Saint Genevieve

Genevieve was born at Nanterre, west of Paris, about 420, into a family of local notables. Bishop Germanus of Auxerre noticed her there when she was about seven years old, and at his urging she dedicated herself to God. Traces of her family’s house have been found near the present cathedral of Nanterre, and an ancient well there recalls the first miracle told of her as a girl.

After her parents died, she went to live in Paris with her godmother on the Île de la Cité and spent her inheritance on the poor. In 451, as the Huns of Attila approached, she urged the people of Paris to stay and pray, and she shut herself in a baptistery with other women to pray for the city. Attila’s army turned toward Orléans and was later defeated, and Paris was spared.

Years later, when the Franks blockaded Paris, she went by boat up the Seine toward Troyes and brought back food from her lands at Arcis-sur-Aube. She is reported to have had great influence with Childeric, king of the Salian Franks, and she had a church built over the tomb of Saint Denis. She died in Paris on January 3, in 502 or, by other reckonings, 512.

She was buried in the church of the Holy Apostles, which Clovis and Clotilde had built on the hill south of the Seine, and the church took her name. In 1130, during an epidemic of the burning sickness called the mal des ardents, the bishop of Paris had her reliquary shown to 103 sick people, and according to the account all were healed except three who doubted. In 1793 her body was burned on the Place de Grève. Her relics, once kept at the abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, are venerated today in the transept of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, beside a large sarcophagus said to hold the stone of her tomb. Of the abbey church only the bell tower, the tour Clovis, survives.

On May 18, 1962, Pope John XXIII named her patroness of the French gendarmes, who keep her feast on November 26, the anniversary of the miracle of 1130. In 2020, for the sixteen hundredth anniversary of her birth, the diocese of Paris kept a novena from January 3 to 11 and carried her shrine in procession from the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève to the Pont de la Tournelle to bless the city.

She is often shown with a loaf of bread for her charity, or as a shepherdess among sheep. Paul Landowski’s large statue of Genevieve protecting Paris, inaugurated on August 27, 1928, stands on the Pont de la Tournelle. In the Luxembourg Garden a marble of 1845 by Michel-Louis Victor Mercier stands among the queens of France and famous women, and at Saint-Médard a painting by Charles-Dominique Eisen shows her reading while she keeps her sheep. At Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis a statue by Eugène Guillaume also shows her as a shepherdess.

Patroness of Paris and of the city and diocese of Nanterre; named patroness of the French gendarmerie by Pope John XXIII on May 18, 1962.

• Paris, Saint-Étienne-du-MontThe church beside the Panthéon whose transept keeps her shrine with her relics and the sarcophagus said to hold the stone of her tomb.
• NanterreHer birthplace, with traces of the family house near the cathedral and the ancient well that recalls her first miracle.
• Paris, Pont de la TournellePaul Landowski’s statue of Genevieve watching over Paris, where the procession of her shrine ended with the blessing of the city in 2020.

On our ways: Saint-Denis.

• Via SanctorumThe Way of the Saints, nine daysDay I, Paris