Church Saint-Sulpice, Paris

Known as the ‘Cathedral of the Rive Gauche’, the Church Saint-Sulpice is a beautiful Parisian church built between the 17th and 18th centuries. It recent claim to fame is that it figures in Dan Brown's  Da Vinci Code.

This is this writer’s favourite church in Paris. Enormous and fading, it has none of the ‘improvements’ of tourism – no floodlit tapestries and polished gilt. Instead, the paintings are dark and peeling, and the air smells of musky stone and hot wax. The domes aren’t decorated with murals, but with dusty carvings high in the endless arches of the vaulted roof.

And yet Saint-Sulpice featured heavily in the lives of the wealthy and fashionable. The Marquis de Sade was christened here, as was Charles Baudelaire, and Victor Hugo got married at this altar. Like many other churches, it was damaged during the Revolution, having been turned into a Temple of Victory. But it was restored in the 19th-century with the help of the artist Eugène Delacroix (whose statue stands in the Luxembourg Gardens nearby).

Construction on Saint-Sulpice began in 1646, but stalled and stumbled, and was only mostly complete by 1745. The west front is the work of Florentine architect Giovanni Servandoni, but it’s a jigsaw puzzle kind of building, and many architects contributed to the whole. Even the two towers are different, one standing at 73m, the other incomplete at 68m.

The church has attracted more tourist attention since Dan Brown used it as the setting for a violent attack in his bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, as well as the site of the Rose Line. There is indeed a golden line that runs across the floor of the nave, but the church is keen to correct  Brown on its origins – as an 18th-century astronomical instrument, rather than the remnant of a pagan temple. The sun hits the line at different points during the year. Note also the Delacroix frescoes in the Chapelle des Anges, the tomb of Curé Languet de Gergy who founded the world’s first pediatric hospital and Servandoni’s Rococo Chapelle de la Madone.

The square in front of the church is also well worth a pause, especially in the evening, for its gorgeous fountain, and the imposing façade of the church. The fountain is by Visconti, bearing the sculptures of four bishops of the Louis XIV era – Fenelon, Massillon, Bossuet and Flechier.

Church Saint-Sulpice, Paris
Church Saint-Sulpice, Paris

Opening Hours

Monday:
08:00 - 19:30
Tuesday:
08:00 - 19:30
Wednesday:
08:00 - 19:30
Thursday:
08:00 - 19:30
Friday:
08:00 - 19:30
Saturday:
08:00 - 19:30
Sunday:
08:00 - 19:30
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