Saint Clotilde
Queen of the Franks, wife of Clovisc. 474–545
Feast · June 4, in France; June 3, the day of her death, outside France
- Patron of
- Patroness of Les Andelys, in Normandy.
Life
Clotilde was born about 474, probably at Lyon, a daughter of Chilperic, king of the Burgundians, and of Caretena. She was brought up a Catholic, although her uncle Gundobad, who ruled the Burgundians, was an Arian. A tradition says that Gundobad killed her father and drove his daughters into exile, but the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he is known to have mourned his brother’s death.
About 493 she married Clovis, the pagan king of the Franks. They had four sons, Ingomer, Chlodomer, Childebert and Clothar, and a daughter, also named Clotilde. For years she urged her husband to accept the faith. He allowed their first son to be baptized, and when the child died in infancy he allowed the baptism of the second. In a battle against the Alamanni, Clovis called on the God of his wife, and he was baptized at Reims by Saint Remi at Christmas, in a year traditionally given as 496.
Clovis and Clotilde built a church in honor of the Holy Apostles on the hill south of the Seine in Paris as their burial place, and she finished it after the king died in 511. She was a widow for thirty-four years. Her son Chlodomer was killed in battle at Vézeronce in 524, and she brought up his three sons; their uncles Childebert and Clothar murdered the two eldest, and the third, Clodoald, escaped into a monastery and gave his name to Saint-Cloud, near Paris.
When Childebert and Clothar later took up arms against each other, she prayed at the tomb of Saint Martin, and Gregory of Tours writes that a storm scattered their armies. She withdrew to Tours and lived near the basilica of Saint-Martin, given to prayer and good works. She died there on June 3, 545; the diocese of Paris gives the year as 548. Her body was carried to Paris and buried beside Clovis in the church of the Holy Apostles, which later took the name of Saint Genevieve.
Cult and relics
At Les Andelys, in Normandy, she began in 511 to build an abbey for young noblewomen near the site of the present collegiate church of Notre-Dame. Tradition says that when the workmen suffered from heat and thirst, she prayed that the water of a nearby spring would have the strength and taste of wine. Pilgrims long came to bathe in the fontaine Sainte-Clotilde to be healed, and until recent years the town kept her feast in early June as its patroness. Of the abbey church in Paris where she was buried, only the bell tower, the tour Clovis, survives.
In the nineteenth century two large churches were built in her honor. The church of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, built from 1846 to 1857 as the first neo-Gothic church of the city, was made a minor basilica by Pope Leo XIII in 1897, and César Franck played its organ. At Reims, for the fourteen hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis in 1896, Cardinal Langénieux decided to build a large church in her honor; the first stone was laid on June 26, 1898, worship began in 1900, and Leo XIII made it a basilica in 1902. Its crypt holds 402 reliquaries with nearly three thousand relics of saints.
In art
She is shown as a queen at prayer, with a crown on her head or beside her, and sometimes as a nun. On the west front of Reims cathedral the Gallery of Kings sets Clovis between Clotilde and Saint Remi. In the basilica of Sainte-Clotilde at Reims, a marble pulpit of 1935 by Georges Saupique shows her facing the entrance with open arms, and a window of the 1920s by the De Troeyer sisters shows her praying beside Clovis at his baptism.
Patron of
Patroness of Les Andelys, in Normandy.
Where to pray
- Paris, basilica of Sainte-ClotildeThe neo-Gothic church in the seventh arrondissement built in her honor from 1846 to 1857, a minor basilica since 1897.
- Reims, basilica of Sainte-ClotildeThe church built in her honor for the fourteen hundredth anniversary of the baptism of Clovis, with a crypt of 402 reliquaries.
- Les Andelys, fontaine Sainte-ClotildeThe spring near the collegiate church of Notre-Dame, tied by tradition to the abbey she founded in 511.
- Tours, basilica of Saint-MartinThe shrine of Saint Martin, near whose tomb she spent her last years.