Paris was a small Roman town on the Seine when, according to tradition, a missionary named Denis arrived to preach Christianity there. By the end of his story he is the patron saint of France, a headless figure in cathedral stonework, and the reason a royal abbey stands north of the city. The historical core is thin. The legend built on it is one of the most famous in Christianity.
The Horror
Hagiography says Denis was sent from Italy to convert Gaul and became the first bishop of Paris, then called Lutetia. The earliest life of him, the Passio, dates from about 600, roughly three and a half centuries after his death, and is itself legendary. The date of his martyrdom is uncertain: c. 250, 258 and 270 are all given. The most likely is that he died under the emperor Decius, shortly after 250, when Roman officials demanded sacrifice to the state gods. Gregory of Tours, writing in the sixth century, reports that Denis was beheaded. He gives little more.
Tradition says two companions died with him, the priest Rusticus and the deacon Eleutherius. Their names are not regarded as historical and are probably later additions. The standard account has the three men condemned and led up a hill north of the city, with the beheading taking place there. That is tradition, not record.
The Legend
The famous part is the walk. In the popular version Denis’s headless body stood up, picked up the severed head and carried it several miles, the head preaching as it went, until it reached the place where he was to be buried. This is legend. It is told in later medieval works such as the Golden Legend, and it is not in the earliest source that records the beheading. A saint who carries his own head is called a cephalophore, and Denis is the best known of them.
Two further traditions are attached to the hill. One holds that Montmartre means “Mount of the Martyr” (Mons Martyrum). That is unverified, and the name may instead derive from a “Hill of Mercury and Mars”. The other, an alternative account, has the body thrown into the Seine and later recovered and buried by converts. Which of these is true is unconfirmed. Denis was also confused for centuries with Dionysius the Areopagite, an error credited largely to Abbot Hilduin in 836.
The Modern Relic
The legend was put to work. Denis became a patron of France, and his name became its war-cry, Montjoie Saint-Denis. The oriflamme, the banner consecrated at his tomb, was kept at the abbey and carried into war by French kings from 1124 until the mid-15th century, and it was retired in 1488.
Over his burial place rose the abbey of Saint-Denis. Its choir, rebuilt under Abbot Suger and completed in 1144, is widely considered the first structure to employ all the elements of Gothic architecture. From the 10th century to Louis XVIII, nearly every French king was buried there.
In 1793 the revolutionary authorities ordered the royal tombs destroyed, though a commission saved some of the monuments. The royal bodies were thrown out of their coffins into three trenches and covered with lime. In 1817 the restored Bourbons had the graves opened, and the remaining bones of 158 bodies were placed in an ossuary in the crypt.
The Basilica of Saint-Denis stands today in the northern suburb that bears his name. At Notre-Dame, a statue at the left portal shows Denis holding his head. It is a 19th-century figure made during Viollet-le-Duc’s restoration, so the image is medieval but the stone is not. The medieval abbey and cathedral are recorded as having disputed which of them held his head, a quarrel that outlasted any certainty about the man.
