florida state university college of visual arts, theatre and dance ...

CHAPTER 3
LOUIS XIII AND THE CHURCH OF THE FRENCH ORATORY:
AN EXPRESSION OF SOVEREIGN AUTHORITY
In 1623 Louis XIII proclaimed the church of the French Oratory in Paris as the royal
chapel of the palace of the Louvre and decreed that state funds be provided to help with
construction costs (fig. 4). The church, for which construction was begun in 1621 in the quartier
of the Louvre, was the mother church of the Congrégation des Pères de l’Oratoire de France, a
society of secular preachers that had enjoyed the patronage of Maria de’ Medici, Louis XIII’s
mother, since its founding 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 conservative French
Catholics known as the dévots, a group with close ties to Maria de’ Medici and the Oratorian
congregation. The dévots, who were dissatisfied with France’s continued toleration of
Protestantism, looked to Rome for leadership and favored alliances with other Catholic powers
even at the expense of French rights.
Scholarship has traditionally characterized Louis XIII as a weak ruler lacking an interest
in the arts, yet within the last twenty years the historian A. Lloyd Moote and the art historians
Anne Le Pas de Sécheval and Marc Fumaroli have recognized that he was a self-sufficient leader
with an active artistic policy (fig. 1). 1 Building on those revisionist studies, this chapter
considers one example in which Louis XIII’s interest in the arts intersected with his political
goals, a subject that has not been previously addressed in the literature. I argue that Louis XIII,
who as king of France was the head of the Gallican Church, patronized the church of the French
Oratory, a duty previously fulfilled by Maria de’ Medici, to counter the political threat posed by
the dévots. To accomplish this goal he transformed the church into a manifestation of his
political will, ordering its incorporation into the palace of the Louvre and embellishing it with
monarchical symbols that evoked the sovereignty of France.
Existing scholarship on the architecture of the French Oratory’s church, largely based on
the extensive collection of the congregation’s own archival documents, generally seeks to clarify
the building’s construction history, its original design, and the authorship of the plans. 2 The only
study of the building that departs from this approach is the doctoral thesis by Le Pas de Sécheval,
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