Reims Cathedral

Tradition holds that Clovis, the Frankish king who united much of what is now France under his rule, was baptized into Catholic Christianity around 496 CE by Bishop Remigius at Reims, abandoning the Arian Christianity or paganism of his predecessors for the orthodox Catholic faith of the Gallo-Roman population he ruled. Later French monarchy treated it as the founding religious moment of a specifically Catholic French kingship, and that memory is what eventually made Reims the customary site for crowning French kings.

That coronation tradition developed gradually rather than beginning with Clovis himself, becoming firmly established by the eleventh century. The most celebrated of these ceremonies took place in 1429, when Charles VII was crowned at Reims with Joan of Arc present, having led the campaign that broke through English and Burgundian held territory to reach the city. Her insistence on Reims reflected the symbolic weight the site had accumulated.

The cathedral standing today is substantially a thirteenth century Gothic rebuilding of an earlier church on the same site, renowned for its sculptural program, including the celebrated smiling angel among its west facade figures, and for stained glass renewed across the centuries, including modern additions by Marc Chagall.

The First World War brought the cathedral close to total loss. German artillery shelled Reims repeatedly beginning in September 1914, and a resulting fire destroyed much of the roof, leaving the building an internationally publicized symbol of wartime cultural destruction. Restoration, substantially funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. among others, took over two decades, and the cathedral reopened in 1938, a year before a second war would again put French monuments at risk.

Reims Cathedral is a working record of Gothic engineering as much as a religious building, and it names its own engineers inside itself. Construction began in 1211 under the mason Jean d'Orbais after fire destroyed an earlier church on the site, and the building rose gradually over roughly eighty years under a rotating team of master masons; a labyrinth once set into the nave floor recorded four of their names, Jean d'Orbais, Jean Le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons, along with how many years each had worked there, an unusually direct credit for an anonymous medieval craft. Their nave rises thirty eight meters, narrow enough at under fifteen meters wide that the height reads as deliberately exaggerated, carried on flying buttresses that let the walls open into glass rather than stand as solid masonry, the structural trick that makes the whole west front possible.

That front is organized around two features working at different heights. High above the three main portals sits the rose window, roughly twelve and a half meters across, glazed to fill the nave with what Gothic builders themselves called new light rather than the dim interior of earlier Romanesque churches. Below it runs the Gallery of Kings, a horizontal band of giant standing statues added mostly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, dozens of unnamed French monarchs carved at architectural rather than human scale, with Clovis placed at the center of the row as the dynasty's founding figure. Read together, the rose window and the gallery beneath it turn a wall that could have been solid stone into a sequence, light and royal lineage stacked directly on top of each other on the same facade.