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Origin and history

The Saint-Louis-en-Ile church is located on the island of Saint-Louis in Paris, at the corner of the streets of Saint-Louis-en-Ile and Poulletier. It was built from 1624 to 1726, under the initial direction of architect François Le Vau, then Gabriel Le Duc, Pierre Bullet and Jacques Doucet. Dedicated to Saint Louis (Louis IX), it replaces a primitive chapel erected in 1623 for the first inhabitants of the island, lotie by Christophe Marie under Louis XIII. The patron saint, canonized in 1297, was associated with the Crown of thorns and the Holy Chapel, which he had built to house this relic.

The construction of the present church began in 1656 after the destruction of the chapel became too small. The choir, oriented towards the east, was completed in 1679, but the work dragged on due to financial difficulties, despite the support of the Bontemps family, close to Louis XIV. A royal lottery in 1702 financed the nave, completed in 1723, and the transept in 1725. The church was consecrated in 1726 by the bishop of Grenoble. Its current bell tower, an openworked obelisk of 30 meters, was erected in 1765 by François Antoine Babuty-Desgodets to replace a campanile destroyed by lightning.

During the Revolution, the church was decommissioned in 1791, looted and transformed into a literary deposit before being sold as a national good. The parish priest Corentin Coroller, having been sworn in by the Constitution, was able to maintain a clandestine cult there until his appointment as a priest in 1802. He even welcomed Pope Pius VII in 1805 for a Mass celebrated in a church temporarily decorated with tapestries of the Gobelins. Repurchased by the City of Paris in 1817, it was restored and enriched in the 19th century by parish priest Louis-Auguste Napoléon Bossuet, who invested his fortune there to acquire works of art and neo-classical decorations.

The church houses major works, such as paintings by Carle van Loo and Jacques Stella, as well as a baroque organ installed in 2005 by Bernard Aubertin. Classified as a historic monument in 1915, it has been the subject of a €80 million restoration programme since 2020. Its unique architecture, combining flat bedside and walk-in, makes it a rare testimony of religious art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Among the figures buried in the church were the painter Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne (1681) and poet Philippe Quinault (1688). The Bontemps family, close to Louis XIV, owned a vault behind the high altar. The chapels house funerary slabs and works such as a Virgin with the Child by François Alexandre Lafond or a Byzantine icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Relief, introduced in the 19th century by the Redemptorists.

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