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events affect their individual reigns, they ultimately contributed to the royal support of churches,
prompting the monarchs to use the buildings as vehicles through which to attain their objectives.
The next four chapters examine the monarchs’ involvement with the churches, seeking to
establish the effects of the royal support and to demonstrate the reasons for the patronage. I
begin with the reign of Louis XIII, with chapter two focusing on the king’s interest in the church
of the French Oratory, begun in 1621 for the Congrégation des Pères de l’Oratoire de France. In
1623 Louis XIII named the church, which was adjacent to the palace of the Louvre, as his new
royal chapel, decreeing that state funds be provided to help with construction costs. Although
the fathers of the congregation had enjoyed the patronage of Maria de’ Medici since the society’s
founding in Paris in 1611, Louis’s decision to support the church was not a beneficent gesture
towards his mother. Instead I propose that it was a challenge to the conservative French
Catholics known as the dévots, a group with close ties to Maria de’ Medici and the Oratorian
congregation.
To challenge the subversive tendencies of the Oratory’s supporters, Louis XIII
appropriated the building for his own use and made plans to draw it into the royal precinct. In
addition he enhanced the existing structure with monarchical symbols and meaningful features
that transformed the church into a sign of royal authority. In doing so Louis XIII not only
tempered the political ambitions of his mother and other dévots, but he also established an
interest in ecclesiastical architecture as a sign of his royal will, which he expanded on throughout
the remainder of his reign.
Chapter three looks at the monarch’s connection to Saint-Louis-des-Jésuites, a Parisian
church built for the Society of Jesus’s maison professe and dedicated to Louis IX (1226-1270),
France’s only sainted king. When construction began in 1627, Louis XIII provided royal funds
to assist with the new church, making him at the time the largest contributor to the building. He
also participated in the ceremonial placing of the foundation stone and commissioned the striking
of two medals to commemorate his patronage of the building. The king’s actions occurred
shortly after the appearance in Paris of a Jesuit publication challenging monarchical authority, a
work that rekindled the belief of French loyalists that the Society of Jesus acted as a promoter of
papal power over the state’s rights.
As I seek to demonstrate in this chapter, the Jesuit publication prompted Louis XIII to
become the church’s primary benefactor, providing him with a means to assert his authority over
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