Saint Germanus of Paris

Germanus was born about 496 near Autun, in Burgundy, into a noble Gallo-Roman family. He studied at Avallon and then at Luzy under a cousin who was a priest. At thirty-five he was ordained priest by Agrippinus, bishop of Autun, and was made abbot of the monastery of Saint-Symphorien near the city, where he was already known for his austere life and for the miracles told of him.

In the 550s King Childebert, a son of Clovis, had him made bishop of Paris; the diocese of Paris gives the year as about 552, other sources 555. In 542 Childebert had raised his siege of Saragossa because the city was under the protection of the martyr Saint Vincent, and he brought back the saint’s stole. At the bishop’s urging he built outside the walls a basilica in honor of Saint Vincent and the Holy Cross, and according to the usual account Germanus dedicated it on December 23, 558, the day the king died.

Germanus took part in the councils of Paris of 557 and 573 and in the second council of Tours in 567, and he persuaded Childebert to put down pagan practices. He excommunicated King Charibert for his immoral life. When Clothar I tried to take back by force his wife Radegund, who had withdrawn to Poitiers, Germanus intervened and stopped him.

When the brothers Sigebert and Chilperic went to war, Germanus wrote to Queen Brunhild, Sigebert’s wife, asking her to prevent further bloodshed. He died in Paris on May 28, 576, before peace was restored. An early Life calls him the father of the poor. Venantius Fortunatus, whom he had asked to write a Life of Saint Marcellus, an earlier bishop of Paris, wrote his Life as well, and a treatise on the ancient Gallican liturgy is traditionally attributed to Germanus.

He was buried in the chapel of Saint-Symphorien, in the forecourt of the basilica of Saint-Vincent, and his body lay there for two centuries. In 756 it was moved into the choir of the main church in the presence of Pepin the Short and the young Charlemagne, and the abbey took the name of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. For nine centuries his relics were carried through Paris in times of plague and danger. Pope Alexander III consecrated the Gothic choir in 1163. During the Revolution the monastic buildings were devastated, and an altar recalls the martyrs of September 1792; worship resumed in 1802. A slab in the chapel of Saint-Symphorien commemorates him. Since 2016 the City of Paris has restored almost all of the church’s nineteenth-century painted decoration, and the work on the Lady Chapel was finished in March 2024.

Windows made between 1245 and 1247 for the abbey’s Lady Chapel told his legend. One panel, the Vision of Saint Germain of Paris, in which the dead bishop appears in a dream to a monk and urges him to keep his faith, is now at The Cloisters in New York. In the church, Hippolyte Flandrin and Alexandre Denuelle created the wax-painted decoration between 1842 and 1870, and the parish guide dates the chapel of Saint-Symphorien, which bears the name of the oratory of his first tomb, to the eleventh century.

Patron of the abbey church, now the parish church, of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris.

• Paris, Saint-Germain-des-PrésThe former abbey church that took his name, on the site of the basilica he dedicated, with its Gothic choir consecrated in 1163.
• Paris, chapel of Saint-SymphorienThe chapel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés that bears the name of the oratory where he was first buried, with a slab in his memory.

• Via SanctorumThe Way of the Saints, nine days