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Origin and history

The church of Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours in Nancy found its origins in the Battle of Nancy in 1477, where René II of Lorraine defeated Charles the Témeraire. To commemorate this victory, a chapel dedicated to the Virgin was erected in 1484 at the burial place of the Burgundy soldiers. The chapel housed a statue of the Virgin carved in 1505 by Mansuy Gauvin, a symbol of Lorrain Marian devotion. It grew up in 1629 and became a place of pilgrimage, especially during the Thirty Years' War, where the Lorrains implored the protection of Notre-Dame-de-Bonsecours against plague and famine.

In the 18th century, Stanislas Leszczynski, Duke of Lorraine and former King of Poland, began the complete reconstruction of the sanctuary in 1737. Several motivations guided this project: asserting its legitimacy in Lorraine, honouring Marian worship dear to its Polish heart, and marking the landscape between Nancy and its castle in Lunéville. Confeded to the architect Emmanuel Heré, the site began in 1738 with the laying of the first stone by the bishop of Toul. The church, completed in 1741, combines Baroque and rococo influences, with a slender facade surmounted by a bulbous bell tower, columns from the unfinished castle of La Malgrange, and an interior richly decorated with stucco, frescoes and polychrome statues.

The church housed four major mausoleums: those of Stanislas (the work of Claude-Louis Vassé, completed in 1775), his wife Catherine Opalinska (sculpted by Nicolas-Sébastien Adam in 1749), their daughter Marie Leszczynska (the Queen of France, whose heart rests here since 1768), and the great Polish treasurer Maximilien Ossolinski. These graves, saved from revolutionary destruction, were restored in the 19th century. The Revolution, however, profaned the vaults, and the bodies of the deceased remained in the choir until 1803. The building, classified as a historical monument in 1906, became a Franco-Polish place of memory, frequented by personalities such as Charles X, Louis-Philippe or Empress Eugénie.

The interior architecture reflects Stanislas' eclectic taste, with frescoes by Joseph Gilles (restored in 1853) illustrating Marian scenes, a pulpit carved in the Louis XV style, and stained-glass windows offered by Napoleon III in 1868. The colourful stuccos, imitating marble, and the statues of venerated saints in Poland (like Saint John Nepomucene) highlight this dual identity of Lorrain and Polish. The sanctuary also preserves Turkish flags captured by the Dukes of Lorraine in the 17th and 18th centuries, as well as a Polish handlebar stolen in 1969. Despite the disappearance of its great historical organs, the church remains a unique testimony of religious baroque in France.

In the 19th century, Abbé Morel made the church a parish in 1844 and undertook restorations, including the expansion of the choir in 1862. Pope Pius IX offered a tiara for the statue of the Virgin in 1865, crowned at solemn feasts. The confessionals, works of the workshops Eugene Vallin and Victor Huel (1889), and the stained glass windows of Joseph Janin (1904) complete this decor. Today, the church, owned by the city of Nancy, attracts as much for its artistic heritage as for its role in Franco-Polish history, embodied by the memory of Stanislas and the Lorrains.

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