Saint Denis, the Bishop Who Carried His Head

Denis is held to be the first bishop of Paris, then called Lutetia. Having come from Italy about the middle of the third century, he is said to have been sent to preach the faith in Gaul with two companions: the priest Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius. Gregory of Tours, in the sixth century, counts him among seven bishops sent out under the emperor Decius: Gatianus to Tours, Trophimus to Arles, Paulus to Narbonne, Saturninus to Toulouse, Austremonius to the Auvergne, Martialis to Limoges, and Denis to Paris.

At Lutetia the Roman governor Sisinnius had him arrested. Denis was condemned to be beheaded at the top of a hill, before a temple of Mercury. But the soldiers leading him up with Rusticus and Eleutherius gave up the last climb and beheaded them halfway up the slope, around 250. To that execution the hill owes its name: mons Martyrum, the mount of the martyrs, the later Montmartre.

The date remains uncertain. Hagiography wavers between the persecution under Decius, around 250, and a later one. On the site of the martyrdom a chapel later rose, then the abbey of Montmartre; of it there remains today the crypt of the martyrium, in the rue Yvonne-Le-Tac. The cult of the three martyrs is old: the so-called Hieronymian martyrology sets their feast on 9 October.

Here the marvel begins. Beheaded, Denis is said to have risen, picked up his head and, led by an angel, gone on his way. He stopped to wash his head at a spring, on the site of the present square Suzanne-Buisson, and then went down the northern slope. After six kilometres he fell at the spot that today bears his name, where a pious widow named Catulla buried him.

It is this image that made Denis famous: the best known of the cephalophores, the saints whom art depicts carrying their own head. The legend was fixed by Hilduin, abbot of Saint-Denis, in a Passio written between 835 and 840, and taken up in the thirteenth century by Jacobus de Voragine in the Golden Legend.

Honesty requires saying that none of it is established. Martyrs were usually shown with the instrument of their torture, and the historian wonders whether the carried head did not arise from a misread image. Hilduin, moreover, confused his saint with Dionysius the Areopagite, an entirely different figure. On the length of the walk the marquise du Deffand is said to have remarked, in 1767, that only the first step is hard.

Behind the legend lies a real grave. The name of Denis appears about 520 in the Life of Saint Genevieve: the patron of Paris venerated the bishop-martyr and obtained from the Paris clergy that a church be raised over his tomb, at the place called vicus Catulliacus, some kilometres north of the Seine. About this first sanctuary the archaeologists remain cautious, but the site itself is well attested.

The rest is history. Around 630 King Dagobert richly endowed the sanctuary and chose it for his grave: he is the first Frankish king buried at Saint-Denis. The Carolingians made it one of the richest abbeys of the West. In the twelfth century Abbot Suger rebuilt the choir there between 1135 and 1144 and let in, through wide windows and the ribbed vault, the light that would give Gothic art its name.

From then on the kings took the oriflamme there before going to war, and had themselves buried there: forty-two of them, with queens and princes, until the Revolution profaned the tombs in 1793 and threw their ashes into a common grave. The recumbent effigies were saved, the church restored, and since 1966 it has been a cathedral. Every ninth of October one still celebrates there the man who, so they say, came here to die with his head in his hands.