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foundation of the newly begun city wall of the faubourg Saint-Honoré. 31 Subsequent French
monarchs continued the tradition, setting the precedent for Louis XIII to include medals when he
participated in the ceremonial placement of the first stone.
Louis’s first opportunity came in August 1610, at which time the young king placed the
foundation stone along with a commemorative medal for the construction of a new building at
the château de Vincennes. 32 The medal, which portrayed a portrait bust of Louis XIII on the
obverse and an inscription recording that it was the first year of his reign on the reverse, lacked
any pictorial representations of the new château. Indeed it was only in 1624 that medals
depicting the design for façades began to appear in France. 33 To mark the start of construction
of the pavillon d’Horloge at the palace of the Louvre in that year, Louis XIII included a medal in
the foundation stone, which now followed the Italian format with a profile portrait of the patron
on the obverse and an elevation of the new building on the reverse (fig. 39).
Providing support for religious foundations by participating in the ceremonial placement
of the first stone was another tradition to which Louis XIII was certainly accustomed. In 1611 he
bestowed this honor on the Reformed Penitents’ church of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce at their
convent on the rue de Picpus and again in 1616 for the façade of the parish church of Saint-
Gervais-Saint-Protais. 34 In 1621, on his return to Paris from battling the Huguenots in southwest
France, Louis stopped in Toulouse and laid the first stone of the new church at the Jesuits’
house. 35 While each of these acts honored the religious institutions, at no time did Louis XIII
commission medals to commemorate the occasion.
Having the monarch, the head of the Gallican church, assist religious institutions was a
long-established tradition that reinforced the king’s divine right and God’s preference for the
people of France. Some of the kingdom’s earliest rulers had founded important abbeys,
including that of Clovis for the Abbey of Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul around 510 and that of
Dagobert for the future Abbey of Saint-Denis in 630. Others placed the first stone of the church;
Charles V did so with the chapel of the college of Beauvais in 1375 and Henri III with the Jesuit
College at Clermont in 1582. Kings also gave gifts of land or money. Most notable as a model
for Louis XIII was his parents’ support of the church of the Feuillants in 1601—his father placed
the first stone and his mother donated over three thousand livres for construction costs. 36
The foundation ritual at Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites, however, differed in several significant
ways from these precedents. In addition to the Louis actually setting the dedicatory plaque in
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