ST. DENIS, a suburb 9 kilometres north of Notre Dame de Paris, capital of an arrondissement in the department of Seine. Pop. (1931) 80,739. St. Denis, an important junction on the northern railway, stands in a plain on the right bank of the Seine, which is here joined by the canal of St. Denis. It has numerous metallurgical works, where railway material, naval engines and the like are constructed, distilleries of spirits, glassworks, pot teries and manufactories of drugs, chemical products, oils, nickel plate and pianos. The name and fame of the town are derived from the abbey founded by Dagobert I. on the spot where St. Denis, the apostle of Paris, was interred.
St. Denis, the ancient Catulliacum, was a town of no preten sions till the foundation of its abbey, which became one of the most powerful in France. The rebuilding of the church, begun in the 12th century by Suger, was completed in the 13th century. Among the many domains of the abbey was the French Vexin. It was held during the later middle ages by the French kings and vassals of the abbey, and to this fact is due their adoption of the oriflamme or red banner of St. Denis as the royal standard. Louis XIV. reduced the abbey to the rank of a priory; and at the Revolutioi it was suppressed, the tombs being violated and the church sacked (1793). Louis XVIII. caused all the articles belonging to St. Denis to be brought back to their original site, and added numerous other monuments from the suppressed abbeys. But it was not till after 1848 that, under the direction of Viollet-le-Duc, the basilica recovered its original appearance. St. Denis, which was the key of Paris on the north, was more than once pillaged in the Hundred Years' War, suffering especially in 1358 and 1406. A sanguinary battle, in which the Catholic leader Constable Anne de Montmorency found victory and death, was fought between Huguenots and Catholics in the neighbour hood on Nov. to, 1567.
The church exhibits the transition from the Romanesque to the Gothic style. The west front was built between 1137 and 1140.
The right-hand tower is almost pure Romanesque; that on the left was Gothic, but its spire was struck by lightning in 1837. The porch formed by the first three bays contains some remains of the basilica of Pippin the Short and Charlemagne, by whom the church was rebuilt. The nave proper (235 ft. long and 57 wide) has seven bays, and dates, as well as most of the choir and transepts, from the reign of St. Louis. The secondary apse (rond-point) and its semicircular chapels (consecrated in 1144) are considered as the first perfected attempt at Gothic. The transepts have fine façades, the north of the 12th, the south of the 13th century, each with two unfinished towers; if the plan had been fully carried out there would have been six towers besides a central spire in lead. The church contains a series of tombs of the kings and princes of the royal houses of France. The most remarkable are those of Louis XII. and Anne of Brittany, executed from 1516 to 1532; of Henry II. and Catherine de' Medici, a masterpiece by Germain Pilon (1564 1583) ; of Louis of Orleans and Valentine of Milan, from the old church of the Celestines at Paris (1502-1515) ; of Francis I. and Claude of France, one of the most splendid tombs of the Renais sance, executed under the direction of Philibert Delorme (I550- 1560) ; and that of Dagobert, which, though considerably dilapi dated, ranks as one of the most curious of mediaeval (13th-cen tury) works of art. In the apse some stained glass of the time of Suger remains. The crypt dates partly from the loth or I ith century. In the centre is the vault where the coffin of the king used to lie until, to make room for that of his successor, it was removed to its final resting-place. It is at present occupied by the coffin of Louis XVIII., the last sovereign whose body was borne to St. Denis. Besides fine statues, the crypt contains the Bourbon vault, in which among other coffins are deposited the remains of Louis XVI. and Marie Antoinette.
See F. de Guilhermy, Monographie de l'eglise royale de St. Denis (Paris, 1848).