Nantes Saint-Donatien Basilica, 150 years of history left in … – Le Point

In its framework there remains only the charred skeleton. The roof of the Basilica of St. Donatien-et-Saint-Rogatien Nantes totally burned in the Monday morning. The slate roof has disappeared, engulfed by fire of a rare violence, which leaves the monument of the nineteenth century gaping and smoking. Initial information indicates that work was underway on the roof. The investigation will confirm this, but it seems as maintenance and renovation works are at the origin of starting that fire. This is likely an accident, not a conspiracy, as imply social networks always eager scurrilous rumors.

Consternation among Nantais

At Nantais is consternation. Johanna Rolland, Mayor of Nantes, visited the scene to assess the damage and reassure the locals burdened with their heritage and see in smoke. The fire is limited, but the elected official is worried: “We’ll have to determine the strength of the roof,” she explains to Point.fr. Dozens of firefighters were mobilized to extinguish the fire spectacular. The images circulating on social networks, accompanied despite messages. In Nantes, as elsewhere, the story sometimes stutters: the cathedral burned in 1972 because of a smoldering torch during renovation work …

Testimony of Catholic resurgence

Dominating the landscape of the city with two imposing towers designed by architects Louis Liberge and Émile Perrin, this church is located in the heart of a neighborhood still alive Catholicism. “This testifies to the Catholic Basilica of the city boost that extends from the mid-nineteenth to the separation of church and state in 1905,” says Philippe Josserand, Senior Lecturer at the University of Nantes and director of the association Nantes History. If the construction of this neo-Gothic building in the neo-Romanesque crypt began in 1872, the presence of a basilica in that place is attested since the fifth century. She also takes the name of “Nantes children,” Donatien and Rogatien, two Christians martyred in the fourth century on the same place. Seat of a Benedictine abbey founded in the reign of Louis the Pious (Charlemagne’s son), the first Saint-Donatien basilica housed the tomb of the two martyrs. The place becomes an important place of Christianity, the remains subject to a pilgrimage ran the Middle Ages. Only during the excavation of the crypt, in the late nineteenth century, as we rediscover hundreds of sarcophagi, including that of two saints.