Saint-Germain-des-Prés

Why it matters

Saint-Germain-des-Prés is the quarter of the 6th arrondissement between the Seine and the Luxembourg Gardens, named for the abbey whose church still stands at its center. The abbey grew up in the meadows, les prés, outside the walls of medieval Paris, and its church is considered the oldest in the city.

The quarter is best known for what happened in it after the Second World War. Writers lived in small rooms and worked in the cafés, above all Les Deux Magots, the Café de Flore and the Brasserie Lipp, and the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the writer Simone de Beauvoir made it the center of existentialism. It is still a quarter of publishers, bookshops and galleries, and a good place to walk without a plan.

An abbey older than Paris's walls

The abbey was founded by Childebert I, a son of Clovis, the first king of the Franks, to hold relics he had brought back from the siege of Zaragoza in Spain: a piece of the True Cross and part of the tunic of Saint Vincent. It was dedicated in 558, the year Childebert died, and became the burial place of Merovingian kings. The Vikings destroyed it; it was rebuilt and renamed for Germain, a sixth-century bishop of Paris.

The church standing today was rebuilt around the year 1000. The lower levels of the bell tower, the nave and the transept date from then, and in the twelfth century the choir was given what are thought to be the earliest flying buttresses in the region around Paris. The abbey was famous for its scholars and its illuminated manuscripts. The Revolution destroyed nearly everything except the church and the abbot's palace, and the church became the parish church of the quarter.

What you see: the church

From the square, the square Romanesque bell tower is the oldest part you can see, among the oldest church towers in France. Inside, the nave and choir are painted in deep blues, reds and gold, a nineteenth-century scheme laid over walls far older, with vestiges of medieval frescoes surviving from the church's early centuries.

In one of the side chapels is the tomb of the philosopher René Descartes. The capitals of the columns, carved with figures and foliage, are among the oldest sculpture in Paris.

Cafés and writers

The first café in Paris opened at the Saint-Germain fair in 1672, and the Café Procope, on what is now the Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, drew writers from the start; Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have planned their Encyclopédie there. The quarter's publishers and printers kept writers close.

Les Deux Magots, on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, became a café in 1884, keeping the name of the fabric and silk shop it replaced, itself named after a popular play; the two carved Chinese figures, the magots, still watch the room. Its patrons included Hemingway, Camus, Picasso, James Joyce, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, and it has awarded its own literary prize every year since 1933. Next door, on the corner of the Rue Saint-Benoît, the Café de Flore was Sartre and Beauvoir's other office.

After the Liberation the quarter also filled with jazz, in small cellar clubs: Le Tabou, the Club Saint-Germain, the Vieux-Colombier. Sidney Bechet and Boris Vian played there, and Juliette Gréco sang. Sartre, the legends say, was a regular; he wrote that he rarely went, finding the cellars too crowded and too loud.

Saint-Sulpice

A few minutes south, on its own square with a great fountain in the middle, stands Saint-Sulpice, the second-largest church in Paris, begun in 1646. In its first chapel on the right are Eugène Delacroix's murals of 1855 to 1861, Jacob Wrestling with the Angel and Heliodorus Driven from the Temple, painted near the end of his life; the painter's former apartment and studio, a few streets away, is now the national museum of his work.

The church's great organ is one of the most important in the world, played by a long line of famous organists, Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré among them. Across the floor of the transept runs the gnomon, an eighteenth-century instrument: a brass meridian line set into the floor, rising up a white marble obelisk about 35 feet high. A lens in the south window throws a spot of sunlight onto the line, and at midday on the winter solstice the spot reaches the obelisk.

How to visit

Start at the church, sit for a while at one of the café terraces on the boulevard, then walk south to Saint-Sulpice and on to the Luxembourg Gardens. North of the boulevard, the streets running down to the river are full of galleries and bookshops, and lead to the École des Beaux-Arts, near the small hotel on the Rue des Beaux-Arts where Oscar Wilde spent his last days, and on to the Pont des Arts, the footbridge to the Louvre.

The churches are working parishes, so visit outside services. For a place to stay in the quarter, see where to stay.

Myths worth setting aside

The brass line in Saint-Sulpice is not a pagan Rose Line, and it is not the Paris meridian. Dan Brown's novel of 2003 sent crowds to see it on that understanding, but it was built in the eighteenth century at the request of the parish priest, to fix the dates of the equinoxes and so the date of Easter, and it does not coincide with the meridian through the Paris Observatory that French maps once measured from.

Nor do the famous cafés trade on the past alone. They are crowded with visitors, but Parisians still meet in them, and the literary prize still goes to a French novel every year.