Cathedral Notre-Dame de Cambric Grâce

History

Foundation of the abbey of the Holy Sepulchre

In 1054 Liébert, bishop of Arras and Cambric, left in pilgrimage to Jerusalem. However it could not exceed Cyprus and had to return to Cambrai without to have seen the holy places. In compensation he wanted to recreate in his episcopal city, as accurately as possible, the places of the pilgrimage of Jerusalem. Cambric lent itself to it well, since one found there a hill (Mount-of-Oxen) planted orchard of the abbey of Saint-Gery and separated from the city by the riot Saint-Gery, topography which could point out the hill of Gethsémani and the torrent of the Cédron. It was there already a vault of the Holy Sepulchre built in 1047 by the bishop Gerard Ier on the site of an old mass grave where one had buried deaths of the plague of 1036.

Liébert made build at some distance a monastery of Bénédictins, with a church on the plan of that of the the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, made up of a rectangular nave reserved to the monks to which a circular building intended for the pilgrims was coupled. The monastery was devoted on October 28th, 1064. The abbey was then out the walls, and Liébert made it put safe from increasing the enclosure of the city.

The only vestige of this church is the sandstone pillar of the current church to which the pulpit is hung, and which was to be one of the pillars of supporting of the bell-tower.

The basilica of Neuvy-Saint-Sépulchre, built with the image of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem at the same time, gives an idea of what was to be the Cambric building.

Rebuildings of the church

This first church was altered or rebuilt with many recoveries: it was initially repaired after a fire in 1145. At the 13th century the abbot decided to replace the church of Liébert by a construction of cruciform plan traditional. In 1498 another abbot, Guillaume Courteous, made it rebuild and increase. The abbey and the vault were again burnt in 1553 by the troops of Henri II. Rebuilding works, which included/understood a separate bell-tower of the building, were completed only in 1602, date on which the church was again devoted by the bishop Guillaume de Bergues. The church was again rebuilt such as we know it today or almost, at the end of the 17th century.

The current church

It is in 1695, the year even where François Fénelon became Cambric archbishop, that the abbot of the Holy Sepulchre Louis de Marbaix decided to rebuild the chorus. The project extended soon to the Nef and one preserved finally only the bell-tower, which had been built in 1542. The work, quickly undertaken under the direction of the Douai-native architect Anselme Estienne, was completed in 1703.

Cambric having been annexed in France by the treaty of Nimègue of 1678, the French influence was felt from now on in the civil architecture and religious. The new church was representative of the style of the reign of Louis XIV, compromised between baroque and classism. Work was continued by the successor of Marbaix, the abbot Joseph Dambrinne, who made rebuild the district of the hosts, only building of the abbey which remained, today occupied by the hotel of the Post office, as well as the abbey district, the refectory and the library. This considerable work was made possible by the richness of the abbeys, in particular in Cambrésis where the church had 40% of the ground. The rebuildings were thus a means of escaping the tax.

Revolutionary period

Contrary to the majority of the Cambric religious buildings, the church of the Holy Sepulchre succeeds in crossing intact the revolutionary disorders.

April 17th 1789 the deputies of the three orders of the Cambrésis are assembled in the abbey church. February 13rd 1790 the National Assembly adopts the decree on the regular clergy: the monks “are released”, the confiscated goods. In November the abbey church is closed. The prince-archbishop of Rohan having refused to lend oath to the civil Constitution of the clergy, it is relieved and it is a Oratorien, Claude Primat, which is elected to replace it, while the priest sworn in Pierre Renaud settles in the church, réouverte in 1791 like parish church.

The bell-tower, crack, must be demolished in 1792. In January 1794 the abbey is transformed into hospital of scabious. At the same time the grids of the chorus are torn off and are used to surround the tree of freedom planted on the town square.

In May 1794 the Comité of public hello sends Joseph the Good “to regenerate Cambrai, town of priests, fanatists and aristocrats”. After having been used as barn, the church of the Holy Sepulchre is transformed into Temple of the Reason: The Good there harangue people since the pulpit which it calls his “barrel of Diogène”. The church is finally sold like Bien national to the Blanquart merchant of Saint-Quentin. However the municipal administration prohibits the destruction in of it 1800, thus saving the building of a probable disappearance. During this time the cathedral, “wonder of the Netherlands”, sold in same Blanquart, is demolished. In 1809 there remains about it only the tower, which crumbles at the time of a storm.

The 19th century

After the signature of the legal settlement of 1801, the constitutional bishop Louis Belmas reopens the church of the Holy Sepulchre, renamed Saint-Gery. In 1804 it buys the old residence of the abbot to install there évêché, and sets up the church in cathedral.

In 1823 it was decided to set up a monument with Fénelon in the cathedral. It is David of Angers which was charged to carve the block of marble offered by Louis XVIII. The monument was inaugurated on January 7th, 1826 and the remainders of Fénelon were deposited there the 22.

The cathedral was seriously damaged by a fire in 1859. Furniture was destroyed and the damaged vaults. The municipality and the archbishop François Régnier wanted initially to build an entirely new building. On the councils of Purple-the-Duke, which saw there an good example of the traditional style characterizing the reign of Louis XIV, the cathedral was restored under the direction of Henri de Baralle. One increases it of five vaults around the Déambulatoire as well as Saint-Michel vault beside that of Notre-Dame de Grâce, and new a 65 m high bell-tower was completed in 1876. The dedication took place on May 12th 1894. March 17th, 1896 the cathedral was high with the row of minor basilica by the pope Leon XIII.

The cathedral was still seriously damaged in the last months of the war 1914-1918, thus, less seriously, than during the second world war.

The cathedral today

The cathedral shelters today in particular:

the monument with Fénelon, work of David of Angers;
nine great greyness misleads the eye of from Antwerp painter of it Martin-Joseph Geeraerts;
bones of the bishops and Cambric archbishops, found under the old cathedral and preserved today in the crypt;
the Icône of Notre-Dame de Grâce, that an old tradition now abandoned allotted to holy Luc. Pointing out the style of the icons of the orthodoxe church, it was given to the Cambric cathedral on August 14th, 1451 by the canon Fursy de Bruille, archdeacon of Valencians, who himself held it of the cardinal Jean Allarmet de Brogny, to which a patriarch of the Greek Église had given it to the Concile of Constancy.

Sources

Eugene Bouly, History of Cambric and Cambrésis , Cambric 1841
the Cambric cathedral, Foreword of Henry Jenny, Cambric archbishop, Cambric 1970
Louis Trénard, History of Cambric , University Presses of Lille 1982
Memory of Cambric , Company of Cambric Emulation, Cambric 2004

External bonds

the cathedral on the site of the Cambric diocese

Random links: