Basilica of Saint-Denis

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Around the year 250, Denis, the first bishop of Paris, was beheaded on Montmartre, and legend says he picked up his head and walked north, preaching, until he fell at the place where he wished to be buried. Over that tomb, whose martyr we honor today, grew an abbey that became the memory of France: King Dagobert was buried beside the saint in the seventh century, and for some twelve hundred years nearly all the kings and queens of France followed, until more than seventy carved figures lay sleeping in stone above the royal dead. Here too, in the 1140s, Abbot Suger rebuilt the west front and the radiant choir consecrated in 1144, convinced that God is light and that walls could be opened into glass: Gothic architecture was born in this building before it had a name. The Revolution emptied the tombs into common pits in 1793, but the restored basilica still shelters the greatest collection of funerary sculpture in Europe, a whole nation's history keeping watch around a martyr's grave.