own canons, who had wearied of children running its path during services; the record of who built Reims survives now mainly through later copies of those lost inscriptions. Much later, in the apse, came glass of a different century: nine windows by Marc Chagall were commissioned in 1968 and set in place in 1974, their deep blues keyed deliberately to the medieval color the building had lost, so that the oldest and newest glass in the church speak across seven hundred years.

Clovis, the dove, and the oil from heaven

The cathedral’s other role reaches back past any of its stones, to a story the French monarchy made the foundation of its own legitimacy. By tradition Clovis, king of the Franks, was baptized at Reims around the year 496 by Bishop Remigius — Saint Remi — turning from the old gods to the Nicene faith and carrying his warriors with him. To that baptism a later age attached a miracle: that as the bishop reached for the holy oil and found none, a dove — the bird that in Christian art carries the Holy Spirit — descended from heaven bearing a small vial of chrism, the consecrated oil of anointing, so that the rite could go forward. That vial — the Holy Ampulla, the Sainte Ampoule — was kept thereafter at Reims, its oil held to be inexhaustible, refilled by heaven and never by men.

The documentary record draws the line more sharply than the legend does. The dove and the descending oil enter the sources in the ninth century, in the writings of Archbishop Hincmar of Reims, who set down the baptism of Clovis in terms that gave his own see a relic no other church in the kingdom could match; the Ampulla’s first recorded use to anoint a king comes later still, at the coronation of Louis VII in 1131, and from then it served the rite until the last king to use it. What the legend supplied was not the oil but the argument — that the kings of France were anointed, like Saul and David in scripture, by a chrism that came from above, and so were made by God and not merely by the men who placed the crown.

This was the doctrine the rite was built to carry, and it had a hard practical edge. If the anointing was the act that made a king, and if the oil that made the anointing valid rested at Reims, then a French king had to come to Reims to be made. The placing of the crown, the handing of scepter and rod, the oath, the enthronement — these were the visible apparatus of the consecration, the regalia themselves blessed objects in the manner of a sacramental; but the decisive moment was the touch of the chrism to the king’s body, the sacrament of anointing that set him apart as priests are set apart in holy orders. A king anointed elsewhere, or not anointed at all, carried a shadow over his title.

The line of crowned kings

From the coronation of Louis VIII in 1223 to that of Charles X in 1825, the kings of France were made at Reims in an almost unbroken succession — of all the monarchs across that long span, only a handful were crowned anywhere else or not crowned at all. The ceremony, the sacre, grew over the centuries into one of the most elaborate liturgies in Christendom, a daylong drama of oath and anointing, investiture and Mass, in which the archbishop of Reims acted as the king’s consecrator and the great peers of the realm held the crown above his head. It bound the throne to the altar so tightly that the words for the rite — the sacre, the consecration — named a making, not a mere recognition.

The most charged of these crownings came in the middle of a war. By 1429 the Hundred Years’ War had gone against the French crown; the disinherited dauphin, Charles, held only the lands south of the Loire and was mocked by his enemies as the King of Bourges, a man with a claim but no consecration. Reims itself lay in territory loyal to the English-Burgundian side. It was Joan of Arc, after breaking the siege of Orleans, who pressed the campaign north precisely so that the dauphin could reach Reims and be anointed; the city opened its gates, and on the seventeenth of July 1429 Charles VII was crowned in the cathedral with Joan standing near the altar, her banner beside her. The anointing did exactly what the doctrine promised it could: it converted a contested claimant into the consecrated king, and the act sent its charge through the rest of the war. The last of the line, Charles X, was crowned at Reims in 1825 in a deliberate revival of the full medieval rite — a restoration monarchy reaching back across the Revolution for the oil of legitimacy, in a France that would unseat him within five years.

The king as sacred person

Historians describe the sacred kingship of France as a political theology — a structure of belief raised and tended for the throne’s purposes, professed and acted upon by kings and subjects alike for as long as the throne stood. Its boldest claim went beyond legitimacy to power. The anointed king, set apart by the chrism, was held to have become a sacred person whose body carried something of the holy; and the most concrete form this took was the royal touch, the belief that the king could heal the scrofula — the disfiguring tubercular swellings of the neck called the king’s evil — by laying his hands on the sick. Both the French and the English crowns practiced the rite for centuries, the king passing down lines of the afflicted and touching each in turn. The historian Marc Bloch made this the subject of a landmark study, Les Rois thaumaturges (1924) — translated as The Royal Touch — in which he set aside the question of whether the touch worked and asked instead why so many believed it did, and what the belief did to the bond between a ruler and the ruled. The healing king of France was anointed with the same oil as the priest at the altar; the distinction between the consecrated priest and the consecrated sovereign, sharp in canon law, blurred in the popular imagination that came to a touched king for a cure.

The whole apparatus depended on a single fragile object. The Holy Ampulla survived in its reliquary at Reims through the whole span of the monarchy, until 1793, when the Convention sent a delegate, Philippe Rühl, to smash it publicly on the pedestal of a statue of Louis XV — a destruction meant to break the relic and the doctrine together. Fragments and traces of the oil were rescued by the faithful, gathered again under the restored Bourbons, and a fragment was set in a new vessel for the coronation of Charles X in 1825, the last sacre Reims would ever hold.

Scholarship and the record of the rite

The building and the rite have each drawn deep modern study. The architectural history of Reims rests on the recovery of its lost labyrinth inscriptions and on the close analysis of its fabric, which establishes the unusual coherence of a cathedral raised quickly by an identifiable succession of masters; the Britannica account and the broader survey literature treat it as the canonical example of the mature High Gothic, the point at which the system worked out at Chartres reached its clearest statement. The political theology of the monarchy has its own classic in Marc Bloch’s Les Rois thaumaturges, which opened the study of sacred kingship as a problem in the history of belief rather than of medicine or law, and which still anchors the field. The relic itself, and the Hincmar legend that gave it its authority, are documented in the editions and studies of the ninth-century Reims sources and in the long record of the coronation ordines — the prescriptive texts that governed each step of the sacre and that scholars have used to trace how the rite was elaborated, contested, and revised across six hundred years. The site, with the neighboring former Abbey of Saint-Remi — where Saint Remi is buried — and the archiepiscopal Palace of Tau where the kings dressed and feasted, was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 1991.

Ruin and rebuilding

On the nineteenth of September 1914, in the opening weeks of the First World War, German artillery turned on the cathedral. Some two dozen shells struck it; one set fire to the scaffolding that stood over works in progress, and the blaze took hold in the roof. The four hundred tonnes of lead sheeting that covered the timbers melted and ran molten through the mouths of the gargoyles, and the interior was gutted. The Smiling Angel was thrown down by a falling, burning beam and lost its head. The image of the wrecked cathedral — and of that decapitated, still-smiling angel — ran through the press of the Allied nations as a symbol of a shared heritage shelled to ruin, and the bombardment of Reims became one of the war’s enduring emblems of cultural destruction.

The rebuilding took decades. The architect Henri Deneux led the restoration, devising a fireproof framework of reinforced concrete to carry the new roof where the medieval oak forest had burned; the American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr. gave a million dollars toward the work at Reims and other French monuments; and the cathedral was reopened to the public in 1938, on the eve of another war. The angel’s head was recovered, recast from a surviving mold and salvaged fragments, and set back on its shoulders in 1926, where it has gone on smiling ever since.

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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