Genevieve of Paris

Origins and the blessing of Germanus

Genevieve was born about the year 422 at Nanterre, then a village a few miles west of Paris, the daughter of Severus and Gerontia — by the tradition, people of some standing in the Gallo-Roman world of the declining Western empire. As a girl she tended her father's sheep on the slopes of Mont Valérien. When she was about seven, the great bishop Germanus of Auxerre, journeying with Lupus of Troyes toward Britain to combat the Pelagian heresy (429), halted at Nanterre, and, singling the child out from the crowd that came to meet him, discerned in her the marks of a soul consecrated to God. He blessed her, spoke with her of the virginity to which she already aspired, and — the tradition says — gave her a brass coin marked with the cross to wear about her neck as a token that she was now betrothed to Christ and should wear no other ornament. From that day she gave herself to the ascetic life while still living in the world.

The consecrated virgin

At about fifteen Genevieve went to the bishop of Paris and received from him the veil of a consecrated virgin, together with two companions. She did not enter an enclosed community — the settled monasticism of women was only forming in Gaul — but lived a life of the strictest asceticism in the world: eating, the tradition says, only twice a week, of barley bread and beans, keeping long vigils, and giving herself wholly to prayer. She early received gifts of the Spirit — clairvoyance, prophecy, the reading of hearts, and the healing of the sick — and these, together with a certain boldness in reproving sin, brought her at first the suspicion and hostility of some of her fellow-citizens, who took her austerities for imposture; it was the authority of Germanus, who on a second passage through sent her tokens of his esteem, that vindicated her, and in time the whole city came to revere her as its living intercessor.

Attila and the deliverance of Paris

The deed for which Genevieve is best remembered belongs to the year 451, when Attila and the army of the Huns swept across Gaul, burning the cities before them, and Paris lay in their path. As the citizens prepared to abandon the town and flee with their goods, Genevieve stood against the panic: gathering the women to prayer and fasting in the baptistery, she declared that Paris would be spared if they would do penance and trust in God, and begged the men not to carry off their possessions but to hold firm. She was mocked, even threatened with stoning as a false prophetess — until word came that Attila had turned away from Paris (the Huns swung south toward Orléans, and were broken soon after on the Catalaunian Plains). The city was untouched, and Genevieve's word was remembered as the cause of its deliverance.

The famine, the kings, and the shrine of Denis

Genevieve's charity was as famous as her prophecy. During a blockade of Paris in the wars of the Frankish king Childeric — who, though a pagan, held her in such reverence that he is said to have released prisoners at her asking and to have spared lives at her word — the city was reduced to famine; Genevieve took boats up the Seine to Arcis and Troyes, gathered grain, and brought it back down the river to feed the starving, distributing it herself to the neediest. She was honoured likewise by Clovis, the first Christian king of the Franks, and by his queen Clotilde; at her urging, the tradition holds, Clovis showed clemency and began the building of a great church on the hill above Paris.

She had a particular devotion to the first bishop and martyr of Paris, Denis (Dionysius), and it was largely through her exertions and her persuasion of the people that a basilica was raised over his tomb at the place of his burial. The church that Clovis and Clotilde built — dedicated to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul on the hill south of the city — became, after her burial there, the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève, the centre of her cult for thirteen centuries.

Repose

Genevieve reposed at Paris, full of years, about the year 512 (some accounts 502), at the age of about eighty-nine, having outlived Clovis by a little, and was buried in the still-unfinished church on the hill. Her tomb at once became a place of miracles and of the city's resort in every calamity.

Relics and later cultus

The relics of Genevieve made the Abbey of Sainte-Geneviève the spiritual heart of medieval Paris. In times of plague, flood, drought, and siege the shrine was carried down into the city in solemn procession, and the deliverances ascribed to these processions — most famously the ending of the burning sickness, the "mal des ardents," in 1130 — multiplied her fame; she was reckoned the patroness of Paris, and, from the association of her Seine-borne grain-convoy, was invoked by the boatmen and (in later devotion) the vintners. At the French Revolution the shrine was destroyed and the greater part of her relics publicly burned in 1793; a surviving portion — a fragment saved from an earlier distribution — is kept and venerated at the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont in Paris, which stands beside the site of her ruined abbey.

Because she lived and died in the fifth and sixth centuries, long before the Great Schism, Genevieve belongs to the undivided Church, and her memory has been taken up in the Orthodox veneration of the ancient Western saints — kept, in Orthodox usage, on the same January 3 as her Western feast.