Like most of Europe’s old cities, Rouen has many churches, and as in many others, the cathedral is the star attraction among them. But as we wandered Rouen on a walking visit, I was struck by two others, and by the contrasts between them: The 14th-century Saint Ouen Abbey Church and the very 20th-century Church of Saint Joan of Arc.
They are very different in their history, though both feature stained glass of the same era. Saint-Ouen sits in a grassy park on a knoll; Saint-Jeanne is back-to-back with the city’s busy food market. Saint-Ouen has not had a congregation since the French Revolution, and has been a museum since then; Saint-Jeanne is an active parish church. Each is extraordinarily beautiful in its own way.
Saint-Ouen was built starting in 1318 to serve a monastery that was already 300 years old; It wasn’t finished until well over a hundred years later. Construction was interrupted by the Hundred Years War, and finally by a wide-scale revolt in Rouen, one of many around the country, against high taxes levied to pay for the war. During the revolt, the church was heavily damaged.
The church is about the same size as Rouen’s cathedral, but its interior seems very different. That’s in part because it hasn’t been used as a church for over 200 years, and is therefore less cluttered, but it’s also a result of the church’s own design: it has very high vaulted ceilings, over 100 feet above the floor, and its stained glass windows mix brightly-colored glass with clear and frosted pieces, letting in a lot more light than in many others.
The original design was familiar Gothic, but by the time the work was finished, the style had shifted a bit toward a ‘flamboyant’ Gothic. Interestingly, while the church was ‘completed’ by 1537, the western facade was not. In the 1840s, after it had become an official historic monument, that facade was built in a neo-Gothic style that matched the earlier rather than the later style.
The organ of Saint-Ouen was a late-in-life addition, built in 1890 by the master organ-builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who revolutionized organ-building and invented numbers of the ranks and stops found in most modern organs. It’s been called ‘the Michelangelo of organs,’ and is often used for recordings because it’s the only one of his major organs that has never been modified.
The Joan of Arc Church, or, in its own language, L’église Sainte-Jeanne-d’Arc, was built in 1979 as a replacement for a 16th-century church, Saint Vincent, which was destroyed in World War II bombing; it had stood only a few metres away, facing the city’s market square.
In fact, it was built as part of the same project that gave the city a new public market, Les Halles de Rouen, adjacent to the church and designed by the same architect, Louis Arretche. They mirror each other in style, and incidentally reproduce a staple of the Middle Ages: the market and the church were common neighbors in city centers.
There’s a close connection between the church’s name and location in the Place du Vieux-Marché, or Old Market Square. It’s the place where Joan was burned at the stake in 1431, at the height of war between England and France. A small sign in a garden marks the spot.
One of the things that remains in my mind about the church itself is that it seems obstinately to refuse right angles, and sometimes any angle at all. Its roof can be seen as resembling an overturned boat, which apparently was not uncommon in early Christian churches.
Even from the inside, the wooden ceiling beams resemble the ribs of a boat, and the roof extends out to form a sheltered entrance for the church.
The boat motif carries over into the market roofs, too.
But as interesting and unusual as the outside of Sainte-Jeanne may be, the inside is amazing. Like Saint-Ouen, it is full of light, even though the ceilings are low and modern. That’s only partly because of modern lighting; it’s mainly because of the huge expanses of wonderful 15th and 16th-century stained glass from the former Saint-Vincent church.
The windows survived the war intact; they were taken down and placed in storage in 1940, and only brought out again to be installed in the new church. They’re set in graceful frames with (again) almost no corners or sharp angles.
Sainte-Jeanne was Louis Arretche’s last major building “from scratch.” A long-time urban planner and architectural conservator, he was also responsible for planning and restoration of several towns after the war, including Saint-Malo; he was noted for working with the scale and styles that had existed before.
