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Origin and history

La collégiale Notre-Dame-des-Marais is a former church in Villefranche-sur-Saône, in the Rhône department. According to a local legend, a statuette of Mary was discovered by shepherds in the surrounding marshes. Transported to the chapel of the Madeleine, it reappeared miraculously in the marshes, encouraging the population to build a church at this site in the thirteenth century. Initially a simple chapel dependent on the church of the Madeleine, it became the main building of the city at the end of the Middle Ages.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the church was enlarged on two occasions: the addition of naves, lateral chapels, and the construction of the western facade with its tower between 1498 and 1518. This work was financed in part by Peter II of Bourbon, who allocated 12,000 books for the decoration of the portal in 1499. In 1568, a fire destroyed the arrow, rebuilt only in 1862. The church was erected as a collegiate church in 1682 by Camille de Neufville de Villeroy.

During the French Revolution, the statues of the portal were mutilated, and urban works broke down the entrance to the building. The college houses a rare set of medieval stained glass windows, partially dispersed in 1828 when the parish priest replaced them with white glass. These stained glass windows, described in 1852 by Father Laverrière, were restored and reorganized in 1858, making their original arrangement difficult to reconstruct. Ranked a historic monument in 1840, it also preserves a Callinet organ with 2,300 pipes.

The parvis, historically paved with calades (typical valleys), gave its name to the inhabitants of Villefranche: the Caladois. The building, with three naves of eight spans, illustrates medieval religious architecture and its evolution throughout the centuries, marked by destructions, reconstructions and adaptations to liturgical and urban needs.

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