Basilica of Saint-Denis
Abbot Suger had the choir of the royal abbey church rebuilt in the 1140s. He wanted a space filled with “uninterrupted light”, and the builders combined pointed arches, rib vaults and large stained-glass windows into something new. This is where Gothic is commonly said to have been born.
Saint-Denis was a powerful abbey, built over the tomb of the first Bishop of Paris, and had long been the burial place of the French kings. Suger, abbot from 1122 and a close adviser to the king, wanted to renew the old Carolingian church. First a new west front with two towers and three portals was built, consecrated in 1140, and then the choir, consecrated in 1144 in the presence of Louis VII. Suger himself wrote about the work, and his texts show that he saw light and glitter as a path to God, inspired by writings then attributed to the abbey’s patron saint. The name of the master builder is unknown. By combining pointed arches, rib vaults and slender supports, the walls of the choir could be replaced by large glass windows.
The choir has a double ambulatory with a ring of shallow chapels. The chapels are not separated by walls but merge into a continuous ring, divided only by slender columns, and each chapel has two large windows. Light therefore falls evenly all around the altar area. Some of the stained glass from Suger’s time survives, including a Jesse window showing the genealogy of Christ, and Suger himself is depicted kneeling in one of the windows. The west front had early statue portals and one of the first rose windows. The upper choir and the nave were rebuilt from the 1230s in the elegant Rayonnant style, with walls consisting almost entirely of glass. The lower, Romanesque crypt remains beneath the choir.
Almost all the kings of France from the Middle Ages to the 18th century were buried here, and the church is filled with tomb monuments. During the Revolution in 1793 the tombs were broken open and the remains thrown into mass graves; the monuments were rescued to a museum in Paris and returned in the 19th century. The north-west tower was damaged and dismantled in the 1840s, and the church was later restored by Viollet-le-Duc. It has been a cathedral since 1966, and work to rebuild the north tower has begun. Suger’s choir became the starting point of Gothic, which spread first to the Île-de-France and then across Europe. The French choir plan with ambulatory and ring of chapels reached as far as Uppsala Cathedral, built on French models in the late 13th century.