Vézelay

Why go

Vézelay is a pilgrimage in miniature. You leave the car at the bottom and walk up a single street of old stone houses, and at the top the basilica of Mary Magdalene opens into one of the most luminous Romanesque interiors in Europe, its arches striped pale and dark. Behind it, the terrace looks out over a quiet green country of woods and vines. It is a place for slowing down, which is exactly what Paris never lets you do.

History

Around 858 Count Girart de Roussillon founded a community of Benedictine nuns in the valley below, at what is now Saint-Père. After Viking raiders drove them out in the 870s, monks replaced them and the abbey moved up to the defensible hilltop, where the village grew around it.

In the eleventh century the abbey persuaded the Christian world that it held the relics of Mary Magdalene, and a papal bull made her its patron. Between roughly 1050 and 1250 Vézelay was the greatest Magdalene shrine in the West. Pilgrims brought wealth and a new church; the townspeople, crushed by the abbey’s demands, rose up and killed Abbot Artaud in 1106. After a fire in 1120 the present nave was built, and the narthex was dedicated in 1132.

The hill became a stage for great events. In 1146 Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade here before King Louis VII, in the open air on the slope; in 1190 Richard the Lionheart and Philip Augustus gathered at Vézelay before leaving on the Third Crusade. But in 1279 the pope recognised the body found at Saint-Maximin in Provence as Mary Magdalene’s, and the pilgrims drifted away. In the sixteenth century Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s successor, was born here.

By the 1830s the basilica was close to collapse. Prosper Mérimée, the new inspector of historic monuments, raised the alarm, and from 1840 a young Eugène Viollet-le-Duc led a restoration that lasted nearly twenty years. Twentieth-century writers such as Romain Rolland settled on the ‘inspired hill', and in 1979 the basilica and hill were inscribed by UNESCO. Vézelay is also the starting point of one of the four great French routes to Santiago.

UNESCO World Heritage: Vézelay, Church and Hill (1979)

Member of the association Les Plus Beaux Villages de France. The Plus Beaux Villages de France by train →