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Origin and history

The chapel of the White Penitents of Narbonne, originally Church of Notre-Dame-de-Grâces, was built by the Augustines from 1523 on their new site after the destruction of their first convent when the ramparts under Francis I were extended. Their cloister, erected in 1542, completed an architectural ensemble marked by a unique late Gothic vaulted nave, diaphragm arches and a pentagonal bedside. The church, decommissioned after the Revolution and turned into a dryer for a tannery, was looted and stripped of its furniture before being sold as a national good in 1793.

In 1816, the brotherhood of the White Penitents bought the building and restored it to worship, walling five of the six lateral chapels opened in the seventeenth century and making the vault. In the 19th century, a statue of the Gothic Virgin replaced the one destroyed during the Revolution on the classical facade, while 18th-century gypsums, representing Marian scenes, were preserved in the abside. The church served in the 20th century as a parochial hall, cinema, and was then handed over in 1985 to the White Penitents, with a cult entrusted to the Priestly Fraternity Saint Pius X.

The architecture mixes late southern Gothic elements (broken arches, vaults on dogives cross, deciduous capitals) and classics (fronton in broken arch of the facade, niche to the Virgin). The bell tower, dating from the late 16th or early 17th century, rises above a northern chapel, served by a spiral staircase. The bedside windows, partially walled in the 18th century to install the gypseries, illustrate the successive transformations of the building, classified as a historical monument in 1986.

The Augustinians, who had been in Narbonne since 1262, initially had their convent outside the walls, destroyed during the reconstruction of the enclosure. Their relocation in 1523 marked the beginning of a new religious complex, financed in part by donations, such as that of Anne of Gentian in 1563 for a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of the Annonciade. The interior decoration, including a Gothic bas-relief of the Nativity and funerary slabs, bears witness to its religious and memorial use.

The chapel, owned by an association since 1985, preserves traces of its varied uses: place of worship, versatile parish space, and even cinema. Its history reflects religious and political upheavals (Revolution, sales of national goods) as well as local cultural adaptations, such as its role in community life in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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