Rouen The Cathedral and the Old Market Square

Saint Joan of Arc, who had freed Orléans on May 8, 1429, and seen Charles VII crowned at Reims on July 17, 1429, was captured on May 23, 1430, during a sortie from Compiègne. The Burgundians handed her over to the English for 10,000 livres tournois, and in December 1430 she was brought to Rouen, which had been under English rule since 1419.

She was held in the castle that Philip Augustus had built from 1204 to 1210 on the Bouvreuil hill, outside the medieval town, and occupied by the English under the Duke of Bedford. Her cell was in one of its towers, later called the Tour de la Pucelle, whose remains can still be seen at 102 rue Jeanne-d’Arc. Although a church court had charged her with heresy, she was kept in a secular prison and guarded by English jailers.

The court was led by Pierre Cauchon, bishop of Beauvais and later bishop of Lisieux, with Jean Le Maistre, the vice-inquisitor. Pope Benedict XVI, in his general audience of January 26, 2011, called the trial “a distressing page in the history of holiness.” The proceedings opened on January 9, 1431, and Joan first appeared before her judges on February 21. She was questioned in the castle, often in her cell, and an indictment of 70 articles was reduced to a summary of 12 for the theologians who condemned her.

On May 9, 1431, she was brought to the lower room of the castle keep and threatened with torture, and the judges gave up the idea. On May 24, on a scaffold in the cemetery of the abbey of Saint-Ouen, before the portal called the Marmousets, she was pressed into making an abjuration, of which only part was read to her. Back in prison she put on men’s clothing again, and on May 28 Cauchon opened proceedings against her as a relapsed heretic.

On May 30, 1431, she was burned alive on the Old Market Square, before the English authorities, the churchmen and a large crowd. Benedict XVI described her death in these words: “Thus she died, her gaze fixed upon the Crucified Jesus and crying out several times the Name of Jesus.” So that no relics would remain, the executioner threw her ashes and her heart into the Seine, near the present entrance to the Pont Boieldieu, where a plaque marks the place.

In 1455 her mother, Isabelle Romée, obtained the pope’s leave to ask for a review of the trial, which Charles VII also wanted. The new court, presided over by Jean Juvénal des Ursins, archbishop of Reims, sat in the archbishop’s palace in Rouen and heard witnesses who had known Joan from her childhood in Domrémy to her campaigns. On July 7, 1456, it gave a solemn sentence that, in Benedict XVI’s words, “declared the condemnation null and void.” The sentence was pronounced in the hall of the officialité, the archbishop’s court, where she had been condemned, and was proclaimed in the cemetery of Saint-Ouen, where she had abjured. The judges also ordered the city to raise a cross at the place of her death.

Pope Pius X beatified Joan on April 18, 1909, and Pope Benedict XV canonized her on May 16, 1920. Two years later she was declared a patroness of France. Her feast is on May 30.

The place du Vieux-Marché was the town’s market square in the Middle Ages. A tall cross now stands at the place where Joan was burned. Excavations have uncovered the remains of the church of Saint-Sauveur, which stood on the square in 1431 and was sold for demolition in 1793.

The church of Saint Joan of Arc, designed by Louis Arretche, was completed in 1979 together with a commemorative gallery on the square. It was built as a national tribute to Joan and to replace the church of Saint-Vincent, destroyed in 1944. Its concrete frame and wooden nave carry a great slate roof, and its walls hold the Renaissance windows of Saint-Vincent, made in the sixteenth century by the Le Prince workshop of Beauvais and by glass painters close to the Flemish artist Arnoult of Nijmegen. They had been taken down before the war, and so they survived the loss of their first church.

The Fêtes Jeanne d’Arc are held on the last weekend of May, the dates closest to May 30, with official ceremonies, a speech on the Old Market Square and flowers thrown into the Seine.

The cathedral of Notre-Dame was rebuilt in the Gothic style from the twelfth to the sixteenth century. A fire in 1200 destroyed most of the earlier church, except the Saint-Romain tower, the nave arcades and one portal. The Tour de Beurre, the Butter Tower, came last; it was paid for by people of Rouen who bought the right to eat butter in Lent. Claude Monet painted the west front about thirty times in 1892 and 1893, and one of the canvases hangs in the city’s Musée des Beaux-Arts.

The cast-iron spire, designed by Jean-Antoine Alavoine after lightning destroyed the old spire in 1822, was begun in 1825 and completed in 1876. At about 495 feet it is the tallest in France. Its restoration began with studies in 2009. An accidental fire broke out on the work platform on July 11, 2024, without damaging the metal structure, and the scaffolding is due to stay in place until the work ends, planned for 2028.

Beside the choir, a recumbent effigy marks the tomb of the heart of Richard the Lionheart, who died in 1199; the remains found in two lead urns in 1838 are now kept by the Musée des Antiquités. The tomb of Cardinal Georges d’Amboise is in the Lady chapel, and a chapel dedicated to Joan of Arc received a statue by Saupique and two windows after the Second World War.

In the archbishop’s palace behind the cathedral, the sentence that condemned Joan in 1431 and the sentence that cleared her in 1456 were both pronounced in the hall of the officialité. Only its north gable survives, and it now forms the entrance to the Historial Jeanne d’Arc, opened in 2015 at 7 rue Saint-Romain. The visit, set during the retrial of 1456, takes about two hours, with audio guides in English.

The Tour Jeanne d’Arc is the keep, the Grosse Tour, of Philip Augustus’s castle, and Joan was held in another tower, the Tour de la Pucelle, demolished in 1809. Her link with the keep is the session of May 9, 1431, when she was brought to its lower room and threatened with torture.

The castle was dismantled from 1591, on the orders of Henri IV, and the keep is its only surviving part. It was listed as a historic monument in 1840 and restored in the second half of the nineteenth century, when it received its pointed roof. About 100 feet high, with walls some 13 feet thick, it stands on the rue du Bouvreuil between the train station and the Musée des Beaux-Arts. Managed by the Métropole since 2016 and now presented as the Donjon de Rouen, it offers guided and self-guided visits and an escape game; its website gives the times.

The abbey church of Saint-Ouen takes its name from Audoin, or Ouen, bishop of Rouen, who died in 684 and was buried in the church of Saint-Pierre he had built, which later took his name. The present church was begun in 1318 for the Benedictines, interrupted by the Hundred Years’ War and finished in the Flamboyant style. It is about 449 feet long, its vaults rise about 108 feet, and it has a large collection of stained glass of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Its organ, built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1890, survives unaltered. The town hall occupies the former abbey buildings.

Saint-Maclou was built from 1437 to 1521 to plans by Pierre Robin, to replace an earlier church that years of neglect had left in ruin. Its Flamboyant west front opens through a five-sided porch onto three portals with carved Renaissance wooden doors, and the organ case of 1520 has columns attributed to Jean Goujon. Its fifteenth-century windows survived the war because they were taken down in 1939. Entry is free, but the church opens only a few days a week.

Nearby, the Aître Saint-Maclou is a cemetery opened during the Black Death of the fourteenth century and rebuilt in the first half of the sixteenth century with three galleries, above which the bones of the dead were stacked. A dance of death is carved on its stone columns, and skulls, skeletons and gravediggers’ tools on its wooden beams. After the School of Fine Arts left in 2014 it was restored, and it now houses a gallery of the arts of fire, craft workshops and a café.

Rouen is the last stage of Via Ioannae and a stage of Via Cathedralis. It is about an hour and a quarter by train from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris.

Further reading: Reims: A Pilgrim’s Guide to the Cathedral of the Coronations; Joan of Arc in France: The Places of Her Life.

• The church of Saint Joan of ArcOn the Old Market Square, beside the place of the stake.
• The cathedral of Notre-DameMonet’s west front, and the tomb of the heart of Richard the Lionheart.
• The Historial Jeanne d’ArcIn the archbishop’s palace.

The cathedral and the church of Saint Joan of Arc are open all year. The city holds its feasts of Joan of Arc in May, on dates that change each year (May 14 to 16 in 2026); the religious day includes a Mass at the church of Saint Joan of Arc, a procession to the cathedral, and flowers thrown into the Seine from a bridge. May 30 is the anniversary of her death.

The restoration of the cathedral’s spire continues; the cathedral stays open.

Mass is celebrated in the cathedral at 10 a.m. from Tuesday to Saturday and twice on Sunday morning. The church of Saint Joan of Arc publishes no reliable schedule, so ask the parish. Nothing is offered in English.

The old center is flat. The cathedral has a step-free entrance through the Portail des Maçons, on the rue du Change. The Historial Jeanne d’Arc is accessible except for its watchtower, which has stairs only, and wheelchairs can be borrowed there.

• May 30, in FranceFeast of Saint Joan of Arc

• Saint Joan of ArcThe Maid of Orléans, secondary patroness of France

• Via CathedralisThe Cathedral Way, seven daysDay III, Chartres, then Rouen · Day IV, Rouen, then Amiens
• Via IoannaeJoan’s Way, eight daysDay VII, Reims to Rouen, by Compiègne · Day VIII, Rouen

About an hour and a quarter by train from the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris.

The shrine’s own website, for times and news: cathedrale-rouen.net/site/index.php?lang=en

• Saint-WandrilleThe Abbey of Saint-Wandrille, about 16 miles as the crow flies
• Le Bec-HellouinThe Abbey of Notre-Dame du Bec, about 23 miles as the crow flies
• LisieuxThe Shrine of Saint Thérèse, about 44 miles as the crow flies
• PontoiseThe Carmel of Pontoise, about 53 miles as the crow flies