Basilique Sainte-Clotilde
Basilique Sainte-Clotilde—named for Saint Clotilde, the wife of Clovis I, whose conversion to Christianity she is said to have helped prompt in 496—began as a new neo-Gothic church on the site of an earlier Carmelite monastery. Work started in 1846, when the original design was by Franz Christian Gau, but Gau died in 1853 and Théodore Ballu carried the project forward, completing the basilica in 1857; it was opened on 30 November 1857 by Cardinal Morlot. Ballu gave it a more “cathedral-like” presence by extending the front and building two towers whose spires rose to 70 metres. In 1896, Pope Leo XIII declared it a minor basilica to mark the anniversary of Clovis’s conversion. César Franck later served as organist for thirty years, tying the building to one of France’s best-known musical careers; and its design was even copied by Léon Vautrin for the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Guangzhou between 1863 and 1888. …
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